UiPath Platform Reviews

My use cases for UiPath include finance, HR, SAP, and technology. 

The tool's most valuable feature is RPA. 

UiPath should improve its licensing structure. 

I have been using the product since 2018. 

The selectors and modern UI are not stable yet. 

The product is scalable. 

The tool's support is good. 

Positive

The tool's deployment is straightforward. We started with contractors and built some POCs. We had a pilot to select the business criteria. 

UiPath's implementation team helped us with the deployment. 

The solution's pricing is a challenge. Every time I go to renew my contract, the prices increase. It is getting expensive. 

The business objectives we tried to achieve with UiPath include time savings and user satisfaction. 

Automation has freed up our employees' time. 

I rate the solution a nine out of ten. 

I'm using one or two robots. We use the solution for reports. We have another software yet we don't have support. Instead of pulling reports manually, we use the program to get the reports and pull them for us. 

The solution is very simple. We can easily create robots. It's easy to build automation.

UiPath enables us to implement end-to-end automation. We have some manual procedures and it helps to complete those tasks. 

We use the UiPath user community. It's free. 

The amount of work we have is very small. We don't have big workflows. However, employees can now spend time on other things, and it's helped us manage our time around reporting.

The company has helped us minimize our on-site footprint.

We've used Academy courses. I've done classes myself. I don't use it every day. I've only used it once, actually.

The solution speeds up digital transformation and reduces the cost of digital transformation. with UiPath, we do not require expensive or complex application upgrades or IT application support.

UiPath has helped reduce human error. It has also freed up employee time. It has saved about 20 to 30 hours or so.

I've dealt with compatibility issues with Microsoft components. When we upgrade the UiPath framework, we might be able to fix the issue. 

We'd like the accounting team to be able to have improved data out of SAP. 

I've been using the solution for one year. 

The product has been stable.

It's a scalable solution. We have about 150 people using the solution. We may increase the usage in the future if we have an opportunity to apply more robots. 

I haven't worked with technical support.

I did not previously use a different solution. 

We're using the 2023 version of the solution. 

I was involved in the implementation. 

The setup was straightforward with the help of UiPath documentation. The implementation process took less than one day and we implemented with one or two people doing the work.  

UiPath does require a bit of maintenance, however, it is not that much. We're mostly just dealing with compatibility issues with Microsoft. 

We deployed the product ourselves. 

As for the cost, I'm not sure if it has saved us money. The customer still keeps the same number of employees, for example. That said, the important thing is to reduce the time it would take for them to handle tasks. In some ways, it's done that.

Our use case is still very small. Therefore, we don't want to buy a solution that is too big for us. We don't want to pay more than $10,000 USD for a license. Therefore, we're focused more on the community version. 

We did evaluate other options. We found UiPath to be more localized. They were one of the top solutions.

We are UiPath partners. 

We do not use the solution's AI functionality just yet. We're only using small automation. We also have yet to try the document understanding features. We still need to try some advanced features and I look forward to experimenting with it.

I'd rate the solution eight out of ten. 

I would recommend the solution to others who need to create automation. 

Our use cases are generally related to front-end UI-based automations that emulate tasks done by teams. For example, we do front-end SAP automation for data entry and scraping or posting data to websites that are related to the organization. We use UiPath for other automations like extracting and manipulating data from Excel. The primary use cases are in finance, HR, and operations. In logistics, it's used in full-sprint solutions.

UiPath's ability to do end-to-end automation is crucial. If we do the automation in bits and pieces, it's challenging to integrate it. The best part is that the turnaround time is drastically reduced because the process isn't being put on hold in between two manual interventions. The more permissions we apply, the more we reduce the turnaround time. However, the smaller automations don't impact the turnaround time that much. If the logic is set correctly, it can completely eliminate human error. 

The UiPath community development forum is helpful. Developers can access all the information they need if they get stuck. For our use case, we refer to OpenMedia, not any particular program. To understand what are the RDP use cases. I personally follow primary and secondary research forums as well as McKinsey's technology consulting newsletters and documentation.

The UiPath Academy explains various use case scenarios through videos and training sessions. It's all practical, hands-on instruction instead of purely theoretical. That made a significant difference by increasing our confidence in the product and ability to create our own automation. You can track each team member's training steps in parallel because everyone needs to be on the same page.

Uipath doesn't necessarily reduce our on-premise footprint. We use UiPath to automate configuration integration, so I can't say there is any direct impact because RPA is now just part of our on-prem ecosystem. The solution doesn't require expensive or complex application upgrades, but certain applications need scripts to be enabled to get UiPath working on their front end.

It saves time, but the amount varies. Each process has a different impact depending on the frequency of that process. If a process is running daily, the values are high, but sometimes it's low. The organization aims to have one bot per person, so everyone has one attended bot that can replicate their monitor network. It's the equivalent of adding one FTE per year by default per person. Every person can have a bot, scale up the work, and get more done in a day. 

The amount of money saved also depends on how often the process runs. We pay per bot, so if the bot isn't running frequently, we might not save any money. However, if the requirement is to do many more tasks than a single person can handle, it makes sense to use a bot, and we can save a lot of money that way. Sometimes, we have different goals beyond just saving money or reducing the time that our staff members spend on tasks. We might deploy a bot to improve the user experience and save the user some time. In some cases, we might not see short-term savings, but we'll see a benefit from it in the long run as the process volume increases.

The feature I like the most is ONEWEB UI automation. UiPath's OCR technology also works well. There is another feature called Action Center that lets you decide what happens after the data is captured. It passes the data into Action Center, where a person can review and approve it before it goes to the next step. It helps us manage our attended bot processes.

It's generally easy to build processes because of the drag-and-drop configurable suite. However, more complex expressions may require some kind of functional coding. UiPath also has some prebuilt functions in its training module that can be utilized to enter the expressions and get the job done. That's one workaround.

UiPath's built-in integration with Python scripts could be more robust so that I do not have to depend on another technology and I can do everything on one platform. 

Each program you write on UiPath contributes to bot consumption and utilization. As you add more bots, your costs will increase for more actions. Python is open-source, so it is totally free. Depending on our automation needs, we go back and forth between these two technologies. Better integration between these two tools will help organizations cover all areas of automation without more cost-effectively. 

I have used UiPath for approximately two years.

I rate UiPath nine out of 10 for stability. We haven't faced any challenges with UiPath's stability because it is a SaaS product. It runs on the UiPath cloud, and things are working fine. 

UiPath is fully scalable. I haven't faced any challenges in terms of scalability because the cost is not per user or per process. It is priced according to the amount of bots being consumed, so it all depends upon the complexity of your own project. If the complexity is lower you can reuse and share 

I rate UiPath support nine out of 10. They always respond with solutions within the time established by the SLA. 

Positive

We were working with Power Automate. It has benefits from a cost perspective. The cost per developer is much lower relative to UiPath. Power Automate is a more cost-effective solution for larger enterprises. However, UiPath has more technological capabilities, and it's more user-friendly for developers, which is why UiPath is being adopted more over Power Automate. At the same time, Power Automate is continuously improving, so it may reach the same level as UiPath in the future. 

We are using the cloud version of UiPath, which is hosted by the UiPath team themselves. We do not use a private cloud. The network configuration didn't take much time. The deployment involves setting up a UiPath account and configuring permissions. It is a SaaS platform like Office 365.

The deployment time is just the amount of time required to develop processes for the project. It depends on the size and complexity. A project with hundreds of activities might take a few months, but a simple project with only two processes can be done in a few hours. 

I rate UiPath eight out of 10. 

We utilize UiPath to manage workflows and deploy application solutions into our customers' environments. UiPath simplifies various business tasks, such as automating applications, Excel, and segregating data.

We deploy UiPath both on-premises and in the cloud depending on the customer requirements.

Building automation with UiPath is straightforward. Even individuals with limited technical proficiency can utilize UiPath.

We implemented UiPath for one of our partners. They previously required human intervention to manually manipulate data in a 17,000-column Excel spreadsheet for monthly reporting, which used to take one hour. By employing UiPath and incorporating a Python script into the process, we automated the Excel spreadsheet. As a result, the task now only takes three minutes. This automation saved the organization time and money, increased the accuracy of its data, and allowed its employees to focus on more value-added work.

UiPath enables us to implement end-to-end automation. I have a client in Malaysia, and I am from Vietnam. I visited the client on-site for two weeks. They are in the manufacturing industry, and my purpose was to gather information about their automation requirements since they had never utilized automation before. I managed to assist them in standardizing their processes by offering advice on how to implement the solution. I collected the end-user requirements, which were then used to create the necessary documentation. Once the document got approved, the developer and I developed the bot and subjected it to UAT before obtaining final approval for its production release.

The UiPath User Community is wonderful. While many RPAs have their own communities, none compare to UiPath's. The community edition of UiPath boasts a substantial user base, with expansive groups across various social media platforms. When I first started using UiPath, I would always turn to the user community whenever I encountered an issue. I noticed that others had already asked the same questions and received answers, which was quite convenient for me.

Everyone associated with UiPath usually completes at least their first year of Academy courses to acquire a fundamental understanding of RPA and the platform's functioning. This knowledge is crucial for facilitating the easiest possible approach to automation. I genuinely appreciate all the videos from each course. Every video contains valuable information, and I never skip any of them. In the beginning, the Academy was a great help to me.

UiPath helps reduce the cost of our digital transformation. One of our large financial industry clients mentioned that where they used to require 13,000 employees, they are now only using 6,000 to complete the same work through digital transformation.

UiPath assists in eliminating human errors. Numerous tasks performed by humans each day involve typing in information. Humans can make mistakes due to factors such as fatigue, mood, or feeling unwell. However, automated processes are not susceptible to these issues.

UiPath can contribute to cost savings for an organization, contingent upon the organization's size and the quantity of tasks being automated relative to the number of employees presently engaged in performing those tasks. On average, UiPath has the potential to reduce costs by approximately 30 percent.

The most valuable feature is the ability to view my own activity and customize it on the platform.

We cannot utilize the UiPath community edition license to operate any bots that we have created using that version in an enterprise environment. This is because we are obligated to employ UiPath Studio, which necessitates a distinct license for professional use.

I have been using UiPath for two years.

UiPath is the most stable platform.

UiPath is scalable.

I previously used Power Automate before switching to UiPath which is an out-of-the-box solution.

The initial setup is straightforward. We just need to run the orchestrator and the packet. I can complete the deployments myself based on the documents.

I would rate UiPath nine out of ten.

UiPath requires proper maintenance which is outlined in the user manual.

We're in the supply chain industry and we use UiPath for automations for purchasing and selling and to make people's lives easier within the organization. We have 20,000 users in our organization. 

We do not currently use the AI functionality in our automation program but we have in the past. I've found Document Understanding in the AI Center valuable. In the past, the action center was slow compared to some competitors in the IDP sphere, which can be detrimental if you're dealing with millions of documents but this has since been improved.

We use unattended robot processes almost exclusively and this includes approximately 130 to 140 processes. We do have plans to increase this usage and create more core automations. Certain automations have a shelf life and need to be retired at a certain point. A lot of times we're working with systems that are eventually going to be replaced. The reason why we use UiPath over strictly APIs or something programmatic is that we don't have access to something programmatic. 

UiPath has improved our organization in the sense that it has reduced our manual hours by 200,000 hours per year. This is substantial especially given the size of the COE. We don't necessarily realize these benefits from a head count decrease perspective but we definitely realize it from a time-saving perspective. 

The automations that UiPath provide free up our team members for tasks and projects that they have always wanted to do but have not had time for. There has been a shift to more meaningful work and doing work that hasn't been done before.

The Orchestration feature has been valuable as well as Studio because it makes it easier for people to develop who don't necessarily have a coding background. The UI automation when using UiPath is the best in the field, as far as RPA goes.

UiPath will introduce new features and it appears as though there is an unspoken rule that what they have released is not where it needs to be, but it'll be there eventually. To improve this solution, there could be increased transparency over licensing and consistency regarding what it costs for on-prem and what it costs for the cloud. This would make it more enticing for people to switch from one to another. 

We have also experienced some difficulty with updates and making sure that everything runs consistently. Many times, new releases are not communicated and then are released. This is included in documentation but this documentation is not always stored in the same place. Having some clarity or upgrade assistance to highlight what we need to look out for would help a great deal. 

We have been using this solution for two years. 

This is a stable solution but stability is dependent on your configuration. If you configure your robots in such a way that every VDI that runs or every virtual machine that's able to run a bot has a backup, then it will be stable.

UiPath's support is quite good. Whenever I've submitted a ticket, I have gotten relatively good responses within a couple of days. If you say that something is urgent and critical, they do get back to you sooner. Sometimes you get stuck between L1 and L2 support, which can be frustrating. 

I would rate the support for this solution an eight out of ten. 

Positive

The complexity of the setup depends on what you're trying to deploy. If you're deploying only the orchestrator and setting up robots, it is pretty straightforward. If 10 is difficult and one is easy, I would rate the setup a three or four. 

The certificates needed to set up the orchestrator can be confusing and frustrating during setup. For the most part, what you need to do is straightforward. When it comes to installations that require a Linux virtual machine, Docker configuration, or Kubernetes, the setup is more complex. It is more complex to set up an on-premises configuration compared to a cloud configuration.

From what I've seen, organizations will have vastly different numbers as to how hours correspond to dollars. Our return on investment has been good, even from a conservative perspective.

The way that the licensing is structured is confusing for some because there is different licensing if you're on the cloud versus if you're on-prem. There are unattended licenses and then there are non-production licenses and people get confused by that.

There's a level of buy-in that's required that makes it difficult for people to get started. For example, "If we do this, we need to get this whole package" as opposed to, "Let's get a couple of licenses and see how it works for us." There's the community for these questions but if you want to do an on-premise installation, you can't really use the community in the same way to get clarity.

As far as strictly RPA and UI-based automation solutions are concerned, UiPath really shines over its competition. The most similar comparisons would be Automation Anywhere and Blue Prism, and I don't think that they have the same level of ease when learning how to use their solutions. Not as many users in the market know how to use those solutions and they don't have the same level of orchestration which makes them more difficult to manage compared to UiPath. 

The UiPath's user community, in terms of the value that you gain by being a part of it, is hit or miss. A lot of times there aren't responses to the high-level questions. There are a lot of responses to people who are just learning how to use it, but for more complex questions, there are no experts to field responses. It is possible to find these answers but they are not necessarily contained on UiPath's platforms. That being said, I did find the user community and academy very useful when I first started using this solution.  

I have done 16 courses from the academy and continue to review what is released to see if it would add value to me to stay up to date with the latest features. The academy provides the ability for more people to learn UiPath and learn RPA and this makes it easier to hire new team members as they can easily gain the necessary skillsets. They still do have to learn on the job to some extent, but there's a basic skillset that's pretty well established and there are certifications that are associated with that. 

I would advise others considering UiPath to start with some use cases in mind. I don't necessarily think that you're going to get value out of evaluating the solution if you don't have at least a few things to get you started. I would advise having someone with a technical skillset to assist in this regard. 

I would rate UiPath a nine out of ten. 

We're a blockchain company that provides finance and analytics solutions, so we have multiple use cases, including organizational process automation. We do some end-to-end automation and automate some repetitive tasks. In the future, we plan to target some advanced processes like blockchain and machine learning. 

One example of a specific use case is market auditing. We are auditing our sales team and plan to audit our customers. This entails inspecting data produced by two third-party platforms, Salesforce and SAE, and combining that data into one Excel workbook to perform some calculations. We perform some analytics and then export the data from Excel to our CRM. Transferring the customer data to our CRM is incredibly time-consuming because we deal with more than a thousand lines of data. It takes a minimum of two hours to upload all the data to the portal.

UiPath helps us extract the numbers from the CRM side and share them with our marketing and financial team. This involves four processes that we combine into one automated endpoint process. The reduced workload across the three involved departments translates to cost savings equalling about 2.6 FTE monthly.

Another use case is to promote our components, services, and products. We are building a promotions portal that is attached to Excel. The promotion will involve maybe 500 line items and multiple roles. While you can do this manually, there is a significant potential for human error that could mean a loss of revenue. For instance, if we accidentally offer the same customer two discounts, we have to honor that. We haven't had any errors using UiPath in the last six months. 

We have three offices in our country, but the solution is deployed on a virtual machine in the head office. If a branch location requires process automation, we automate that solution at headquarters, and all the infrastructure is centrally managed. The primary users are six people from my team, including me, a business analyst, a developer, and three consultants. There are also two people from another group managing the UiPath infrastructure. 

We use UiPath Action Center, a capability that allows us to engage businesspeople and incorporate them into our automation. In total, we have about 12 to 15 people using UiPath, but some of them have limited privileges. 

Management prepared a presentation last week detailing how we've benefited from the start of 2021 to June 2022. We uploaded 149 processes into our unattended environment, and the robot runtime is 15,028 minutes, so we saved 75,114 hours. In the last year and a half, we saved the equivalent of 43 full-time employees.

 We have automated many tasks that would've been done manually, and we are reassigning our employees to other valuable tasks. This translates into a cost savings of about $98,000 for the last two years. Performing repetitive tasks is also demoralizing. If you're constantly performing representative tasks, your motivation level very goes down, so keeping our employees motivated is an added benefit. 

I am not an experienced developer, and working with UiPath has taught me a lot. We use UiPath Orchestrator with a combination of unattended and attended bots. That functionality allows you to manage your platform virtually. You can monitor everything and assign new roles to users. 

I would like to see more native AI and machine learning functionality. UiPath doesn't cover all the options for a few tasks that we require, so it's hard to do advanced automation. For example, UiPath chatbots are one area where machine learning capabilities could help. Users ask the robot questions, triggering those kinds of processes. 

We started using UiPath in September 2020.

UiPath is a highly stable solution. We haven't encountered any bugs, downtime, or other issues since we started to use the solution. We also don't experience any instability when working with components in other projects. 

UiPath is a highly scalable solution because some of its capabilities can be used in other projects. This means we don't have to rebuild the solutions we have already developed. With the help of these solutions and features, we can reduce the development time. 

I rate UiPath support eight out of 10. Technical support is generally good, but there's one thing I don't like. UiPath support's technical expertise is impressive, but the response time isn't ideal. When you raise a ticket on the UiPath portal,  customer support can sometimes take up to 24 hours to respond. 

Positive

Setting up UiPath was highly straightforward because we had help from the vendor team. Our deployment team had eight people total, including me, a business analyst, a developer, and two IT people plus two people from the UiPath side. It took approximately one month because we implemented the UiPath solution on-premises. We had one or two technical meetings with the UiPath team and we needed to build some architecture. They suggested that we leverage our existing servers on Microsoft Azure and Google Cloud.  

Then, we integrated all those solutions on the UiPath side. We installed a UiPath solution in the dev environment where we were developing the processes and one in the live environment. We have more than 32 licenses, so we created 32 virtual machines on Google Cloud and Azure. 

Every organization needs to cut costs, and all customers try to negotiate a discount on licensing. When we initially tried UiPath, they offered a discount of nearly seven percent, but they haven't since. UiPath's price is a little high compared to other solutions, but it's easier to use and maintain. We purchased a three-year license.

We tried Blue Prism, Automation Anywhere, and another tool by IBM, but I didn't care for those solutions because they were too complex. UiPath is easy to use, monitor, and manage. Automation Anywhere and Blue Prism lacked some of UiPath's features. For example, UiPath allows us to maintain our environments remotely through UiPath Orchestrator. 

I rate UiPath nine out of ten. It's a great solution. I highly recommended UiPath over other automation tools I've used.

Our primary use case for UiPath is the automation of some of our processes. The main departments that have been affected are accounts payable and accounts receivable.

We are developing expertise internally. At least for the first year, we worked with an outside consultancy to provide us UiPath development. They were working with the business team here closely, but also helping to train our people.

The main parts that we've got are in the area of invoice automation, but we also have some bots that deal with the automation of some of our engineering applications within Oracle.

We run six bots, primarily dealing with invoice automation from our suppliers. That is working in conjunction with Abbyy. So, part of the process is UiPath and part of it is Abbyy FlexiCapture. We also have some engineering applications in Oracle that we also use it for. Examples of this are updating bills of materials, or printing out invoices.

The key savings and kind of the real business case of the project were to do with invoice automation.

UiPath allows us to implement end-to-end automation. We utilize the Task Capture functionality for some of the initial parts. Then, building the bots is done with Studio, and Orchestrator is used for monitoring. It's complete, end-to-end automation.

The invoice reconciliation has been very useful. We now process 80% of our invoices automatically, of which 80% of those get no human contact. The remaining 20% of the ones that are automatically processed are either exceptions or they are certain expense items or the price doesn't match up. In this case, there's some human intervention, but we are getting a high percentage of things going through automatically.

This automation has enabled us to move some headcounts into different, higher value-adding activities instead. We have freed up approximately 10 full-time employees by using UiPath. We didn't let anybody go. Rather, they've been moved into other more creative roles.

The most valuable feature of UiPath is its usability. It's very easy to understand. I think in general, some parts of the process were difficult to grasp, and there were challenges along the way. But now at this more mature part, it's definitely increased employee satisfaction. People have been able to move into higher value-added, more enjoyable tasks.

We've got a group of citizen developers that work on UiPath. These are people that weren't developers but given a bit of training and its ease of use, they have been able to utilize it.

Both members of my team and I have used the UiPath Academy, and the training has been really good. It has enabled us to utilize the citizen developer approach. It is because of the conciseness and quality of the teaching that we have been able to employ citizen developers. We didn't really envision that as something that was possible, but given the ease and usability of the tool and the quality of the training, that's been possible for us.

UiPath has definitely helped to reduce human error. The main process that has gone through automation is the accounts payable process. Now, some of our suppliers may offer discounts and stuff like that. So, it's reduced the time for us to get things into the system. We've got increased visibility, and we've reduced the number of people working on this process, ultimately meaning cost savings as well.

The one negative that this solution has is its reporting. I found it a bit confusing because it was suggested to us that we use Elastic and Kibana for reporting. To me, this seems a little bit fragmented. I understand that UiPath has the Insights feature, but it wasn't what they recommended for us and I think the reason is that it isn't powerful enough for what we want to do. Ideally, we should not have to utilize other tools for reporting.

When it comes to speeding up our process, it has not made any impact. This is because the licensing and agreement part is quite time-consuming. Where we may have wanted to scale up quicker, we've been limited by signing contracts or getting things moving in that regard. As such, it's not really sped up our procurement process or enabled us to scale as quickly as we'd like when we wanted to.

We scale up some parts of the system quicker and we were seeing large delays in processing some of the documents that we wanted. This problem was that we didn't have the hardware or software ready for us to scale. So, in that regard, we've not found the ability to scale beneficial.

The error handling is in need of improvement. We'd had a problem tracking when errors occur, and troubleshooting how things are captured in production.

I have been working with UiPath for between 18 months and two years.

My impressions of the stability are largely positive. However, I'd like to see more emphasis placed on error handling for production.

With respect to scalability, I'd like to see it be made more fluid. It was a bit slow for us to be able to scale. If it was more elastic or there was a different way of billing it instead of having to sign up we had to sign up for a year-long license, it would have been useful. It wasn't that we minded the length of the contract or the cost. Rather, it meant that there were contracts that had to be signed, etc. 

With the processes that have already been implemented now finished, we're actively looking at where else it can be deployed. There is even interest from the executive team. They would like to see it used further.

UiPath has an active community but we've not really engaged with them very much. When we were in need of help, we contacted support and our account executives, but not the community.

The technical support has been really useful. I would rate them a ten out of ten.

In general, they've been very responsive, and easy to get them on a call if required. I've been really happy with the SLAs they've provided to us.

Positive

This was our first RPA implementation.

The initial setup was fairly straightforward. As we are using the on-premises solution, we've had to invest in additional hardware.

We used a consultant to assist us with our deployment. We definitely found it beneficial because it gave us experience. We didn't have any experience with RPA, and they helped us to get off the ground and provided some best practices.

There are three members of our team that are responsible for bot deployment and maintenance. One is a UiPath developer, another is a support developer, and the third is a business analyst.

We have definitely seen a return on investment.

UiPath has helped to both speed up and reduce the cost of our digital transformation. Compared to traditional automation approaches, it's been a lot quicker and less costly to implement. It very minorly affected us in terms of needing IT support. For example, we've had to work with our Oracle applications team, as well as our infrastructure team, in getting some of those parts set up. Overall, I've not found it to be burdensome.

UiPath has definitely saved on costs for the organization. I think that initially, there was some skepticism. Obviously, there were significant implementation costs but now, we're definitely seeing the fruits of that. 

Our total savings at the moment is between 50,000 and 100,000 per year.

The licensing fees are billed annually.

The company evaluated Automation Anywhere and Microsoft Power Automate before choosing UiPath. I can't speak to the pros and cons of the different options because the decision was made just before I became involved.

Overall, in terms of ease of building automation, our experience has been positive.

UiPath has features available for attended automation, although all of our automations are unattended. Similarly, we don't yet use the solution's AI functionality but it's something that we're really interested in starting to use.

My advice for anybody who is looking into implementing this product is to ensure that the processes they want to automate are standard and standardized. That was a key barrier that we realized, and it delayed things for us by quite a bit.

I would rate this solution an eight out of ten.

We are a small but global company. We are about 1,200 people. We are a logistics company, and most of our employees work in our warehouses. So, our office workers are somewhere between 400 to 500 across the globe. Being a logistics company, we are maybe a little bit old-fashioned. There are a lot of papers going back and forth, and we are trying to automate different scenarios. We cater provisions to ships, so we are basically a grocery store for ships. 

One important thing is when a ship is going into port somewhere, they put in an order for whatever provisions they need for when they leave port again. So, we need to be quick at expediting their orders. When they put in a request for a quote for whatever products they need, we need to respond very quickly, because the tendency is that whoever responds first gets the order. So, we want to do that. We are trying to sort of increase the speed of those types of operations as well as the quality of them. 

It is hard to really pinpoint what it is we are doing, but it's the communication between customers. When we receive a communication from a customer, we want to move the process through our company as quickly as possible and with high quality.

We are fairly new to UiPath still. We do intend to use it company-wide and have started out with purely unattended scenarios so far.

We invoice every month quite a substantial amount of money to our customers. We saw a problem in that about 20 percent of our invoices were sent to the wrong addresses. That meant that, at month's end, when we were expecting money to come in, we would be missing around 20 percent of our cashflow that month. Of course, we wanted to prevent that because 20 percent of the cashflow of $300 to $500 million a year is a lot of money. 

We have automation that runs every night through all our invoices. Because we have some problems with our master data in the company, it does a number of measurements, on whether an address for an invoice seems to be the correct address, and a number of checks, such as, what ship was the goods delivered to? After that, it looks up information through the international registers of ship ownerships, then it will do a number of checks, giving each invoice a score as rating the probability that the address is correct. If it is below a certain threshold, then we will do some manual processing, and we are looking into UiPath Action Center for this. For four or five of our largest branches in the US and Asia, we have seen a significant improvement in the payments at month's end, which has definitely improved our cashflow.

The administration is a SaaS solution, which helps to minimize our on-prem footprint. The only things that we have running on-prem are the machines running the robots. Everything else is handled in the cloud. We don't need to worry about backups, etc.

We are adopting as much as we can some of the things that should reduce the maintenance costs. We are using Robotic Enterprise Framework in our development and Automation Hub to sort of qualify our ideas. So, we are trying to implement a uniform way of doing things throughout the lifecycle of an idea. UiPath supports this fairly well, and I think it will get even better.

Just this week, we are launching our Automation Hub effort because we need to start building a pipeline for our automation candidates. Right now, we have eight or nine ideas in our Automation Hub. That will grow quite quickly because we need the help of Automation Hub to decide on which idea that we will be moving forward with next.

UiPath continues to add services to the Portal. It is fairly important that they are all managed from the same place because it is a single point of access, which was a factor that really played into our choice of vendor, UiPath. We use Automation Hub to sort of collect ideas and discover what ideas are good for information, then we use Orchestrator to manage them once they have been developed. We are hoping to use Insights at a later point, when that is available in the cloud, so we have a complete end-to-end solution in one place. 

Automation Hub is an immature product. We have only been using it seriously for about a week and have already seen some things that will give us a few headaches down the road. We are committed to using it and will continue to use it, but I have some suggestions for improvement. We have been in contact with our local UiPath office about that, and their initial response was positive.

We would like to see more detail and refinement. It is still a young product, and we are confident that the product will improve a lot over the next few months.

We are hoping for some integrations between Automation Hub, Orchestrator, and Insights.

We are missing a way to quantify that money isn't everything with this solution.

Our license was activated sometime in July. So, we have been using it for about six to seven months.

We have seen a few quirks here and there. Overall, we are satisfied with the stability.

We have only a couple of handfuls of automations running, which are very stable. So, we are not doing much maintenance at all. Maintenance needs half an FTE, if even that.

The potential scalability is really good.

I don't know what the scale is for UiPath Portal. There are still signs that it is a young product, but we see it moving and improving at a really good pace. So, we have high expectations.

The technical support has been good. I have only used them a couple of times. The response has been good. They are knowledgeable. 

One of the big reasons why we chose UiPath is that it has a big following in online communities. It has a good forum itself: Forum.UiPath.com, but I really wish that UiPath would have moderators in their forums who are more active. There are a lot of questions that go unanswered, and that is a shame.

We didn't previously have any other automation solutions in this company.

Our initial setup was very straightforward. Our deployment took only a couple of days. We are a small operation with only two unattended licenses. We created the Orchestrator account and installed the robots on two servers. 

As far as development goes, we really just have the base package. Then, we are adding on Automation Hub right now.

We did engage with their local consultancy. They sort of helped us build a strategy for the infrastructure structure setup and strategy, as far as how to identify candidates, operations, and development. However, initially, we just wanted to pull the trigger very quickly. We had an evaluation phase of a couple of months, where we were testing different products and had tried to set up UiPath before, which helped.

We have used Carve Consulting, and our experience with them has been fantastic. We are working with this third-party consultancy to have them come up with a couple of ideas for some solutions that would involve AI Center for the end of this year or next year.

The initial deployment needed just a couple of people from our side, including me. I worked a little with some of our infrastructure guys, getting the accounts set up, the service division, provisions, etc.

We just haven't scaled to a point yet where there has been any kind of return on investment.

There are not very many users because the stuff that we have automated so far has just taken work off people's hands. Where a person used to spend all day uploading pricing data into a database, we have a bot doing that now. So, people are not using UiPath, they have just sort of been relieved of their duties. While that sounds bad, we have made an effort to find areas where FTEs get to spend time doing what they are best at.

The licensing is too expensive. It is not a cheap product. We constantly have to build business cases where we have to justify our existence as an RPA team. 

We have engaged in a long-running licensing agreement because we believe in the product.

We have used a third-party consultancy, and that's definitely not free.

We looked at a local variant of Kofax RPA called SmartRPA, which was built by a Danish company. It is basically Kofax RPA with an Orchestrator service built on top of it. We evaluated that. We also looked at something called OpenRPA, mainly due to price.

UiPath is built on top of Windows Workflow Foundation, which is a platform that I have worked with previously. So, there was a lot of familiarity and extensibility. Then, we looked at how good the product is at automating desktop applications. There was not really a contest there; UiPath was better by far.

The fact that this is a SaaS solution very positively affects how fast we are able to innovate when it comes to automation. When we did the evaluation of what product to choose, UiPath versus something else, the ability to assess deployment of the whole administration was a key factor.

In our decision to go with UiPath, it was very important that we didn’t have to worry about future installations and upgrades of Orchestrator. We just didn't want the trouble of having to do upgrades. With UiPath being a young product that is evolving very quickly, we would be doing on-prem upgrades every few months and we don't have time for that. So, we liked the idea that it is a cloud-based setup.

Security was a factor in our decision to go with the solution. We didn't look into all the technical specs and certifications. We just looked at some of their customers, and said, "If that bank is using it, and it is used in the defense industry, then they know what they are doing." They had good references.

It is the best product.

It is an automation product. At the end of the day, it is software development. If there is anything that is important in software development, it is that you have a defined process from beginning to end, from the birth of the idea until it has been put into production and eventually retired. So, you need to have a defined process for different stages in the lifecycle that you need to be in control of. The product somewhat helps us do this with Automation Hub and the Robotic Enterprise Framework, but we are looking forward to even more tools for stuff like that.

So far, we are still in the meat and potatoes space. We haven't really gone into the AI or Document Understanding stuff yet. 

UiPath Portal is good overall for enabling administrators to work with Orchestrator. I have seen a lot of improvements, even in the last six or 12 months. We are learning as we go. For the first few months, we were working in a classic folder. Now, we are adopting modern folders in order to better be able to scale our efforts.

UiPath provides granular, role-based access control and management. Right now, that is not so important to us because we do everything unattended. So, we have a couple of service accounts that run everything. However, once we move into attended scenarios, then it's really important that we have that granular control.

I know that there are some new features coming out in regards to deploying automatically and elastically, but we haven't looked that much into them. We don't expect them to be a problem.

We are looking forward to doing attended robots, but that will probably be in the second half of this year when we start looking into that.

For the size of our company, we started fairly big. We went all in, buying licenses, consultancy hours, etc. We have spent a lot of money this first year. I would probably advise someone to start small but still be ambitious. Do a lot of PoCs and see how it fits into your organization. There needs to be a lot of disciplines surrounding it, e.g., if you just stay with five or 10 automations, then things are good. However, once you build 100, you start running into maintenance problems and things like that, so there needs to be a discipline. 

You don't need to spend a million dollars to sort of get off the ground, so I would advise people to start small.

I would rate this solution as an eight (out of 10).