UiPath Platform Reviews

We use UiPath to automate daily repetitive tasks.

I would rate the ease of building automation with UiPath a nine out of ten. It saves us a lot of development time, and the drag-and-drop feature is very useful. The cloud version's orchestrator is also amazing, as it can host our robots.

UiPath enables us to implement end-to-end automation, which is one of the most crucial parts for our customers. Most of our users are not technically proficient and do not know how to deal with these things. They want the automation to be complete without any manual intervention.

The UiPath User Community is really helpful and has helped solve a lot of problems.

The biggest advantage of UiPath is that a lot of time is saved, which can be used for other projects.

UiPath Academy courses are helpful. They help us gain a deeper understanding of the product.

UiPath's AI helps us perform more complex processes in automation.

It has helped us speed up our digital transformation by removing a lot of manual work.

Speeding up the digital transformation process does not require any expensive upgrades or much IT support to keep UiPath up to date.

UiPath has helped to reduce human error. This indirectly allows our customers to focus their employees' time on more productive projects.

It has helped us save time.

UiPath helps reduce costs, especially for accounting companies. They are able to automate basic tasks reducing the number of people required for daily tasks and can also have those tasks running twenty-four hours a day seven days a week.

UiPath is a no-code automation tool that saves me a lot of time when developing workflows.

UiPath is very slow for scraping. If they could make it faster, that would be great. We are currently using custom robots to scrape data, which is faster.

The initial setup of UiPath can be complicated. It would be helpful to have an executable file to simplify the deployment.

Integrating UiPath can be a complex and error-prone process, especially when it comes to calculations. A helpful feature would be the ability to add simple workflows using executables, which would be especially beneficial for small projects.

UiPath needs to be more compatible with MacBooks.

I have been using UiPath for three and a half years.

The UiPath software is generally stable, but some of the packages within it can sometimes be unstable. For example, we have had to switch to older versions of some packages in order to get them to work properly.

I would give the scalability a rating of seven out of ten. As we scale, we involve more users and machines, which means ensuring compatibility.

To deploy, UiPath needs to be installed on the production machine and the extensions need to be ready. One person is enough for the deployment.

The initial setup of UiPath can be complex, as we sometimes need to explain to customers that it is not as simple as copying and pasting an executable file. UiPath requires some setup and configuration in order to work properly. 

I would rate UiPath an eight out of ten.

The decision of whether or not to use UiPath depends on the customer. If the customer is a Windows user, then UiPath is a good choice because there are many third-party packages available that make tasks easier. The orchestrator cloud functionality is also very helpful.

UiPath is easy to maintain because it integrates with other applications.

I recommend UiPath for Microsoft Windows users.

UiPath is one of three automation products that we use to build solutions for Canadian federal departments. We use it for several automations based on the client's requests and tie it with an NLP AI to query a large database of documents and auto-generate responses to thousands of clients.

We have to surrender certain documents to the public, but the documents have to be deduped. We use UiPath to collect those and perform deduplication with another system. 

I tend to use what UiPath offers, but I also have a full AI shop and Microsoft, so we've been using more of our solutions. Their document understanding features have helped a lot. We haven't used any of what I'd call their "Black Box" AI because explainability is super important. You need to understand what's going on under the hood. You can't always fully understand because it's their proprietary technology. We run into issues because we're with the Canadian government and we cannot allow services that are based in the United States.

It's too early to tell from the perspective of digital transformation. We tend to take on projects where we can realize value immediately. UiPath is fairly expensive, and the cost grows as you scale it. On the other hand, it's cheaper than employees and reduces backlogs. It frees up a lot of employee time if implemented properly. UiPath also reduces human error in most cases, particularly transactional data that is hand-typed by people.

When it comes to developing and deploying technology like this, there's a fair amount of planning, organizing, and putting all kinds of people in place. Building a project to scale involves a large upfront cost, so we need a little more time and automations to see that benefit.

Organizations should never underestimate the need to adjust their management strategy and implement a center of excellence. You need to educate your staff and bring in good use cases that demonstrate that value. All of this takes time, effort, and talent, which are seldom factored into the cost of automation.

If I eliminate seven full-time employees at $100,000 a year, so I've saved $700,000. However, if I'm spending $700,000 to implement and run processes, then it's net neutral. I need more time to start realizing those tangible benefits. I believe we will see some cost savings, but we have to stay focused. 

One of my biggest frustrations with UiPath is that they're constantly changing the underlying technology and adding features, so you're not always in a stable state. You're looking at the next shiny thing, and that distracts us from our initiative. Because we work with the government, we must go through the security assessment process each time they change something. We have to pay the costs associated with reviewing their infrastructure.

UiPath has an excellent GUI. It's an easy platform to develop on. They have lots of existing code that you can download and use. UiPath is strongly oriented toward intelligent automation, which is where we need to be. Their roadmap looks promising. 

They also have solid training and education resources. As a leader, I find UiPath Academy useful. I can send my new staff there to get up to speed quickly. It's a terrific way to introduce people to the platform so they can hit the ground running. Their user community is also helpful.  

We have used UiPath for three years.

I rate UiPath's support a seven and a half out of ten. 

Neutral

I'd love to see UiPath's pricing align better with the product maturity life cycle. UiPath's licensing model drives the cost up rapidly, whereas their competition has been cutting prices and bundling more. It's hard to stick with the technology when they're significantly more expensive. This segment is being flooded with new products. 

UiPath will have a hard time competing if they don't drop their prices. On the other hand, all of the things that give them an advantage cost money, like UiPath Academy, their excellent technical support team, marketing, etc. 

I rate UiPath an eight and a half out of ten.

We're doing a lot of accounts payable automation and accounts payable invoice automation. 

We have about 70 bots in production right now. They are unattended.

It's helped us to dramatically cut down on the number of people having to key in invoices manually. We've been able to repurpose some of the staff into other jobs and have the bot do all this work for them. It's really changed things. Our staff likes it since they're doing more meaningful work and not keying in invoices all day. I'd say it greatly impacts our staff, and our dealers love it as they're getting paid quickly. The invoices are getting paid much more quickly now.

We know that it's increased the speed of payment dramatically. I'm not sure of the numbers. However, we've processed about 40,000 invoices to date using the bot. We started in January and do about 5,000 invoices a month. That's saved a lot of hours. Our guys were doing this all day, every day, and we've cut back on it dramatically. It's a considerable amount of hours saved.

We enjoy using the AI functionality. The document understanding is the tool we're using to do the invoice automation, so it has an AI piece and machine learning built in. 

The invoices are probably our most complex as there's a lot of information that has to be scraped off the invoice that DU is doing. We started with the hard ones, and we're easing into the easy ones now. We worked backward a bit. We were a little concerned going in that this was a little bit complex; however, in a very short time, we got a lot done. Looking back, it was probably a good decision to start there. With AI, we're looking to do more. We'd like to bring on more invoices and continue to use this throughout the whole organization and in Latin America as well.

Just seeing all this manual work being automated, and seeing how the staff is thrilled that they're actually doing interesting jobs now has been great. They come in the morning, and they're actually excited about coming to work, not keying in invoices all day. That's the biggest benefit I've seen. The staff is really excited about the product, even though, in the beginning, they were a little nervous about bots doing their work.

The goal of the project was to get 75% of our invoices done with no human intervention. We actually hit 90%.

We use the UiPath community quite a bit. We find it very helpful. Most times, when we're having an issue, other people are having the same issue. We have gotten very good insights and have found other use cases. It has helped us a few times to fix an issue. It's a great feature.

The UiPath Academy courses are great. When we rolled out, we did a project with UiPath. We put a lot of their courses in our Academy so that our users could take them through us, and have actually had a very good response. A lot of people in the company took it, and the completion rate was very high.

The Academy teaches people what RPA is, and how to use it. It could be as basic or as complicated as you want. They have a wide range of classes. The fact that people can get in there and start learning for free is also very good.

Maybe we need to rely on our rep a little bit more to find out what's out there and start asking a lot more questions. We don't understand its full potential. However, that's a little bit of us not asking the right questions. What they've been terrific about is coming out with fixes. Every time we have an issue with something, they're quick to fix it immediately or in the next release. 

They're spending a lot of time and effort on unstructured documents or core quality documents. Sometimes things don't pick up right away, however, it is my understanding that they're working on it, and it has improved tremendously. Even since the beginning of the year, we've already seen some improvements.

I've been using the solution for two years. 

The stability is great. What they've done is pretty impressive. They're going to be here for the long haul.

We found it to be very, very stable. We have not had any issues since we went live, so that's also been very impressive for us that it's extremely stable.

From our perspective, there's really no issue with scaling. We're looking to expand, even by putting more invoices on it, and we don't anticipate it being an issue. We're not concerned in the least about how much it can handle. We're looking forward to expanding it a little bit.

Technical support has been terrific. 

They're very quick to react to us, and even if they aren't, our rep is always very quick to help us get a response. 

Positive

This was the first RPA solution I've used. 

I work in finance and accounting, and we were chosen to be the proof of concept to use UiPath. We were in very early, so we did a very early proof of concept, built five bots, and presented them to senior management. We gave feedback that we thought it was something that could be beneficial for the company.

The initial setup was very straightforward for us. UiPath worked with us. They were great in helping us out; the reps really helped us through the whole proof of concept. It was very new to us, and we had their full support - even when we were presenting to senior management.

We're looking at ROI on one project right now, and we estimate we will begin to see a return in year two, which is great.

The pricing has been fair. They've been very good to us with the pricing. They let us choose what we needed. They build packages that fit us, whereas maybe the competitors aren't doing that. Others don't give us the ability to buy what we need. We kind of would have had to buy in bulk, and we didn't like that either. UiPath gives us the ability to be flexible with what we need.

We looked at Automation Anywhere. We just had a better feeling about UiPath. Even from the proof of concept, we had a better feeling about UiPath.

The biggest thing we found with Automation Anywhere, for example, was we asked for a demo license so that we could do a proof of concept; we had a very difficult time even installing the demo licenses. In contrast, with UiPath, it took us a matter of minutes to get going. We were on and building bots within a matter of minutes. Therefore, very quickly, we realized UiPath was the right solution for us.

We're on the latest version, I believe.

While our company is very socially and environmentally aware, we're not yet leveraging UiPath on projects that work towards good causes. RPA is starting to get some acceptance into the organization now, and we'll do something in the future. 

I'd advise potential users to set expectations with users. Talk to users. With RPA, people always fear when they hear robots. Setting expectations for your user base. Also, if you're not sure, find a partner that you can trust. We found a very good partner. They were very good to work with, and we really felt like we could trust them. We wouldn't have been able to do this without them. They really brought in the expertise. 

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

The software's terrific. The support's terrific. All the people that are assigned to our account are very attentive to us. Our current rep is amazing. Every time I call him, he always helps. If he can't answer it, he always finds us an answer. They're quick to respond to us, even if they don't have the solution immediately. It's never gone more than two days without us resolving any issues. They've been very, very good.

We're very happy with the overall solution.

We have about 180 bots we're doing now. I think the most interesting one we have is an underwriter bot. It collects information about a person who has just applied for a product, and it does research for the underwriter. It does financial research and medical record research, and it compiles all that into notes for the underwriter. It actually gives them a recommendation on how to proceed with the application. We do all sorts of use cases, including financial and claims, and have a hand in everything that MassMutual does.

In terms of the ease of building automations, we have processed millions of cases through UiPath. It has saved hundreds of thousands of hours for our employees and freed them up to do other tasks. At MassMutual, we have people lining up to have us make a bot for them. So, it's been well accepted.

I like the tie-ins to other languages. Being able to use Python, C#, and VB has been very valuable because I can get a more diverse developer skill set on my team. If somebody's interested in a particular language, I can push them in that direction. If they want to get more into C#, for example, we can do that.

We put all new developers through the UiPath Academy courses. We're trying to get more into attended automations as we're almost exclusively unattended right now. I'm trying to get all my developers to go through the attended automation course. It's only 16 hours, so I can upscale them all on how to build attended automations better. I'm also sending some citizen developers to that course. It's pretty easy for the developers to pick up, and the citizen developers can try it.

We struggle with handwriting recognition. If we had something, maybe in Document Understanding, that would work well with handwriting recognition, it would help us out a lot. Right now, we use an outside vendor for that.

I've been using UiPath for four and a half years.

We've been using UiPath for almost four and a half years, and we've had one outage so far. The stability has been great.

We've grown a great deal in the last four years, and scalability hasn't been a problem.

We have a really talented development team, so we haven't used technical support much. However, they've been useful when we've run into problems. I'd give them a rating of ten out of ten.

Positive

I was not involved with the initial setup, but all other deployments and upgrades have been seamless.

We measure the ROI by how many full-time employees we would need to do the work the bots are doing. I think we're at 90 to 100 covered. It's working well.

The cost of UiPath is much less than that of Blue Prism. They've been very flexible and willing to work with us with our new contractors we just signed on. It's worked out well.

We looked at Automation Anywhere and Blue Prism. We chose UiPath because of the technology that we can use to build things. I like that our developers have marketable skill sets when using UiPath. They can use their SQL skills and their C# skills, for example. With some of the other products, the developers aren't really stretching themselves or making complicated solutions, which is just what they really want to do. It just seems like the other programs are more drag-and-drop only, and I don't think that's great for my team.

My advice would be to start slow and small. Big bots sound like they give you a great ROI, but the complexity and the amount of time you have to spend on them burn through your ROI quickly. We've learned that building small 10-week projects for bots is better.

On a scale from one to ten, I give UiPath a ten. It is very simple to use and easy to pick up, like I'm learning with my new citizen developers. It can get really complex with my advanced developers being able to build some pretty unique things. I like that flexibility.

We have a team with a set of developers, business analysts, and managers who are constantly looking at processes within our organization that we can automate to ease the burden of our employees. Our use cases align with departments like finance, inventory management, and HR. They include all the corporate level and core processes within our organization. Most of the automations are unattended.

A simple example would be that we have sales reps who get orders from customers. Those reps have to use some of our internal systems including our ERP system which is SAP. They use the systems to create orders and generate sales order numbers, invoices, et cetera. I have worked on these processes wherein we automate all those steps for them so that they don't have to go through the basic steps and do the same things for different orders.

We have had some of our bots running thousands of transactions per day, saving between five and ten full-time employees' hours, which is huge. And that is just one process. We have over 80 bot licenses and over 100 processes that we have automated, so it's pretty significant.

And while we haven't used it to pull patient information into a dashboard, we have pulled that information together for other purposes. That way, sensitive data is very secure when it comes to processing customer orders and the like. It's made things faster. Before, accessing it could cause errors or slow down the daily functionality. With the help of UiPath, being able to pull it easily into a single view means we are not misreading information or misunderstanding it.

Our company deals with hospitals and provides them with necessary supplies in their continuum of care. Although we don't deal directly with patients, automation has improved the efficiency of delivering that care. It's done at a much faster rate, rather than slowing it down.

We have also used UiPath's artificial intelligence and machine learning and these capabilities have made things better. These are not things I experienced using Automation Anywhere when I was a developer myself. AI and ML were never on our radar when we dealt with business processes. But now, they're opening up more doors, giving us more intelligent automation. Without them, it would probably be a little more difficult to tackle a problem. They have made things easier.

It's very easy to adapt to and it's very user-friendly and robust at the same time. You don't need to have a lot of technical knowledge to use UiPath. Overall, it's a very good tool for tackling simple and very complicated business processes.

Also, UiPath is easily integrable with other systems. When we are modeling our business processes, we use Appian as a business process modeling tool and it integrates very easily with UiPath. That's a bonus for us because we're dealing with very sensitive data. UiPath is definitely easy to use with a lot of systems.

I have been using UiPath since April of this year, which makes it about six months. Before that, I was with Automation Anywhere as a developer. Now, I'm a business analyst using UiPath.

With the latest upgrade of Orchestrator, about a month ago, sometimes, when we are running our bots, the server crashes and the bot has to stop. There is a certain time limit to it. About two or three hours after it runs, it closes down and the bot stops and you have to rerun. There is some sort of a timeout issue.

It's something that we are still figuring out with the support team from UiPath. We don't know if it's something internal to our systems or if it has something to do with the upgrade. We have been in that loop for quite a while and have yet to receive a resolution.

From my team's perspective, and from talking to a few others here at the UiPath event, the area that probably could be improved is the support system from UiPath. When we have technical issues and we reach out, sometimes the support is very delayed when a resolution, or a conversation, is really needed. Otherwise, everyone is happy with the tool.

Neutral

Our company is a manufacturer and distributor of medical supplies and products. Our automation journey started with Ashling Partners as our consulting firm. They helped us to analyze our business processes and come up with some automation ideas and, after a few months, we got UiPath.

The number of full-time employee hours spent on mundane tasks has been greatly reduced, which has resulted in great savings for our company.

The other definite benefit is no more errors, which is especially important in the healthcare field. UiPath has greatly increased the speed at which we deliver our products.

For example, we have an inventory management division and we often have branch realignments happening. They would take a week to deal with the branch realignments and handle all the inventory. Now, with a process we created for them, it takes a day or two for a bot to do it for them. It's saving them time.

We have had feedback from higher-level management where they say, "We don't have to worry about these manual tasks now. All we have to do is shoot you an email that says we have a branch realignment coming up and ask you to please run the bot for us." They give us the file and then it's done in a day or two. It's easing their workload and they are able to focus on other things. Before, it was a really painstaking process for them. Weeks of effort have been reduced to days and hours. That's a big win.

For me, as a business analyst, the biggest difference between Automation Anywhere and UiPath is that UiPath gives me the ability to capture every step. Previously the way I would do it was to sit down with the business user and take notes such as, "Okay, he's clicking into this screen, going to this system," or I would have to record the process. But now it's very simple because I can turn on the recorder and have all the steps documented so I can refer back to them. I can then give that to my developer who can then use it as a benchmark when he's building his process.

The ability to get into the finest of details with UiPath is very helpful. You don't have to worry about those manual methods and can focus on the bigger things. These are some of the advantages of UiPath.

Also, the scalability across the systems that Automation Anywhere is compatible with is limited versus that of UiPath. With UiPath you can connect to different backend sources without restrictions. In the processes that I have worked on with UiPath, there hasn't been a huge complexity if I have to do something with APIs or with databases. Whereas, in Automation Anywhere, it was a little harder. It wasn't very flexible with all the different systems.

I recommend trying out the Community Edition where you can start doing some pilot projects and test its abilities. Then you can pitch it to your organization if you have not yet done any automation.

The UiPath Academy is a great place. That's where I went first, six months ago, when I wanted to know what UiPath path is and how it is different from other tools. I took courses that helped me to understand it better. The Academy is a very good website. The course was very user-friendly. It has a wide variety of subjects, so it's not just the regular certifications that you pick up. Rather, it has specific topics. As a business analyst, there are a lot of courses for me. I need not look at courses for a developer. The diversity of the courses that you can choose from is really nice. There are courses for any role that you are into as part of an automation journey. You don't have to worry about not knowing where to start. They give you a good head start. It's definitely possible to learn this tool and it's rewarding.

I was just talking to someone who said he's from the oil and manufacturing industry and they are also implementing UiPath and automations. Aside from our company, which is in healthcare, it seems that the solution is applied in pretty diverse areas, across every other industry. There are a lot of applications of the solution and a lot of success stories. It's really nice to hear those. They help us realize that we still have a lot more to extract when it comes to the benefits of UiPath.

We've used it to automate most of our processes. Our organization is completely technology-driven and we have been able to automate a lot of our processes with UiPath. The main thing that we are using it for is document creation with multiple fields and approval processes.

We're using it to automate daily tasks, using small bots for multiple processes. In the long-run, they're actually connected together. A lot of people have left our organization in the past couple of years and, instead of hiring new employees, we actually try to build a bot for whatever the work those employees were doing.

By not replacing employees who have left, we have been able to achieve our aim of running a lean company. We are able to save a lot of money on HR costs as well as on the costs of hiring new employees.

In addition, our document-processing time has been reduced for every customer that we are catering to, and that has resulted in great ROI as well as customer satisfaction.

We have compared the performance of humans with the bots who replaced them as they left the organization. The humans were making a lot of errors compared to the bots. The bots are not perfect and they do make their share of errors, but they are quite different from human errors. Everything is logic-based, and everything happens with triggers, so the possibility of an error is minimalistic when something is being handled by a bot. That is especially true for a bot that is created with UiPath because it's so mature. Overall, there are hardly any errors that come out of the bots made with UiPath.

Another benefit comes from the UiPath Academy courses. It saves us on training costs because we don't have to develop the content for training new employees. We're not product experts when it comes to UiPath and the Academy delivers training in a fashion that is easy to understand. There's a lot of support provided with the training courses as well. Not only does the Academy help in terms of training-development costs, but it has minimized the duration of training for each employee who starts to use UiPath. The results are great savings for the organization, both monetary, through automation, and non-monetary when it comes to training.

The AI and machine learning that are built into these bots really help us to make bots at a mature level where they're able to track with real-world customers. They also help with employee engagement and business productivity and take them to a whole new level. Obviously, we cannot develop such technology from scratch. We used built-in processes and automations in the past, but once we found, first when we were using Automation Anywhere, and now while using UiPath, this type of technology, it really took over the technology suite that our organization had been using previously and replaced it completely. UiPath is a complete suite that can handle most of our needs by itself.

Document creation is one of the most important features for us. As a healthcare company, we have a lot of documents with complex fields. For example, if a treatment is booked by a customer in another country, a lot of paperwork has to be completed. That paperwork first goes to the healthcare provider and, once accepted there, it comes to the company to be approved by the management. Then it goes back to the customer.

In addition, the process has been integrated into mobile apps. That way, a senior manager gets a request on the mobile app and to approve the transaction they just have to press the "Accept" button and everything else happens on its own. All of that happens in a matter of seconds.

Also, the UiPath Academy courses are very user-friendly and enable us to achieve a lot more. Those courses have taught us a lot, especially for our new automation employees. Once the basic courses are completed by any new employee, we actually recommend that they complete the certifications that are available via UiPath, and some of them are actually free of cost. Only after completing certification do we allow them to work on the floor. We have found the Academy content to be really amazing in terms of design as well as its functionality. We have made use of all of the courses there are.

The UiPath community has grown quite a bit, but it's still not on par with the kind of support that you would find with Automation Anywhere. That is still missing because UiPath is a relatively new entrant in the market. The community support is growing, but that is definitely one of the areas that can be improved.

Also, sometimes there are failures in the cloud during migration. Say you're migrating it from one instance to another instance. There are failures and there's not much support for such cases in the UiPath documentation. While it is a rare instance that we need to migrate, whenever we do have to migrate, we generally face some issues. I feel that there are bugs in that area.

We've been using UiPath for about three years.

The platform is really stable. There's never been a point when it's been unstable or has had runtime issues. There have been really minute server crashes, unexpectedly. But I don't think that is due to the platform. It is more due to the server environment and the hosting environment not being configured properly. There are no problems whatsoever in terms of the stability as well as the performance of the product.

The product is very scalable. It is meant for scalability. It is specifically meant for a situation where there are a lot of tasks that have to be completed by and it automates everything. Even if large volumes of data and tasks have to be completed with lightning speed, that is exactly where UiPath fits in. It does the job beautifully. That is the reason it was able to replace the whole technology suite that we were using, a suite that consisted of different products.

The technical support has been great. The only issue that we've had is that there aren't enough specialized support people who can help with the server issues. Configuring Google Cloud Platform with UiPath can be challenging. There were some errors that we were not able to figure out on our own. There are two support teams that we could reach out to, either the server support or the UiPath support. Sometimes both of them were confused about what was causing the issue. And sometimes, it takes more than the anticipated time to resolve the issue. But overall, UiPath provides great support.

Positive

At first, we were using a completely in-house technology system. After that, we used Automation Anywhere for a couple of years. But once we started using UiPath, we were able to replace that completely.

The initial setup was fairly easy. We've been using the Google Cloud Platform to host the entire automation platform and there isn't much documentation for deploying it on GCP. There are a lot of settings and configurations that are location-specific and that relate to the load and the number of bots that you are going to make with UiPath. There are a lot of things that come into the picture and the documentation is not up to the mark.

To sum it up, it is a little difficult, but not impossible to deploy it initially.

It only takes a few days but it depends on the complexity of the kinds of bots that you plan to run with the platform. Certain bots could take time. For that situation, there are consulting services. Also, there are certain bots that are already there as a template and you can customize them. But if there are processes that require a custom bot to be built from scratch, that could definitely take time. That could take from months to a year if it's a very complex bot and you're creating it with an in-house team.

Our implementation strategy was to take one step at a time. We had designed a complete project deployment roadmap, in which we had certain milestones that we planned to achieve within a few months. There were then more milestones that we planned to reach within a year. We did have to take on some consulting services from UiPath partners for the customized bots, but that resulted in the development costs being reduced, as it went a lot faster than it would have gone without the consulting support. It has gone pretty smoothly.

Apart from the consultants for the customized bots, the initial deployment was completely handled by our in-house team. There was a fair bit of documentation provided with the system itself and we found it sufficient to take care of the initial deployment.

The ROI has been really excellent. We're able to save a lot of costs that were previously paid for subscriptions to multiple suites of software. We were able to save all of that and invest it into one product, UiPath, as well as into development of the bots.

The ROI has been very positive for us. The main issue is that there is an initial investment that you have to make. Once you do that, the ROI keeps on growing year-on-year. For us, it has only been three years. If we compare our costs and ROI over a longer period, I'm sure we'll see a lot better ROI.

The costs are related to infrastructure and development and, of course, at a later stage, include monitoring and maintenance. If you compare all of that over a longer period of time, you'll see savings of anywhere between two and 15 times compared to an equivalent system, over a period of about five to seven years.

Another area with room for improvement is the pricing. Initially, the pricing was a lot more affordable. Now, it seems a bit excessive.

Get an estimate of the cost from UiPath sales representatives. Don't just include the UiPath cost, but also the consulting costs that you might have to pay, and the number of licenses that you might need as an organization. The third thing to consider is the development cost of the bots. All of that has to be considered well in advance.

I don't think there is anything that UiPath bots aren't able to do. But be aware that the budget could become excessive by using UiPath because there are so many different costs that come into the picture. You could require trained employees, people who have previous experience with UiPath, to develop bots that are a custom fit for your organization.

Cost would be one of the things that I would recommend that other organizations consider in advance to see if it suits their budgets. They should also consider whether they have the resources that can deploy and design bots that are able to automate the tasks and the processes that they want to automate.

Apart from UiPath, we also used Automation Anywhere. The reason we use UiPath far more than Automation Anywhere is because we have been using it for some time and we have some resources who are quite well-trained on it. It suits us pretty well. It has automated most of our processes and really kept our system moving. Whatever issues we have had with the product have been very well resolved by the customer support team in a very timely manner, and that is another reason we prefer UiPath over Automation Anywhere.

You need to have resources who are trained in UiPath. You could take the initiative of training employees, but you need some senior resources who have prior experience with UiPath who can be project managers and guide the development and analyst teams on how to reach the goals that the organization is trying to achieve.

UiPath was a fairly new product when we started using it. They were giving a 60-day free trial and were also providing free certifications for that initial period. That is how we started with it. Over the years, we've seen that the UiPath community has grown quite a bit. From being a new entry in the automation market, it has grown into a very mature product and it has now taken over as the main system that our company is using. We rely on technology to support our backend processes and we need a system that is very reliable in terms of delivery. UiPath has turned out to be a system that works out very well for us. The UiPath community really helps whenever there are bugs or glitches that our company is facing. You can reach out to the community where there are very senior developers as well as analysts and you can get a lot of help there, apart from the customer support.

It runs in its own private cloud in the Google Cloud Platform. We have some projects that are run on UiPath that are given to independent contractors to work on. We give a contractor a license for the system and they have to install UiPath on their computer and complete whatever work they have to complete on that. But for our internal organization and employees, we have a private cloud over which UiPath is running.

The biggest lesson would be to just take one step at a time. Make use of the partner support at the beginning. Initially, we tried to build everything ourselves and that cost a lot more than it would have if we had used consultants. There are companies that provide consulting support and there are companies that will actually build your bots exactly to your requirements. That way, you can just deploy them from day one. They also provide maintenance and support for the bots they have developed for you.

Our primary use cases are within the financing and HR teams right now. But of course, there's a lot of opportunities in the clinical space and with MB services. We have use cases in all of those departments throughout the organization, but right now we are engaged primarily with the HR and finance team.

We have two automations in production right now. We just started our COE and it's been exciting so far. We are building things and have identified quite big end-to-end opportunities. 

I'm not new to the automation world. I've been in this field since late 2015 and I've seen the ROI you can get with it. Some things you can quantify and others you can't. However, we are very new to UiPath so I can not comment on improvements just yet. We will know within a year. 

We have seen savings in time. One of the automations that we have in place with our finance team is a monthly reconciliation process. The first three to five days of the month are critical in finance. So, if you're able to save as little as half an hour every day in those five days, that adds up to a full day of work. This automation has helped our accountants and the finance team do their closing and be on time and have extra time to analyze things. They're not fighting fires anymore.

The partnerships that UiPath has with other vendors are excellent. Some of the applications that we rely on heavily, like DocuSign for Workday, already have built-in integrations with UiPath. This will help us scale and go to market quickly. 

I am happy that they are always listening to us and doing as much as they can to include more features. 

UiPath could work towards more engagement on the community practice side. Some of our people are having a hard time understanding how to make sense of the data that UiPath puts out. 

There could be some guidance as well on how to calculate ROI. ROI is how much money you have spent and how much you are getting back. But, how can I know how much money I've spent? Do I calculate the cost of infrastructure? Do I calculate the cost of the team I have? Where do I begin? What is the right way to look at ROI? What are some of the analytics I should be looking at?  

Utilization, the success rate, business value, and ROI have to go hand-in-hand. You cannot tell a whole story with just ROI. 

I have been using UiPath since March of this year. 

My impression of UiPath's stability is good. Compared to some other automation vendors that I've used, I would say that UiPath is more stable and better. 

We do not have a lot of experience with them but whenever we reached out to them they helped and directed us. 

The initial setup was straightforward. It was on-premise and run-of-the-mill. Our team is very knowledgeable and had already done similar implementations. 

We had four people engaged in the implementation from our side. We partnered with EmiTech for the deployment and they brought in their expert and helped guide us through the installation process. 

I do not fully understand our pricing model yet, but I would say that it is fair. I cannot tell at the moment how it is going to affect us. Right now we have only six unattended bots and maybe two attended ones, so we will see how it goes as we grow. 

The ease of building the automations depends on the process, but overall I would say that UiPath is intuitive. If you understand some basic functions of logical expressions or loop functions, UiPath is intuitive enough to help you build some impressive automations. It is easy to pick up.

We have a few people who have completed UiPath Academy courses and are now going for advanced certification. I'm not planning on building any bots on an enterprise scale myself, but I am going through the training as well. 

UiPath Academy is excellent because it is intuitive. Of course, you have to have some development or SDLC knowledge, but it helps tremendously. You get so much insight on the features. You also get to build a small automation. I dedicated 30 to 40 hours to the trainings and was able to get some knowledge from it. 

The trainings are even easier for people from accounting, for example. They are used to macros, automations, and file transfers. Conceptually, they are already there and with a tool like UiPath Academy, they can start using the solution. It's important to just stick with it.

Our use cases for UiPath are all across the board. We started primarily in the finance and accounting sectors and moved to our integration center, which is made up of individuals working with our field operations folks to schedule and conduct work.

We have also moved into HR and found a lot of hours there, as well. We have also done automations for our IT and supply chain sectors. We probably touched about 15 different business units within our organizations with UiPath automations.  

We have seen a reduction in human error. A perfect example of that is an automation that takes a report from our bank and identifies all of our customers who have changed their routing or checking account information from the previous day. It then goes into the system and figures out which of these customers are check-free and updates their routing account number information. This process used to take four people four hours each day. It now takes the bot less than 15 minutes a day. There was a lot of room for human error in this process that has been eliminated. It has been automated, improving the data quality instantaneously.

The UiPath Academy was one of the biggest reasons why we chose this solution over other products. What was important for us was the availability of the free online training that we could do. 

The other vendors we were considering at the time were offering training but for a fee. We would have to pay some $2,000 per session and our upfront investment to get the team off the ground would have increased exponentially as a result.

Also, with those classes, you don't always know which quality you're going to get. Sometimes they're phenomenal and other times not so much. 

We've leveraged the UiPath Academy with our college recruits/interns. We have been able to say, "OK, we're going to hire you, but here's your commitment. You need to go through these training classes before you start your job." This would help them hit the ground running, which is phenomenal. 

The UiPath Academy expedites onboarding, which is probably its biggest value.

There is more that we could be doing with the platform. At the moment, we're just leveraging RPA right out of the box. We're just doing what I would call plain Jane automations. We're not doing a great job of leveraging the process discovery tools, which is a huge pain point for us. A lot of businesses are dealing with people shortages right now, which is taxing. And the people that are there are doing too much work so they don't have time to sit down and document their processes. Having those process discovery tools will elevate our game and allow us to be able to help them more quickly. That's a huge win for us. 

The other piece of the pie is that as we roll out automation to our organization, we're finding nuances with the process. Using some of UiPath's process mining tools, we can identify discrepancies between, for example, processes in Ohio versus Pennsylvania or Virginia or Kentucky. This would be huge for us because we spend a lot of time addressing these nuances for the automations.

The pricing could be more transparent. Overall, I think the pricing is fine, but they keep changing it. It should be more structured. They don't have to tell us what their pricing is, but they should publish how the product is broken down. 

Also, as a customer, one of my frustration points is that I'm not sure the customer success team is engaged at the right level with the customers. There's too much focus on selling more product versus helping to evolve the COE. 

There are many partners out there that have kind of learned over the last two years like this is what we need to get it off the ground. There are so many customers out there that I've talked to that have bought UiPath and it's just sitting on the shelf. If they can help them get it off the ground and get it going, then they can increase the community. 

Another issue that we run into that is not necessarily a reflection of the solution is the fact that our IT operations team does not want us running automations during business hours. This is because they don't have a good understanding of what the true impact of automation is on the source system. It would be great to have UiPath help us educate other members of the organization that automation is no different than human interaction. This could help people like me communicate with stakeholders and increase our ability to run even more automations. 

We started using UiPath in November of 2018.

I haven't seen any issues with UiPath's stability. 

We haven't seen any issues with scalability. 

We have had a mixed bag with UiPath's tech support. We have upgraded to premium support now because we need more help. The reason why we went with premium support is because we were not getting what we needed from the customer success team.

The setting up of the infrastructure and getting off the ground from a technology standpoint was the easy part. The complex part was setting up the governance model and setting up the COE model. 

I think it's probably gotten better since 2018. When we started, I didn't feel like UiPath or the partners had their heads wrapped around governance and the infrastructure set up.

At the time, I felt like I was on my own when it came to security aspects and things like setting service-level accounts for bots, setting up bots on virtual machines, and governance aspects like setting up a steering committee or the structure around the intake, tracking, or ROI processes. 

The service providers and UiPath did not help me. It was difficult in that sense in the beginning. I even ran into some trouble with my superiors because the whole process was taking longer than expected. 

We are running around 20 bots and have 105 automations in production today. One of our automations saved 25,000 hours. Overall, I'll say we have more than 250,000 hours saved for the organization.

I think we take a fee of $50 per hour, so that's well over $10 million saved that went back to the organization. 

UiPath's pricing can be confusing. They are changing it all the time. It would be nice if it was a bit more transparent. 

Before settling on UiPath, we looked into Automation Anywhere and Blue Prism. This was back in 2018 and the product has come far since then. 

To be honest, the best product offering at that time was Automation Anywhere. However, we understood UiPath's vision and saw where it was going. We liked the training that was available and there were a couple of use cases that we needed that Automation Anywhere would not be good for. 

Cost was another factor. At that time, UiPath had aggressive pricing that helped them get their foot in the door and enabled us to get off and go. 

My first bit of advice is to ask questions of customers. It is helpful to build a community around you of individuals that you can call upon and just ask questions. In Columbus, we started an intelligent automation user group that brought together customers. It wasn't necessarily UiPath-specific. We talked about different topics and challenges that we are having. 

For me, that was helpful, especially in terms of governance because I got a lot of good ideas from different people in regard to how I should set up my governance or how to handle certain security issues. I highly recommend connecting with other customers and leveraging the experience and knowledge that they have rather than trying to figure it out on your own.

We love UiPath Studio and we have done a little bit with StudioX. We have not had a high level of success with them because our business has been taxed. Trying to find business resources to put towards those efforts has been our biggest hurdle to getting a citizen developer program off the ground.