UiPath Platform Reviews

We deal in banking and finance. The use case is based on the transaction dates. For example, how customers are using credit cards, net banking, transactions, and what components they are buying. We gather this information in order to provide a CIBIL score. 

We do have multiple applications, which are provided to the banks so that they can work without taking much time. We have a set of test cases that need to be automated and we'll run it up. 

As of now, we test and we usually have a CSED pipeline as well. We are not only restricted to any one of the features in UFR. We are using Citrix, among others. 

The solution makes it easy to build automation. Earlier, we used to collect the data and create a hard copy. Now, these are all processes that are automated. There are fewer human interventions that are required to collect the data from the email or collect the data from the hard copy. It is auto-generated through auto-generated mail. It will collect all the details and save them to a repository. Based on that, our support team is providing the solution to the customer, and it's much easier.

UiPath enables us to implement end-to-end automation. These processes are very complete. Where there's not a single person is in practicum, however, it's only deployed in our productions. 

They have included the chatbot. Therefore, if the customer is having any issues related to any of the products, they will raise their queries. We will log these queries through a bot system, and this will get notified to the escalation team. They will locate into it through banking domains or through the solution of it and providing the solution on emails. It's very helpful.

End-to-end coverage is one of the best features. If their service display is not good enough, or if they are facing any issues, we can sort things out faster, which makes customers very happy. They are getting the solution on time, and they are running 24/7. Human workers are not able to provide each and every solution on an immediate basis, however, by using the solutions, we have got a solution for the end-user that responds immediately so that they are satisfied and their needs will be fulfilled much faster.

As of now, we are using attended automation, however, we also have created some of the use cases, which are going to be linked through unattended automation. Attended automation helped to scale RPI benefits in our organization, by automating department or all specific processes that require human-robot collaboration.

For example, in one project, which we used as a test, typically the turnaround would have been 15 days, however, with UiPath, we were able to churn out this product in 30 minutes.  It's amazing how much we are saving in terms of time. We've been able to shrink timelines.

We do use UiPath's AI functionality in your automation program. The complexities are always a part of the banking industry as data is from many places and over a large amount of time. However, when we talk about the calculations, it's when human beings are involved where it really takes a while to get a task completed. With automation, we can shrink that down to 15 or 20 minutes and know in that short amount of time a person's complete financial background and if they are credible or not. This customer doesn't have to wait so long to get the results they need. 

UiPath's AI functionality has enabled us to automate more processes overall. Now, for example, it's feasible to process data, and, if we have to, get the data explained very simply to calculate a score and find out if a person is genuine or not. We can look at credit histories, transactions, et cetera, and based on that, be able to process requests in order to enable users to get loans in seconds instead of days or weeks. 

UiPath both speeds up and reduces the cost of our digital transformation; it increases processing speed and saves costs that would otherwise be taken up in longer-term tedious tasks.  

I've used the UiPath apps feature, however, I cannot say it's fully required for our processes. That said, it was very helpful when we did use it. 

UiPath has helped us reduce human error. We can achieve our goals, as mentioned, in 30 minutes, without having to manually go from one stage to another, which may cause errors. It frees up our employee's time as well, to help improve their focus. That, and, within a week's time, we can save 30 hours on a single resource. It allows those employees to really focus on higher-value work. Employees are happier as they now have the time and space to build their skills.

Overall, UiPath has reduced the cost of our automation operations. This reduction is around 30% savings. 

The product is well-integrated with different tools that can help with logging, et cetera.

The task capture is great in that we have all of this data we are receiving that's automated and we don't need to invest much time in creating documents.

For a few of the projects, we have saved money, however, on a few of these projects we've noticed less revenue. The orchestration cost is a bit higher when we are working on smaller projects.

From the improvement perspective, I am from the testing background, and UiPath has recently released some announcements related to scrums. I would be happy to see their products be involved with scrum teams.

Just like they have data for the JIRA automation, maybe if they can include some of these options in the Rally solution. It's a tool that is used locally for various projects and having automation activity included there would be useful to us. 

From a migration perspective, if we can get something better than the manual process that would be great. It would be nicer if it was smoother for those doing implementations. 

I've been using the solution for five years. 

I can say it's a very good tool from the RP perspective. It is helping us to get our work faster, saving time as well as offering multiple functionalities. We haven't had any issues with it. 

Everything is good - except the capture part. They could improve on that as we are getting less accuracy as compared to the other functionality. Other than that, the rest of the components are fine.

The scalability is very good. 

On my team, somewhere around 14 people are working on the UiPath product. There are several other teams also on it. Likely, there are around 50 plus people in total on the solution.

We are regularly using this product. I cannot say I'm not using a single day. 365 days a year this solution runs, as these processes are basically used on the weekends as well. Based on the schedule, it is pretty much always running in the UAT or QA environment. 

How much we use it depends on the products. If we get more products, we will increase usage. 

The customer support is very nice. Most of the time, we are getting a resolution from there.

I would rate them at more than eight out of ten. Over the last three years, I've been interacting with the web team on customer support. I tend to get an immediate response from their team for the assignment of my ticket, and they schedule a call. However, in some of the operations, it's not possible to directly interact on the WebEx.

It's important for us to have them extend their communications or extend their environment. Not every organization can get support as they offer it. Using Microsoft Teams or Zoom or a more popular platform may be helpful.

We did not use another solution that is similar. We previously used an automation tool that was purely used for the testing perspective. We decided to move to UiPath as it was an easy-to-use solution. However, I was not a part of the RPA tool decision-making process. 

Earlier, it was a bit complex as we had to configure our robot with the orchestrator or the studio that was providing details. Now, when we are installing, everything is taken synchronously. We don't need to enter the required areas. It is automatically catching that from that environment.

The time it takes to deploy depends on the system resources or the system specifications. Usually, it will take around 23 to 40 minutes for the installation, however, now that they have improved their installation time as well, it may only take 20 to 30 minutes.

For us, the deployment plan is basically to focus on the data perspective. We don't want to lose any of the aspects of the data, which is already running, so we do take a backup first. The orchestrator has a different environment structure, which has already been configured like a development rather than a UAT.

These are the phases that we are using on a regular basis. Once it is certified for the first stage, only then does it move to the next phase.

We require 22 people to maintain the product. They are largely comprised of the DevOps team. 

While the solution is a bit expensive, we do see ROI. When we compare the ROI with the expenses differently, ROI is on the higher side. Of course, for the organizations who have a small product base, who may have less automation required, will find that expenses are higher. The more you automate, the more you save.

However, in relation to sharing actual data points, that's a bit tricky.

As compared to the licensing costs or the pricing of other tools like Automation Anywhere or Blue Prism, it's a bit cheaper, however, when we talk about the open-source tools such as Robocorp or Robot Framework, the cost is on the higher side. Microsoft Power Automate is also cheaper.

There are no other costs beyond the licensing. 

We are just customers and end-users. I'm an RPA lead.

We are using an operating system related to Microsoft and several other features related to Microsoft. If they offered this type of product on a regular basis, that was less costly and had the same compatibility, security, and features, we'd likely adopt it. 

I'd advise those considering the solution to check the processes and compare them to their potential ROI. A company needs to consider if the tools will help them based on their environment and goals. It's important to first analyze the internal capabilities before jumping in. If they don't think they'll be getting the ROI they desire, they should look at another tool. 

I'd rate the solution at an eight out of ten.

We mostly use UiPath in the healthcare and banking/finance sectors. Our use cases depend on the different sectors we use it for. A typical use case would be an Excel file with lakhs (hundreds of thousands) of records that we need to filter and apply some business rules to. We may have to check whether numbers are in integer or alphanumeric format so that they can be accepted by a particular application, or whether date data is formatted correctly.

We use it for end-to-end automation. We take all the input from users, regarding the full life cycle of a process, and use UiPath to create a business solution. An end-to-end project can include taking an Excel file and putting the data into a data table. Based on that, we create some business rules, check things with validations, and then create some templates. We upload the templates for different legacy applications so that they can be automated. A bot will run these scenarios in the backend, in either attended or unattended mode.

We may take student records and place those records into a particular template which we then upload to an application, whether a web application or a desktop application. If a human was involved in doing this, it would take days to filter the Excel and create a template based on a particular record. But by setting up some business rules through UiPath coding, it automatically applies those rules to create the template and upload it to the application. We can then send a notification to the user by email, because we have connectivity with Gmail, Outlook, and SMTP.

A human being can work eight hours or nine hours per day on average, but a robot can run 24/7. With automation, we can save time and money by continuously running things on the same machine without any errors. The accuracy can be 90 or even 100 percent, depending on the logic of the code. It also helps the communication between clients, users, and our organization, improving the partnership. It definitely reduces human error because it's automated and well-tested. It increases work volume because it's very fast. In terms of the amount of time it saves, for repetitive tasks it can save 90 percent of an employee's time. Employee satisfaction has definitely increased.

UiPath is also helping us to increase the number of tasks we can do. For example, if a human being is reading an Excel, doing some operations and validations within it, it will take hours or days to complete. But using a UiPath robot, we can simply create the set of necessary instructions in our code so that it will run within minutes or even seconds sometimes. It is very fast.

We use every component of UiPath, from Studio to Orchestrator. It's very helpful and it is very fast. Orchestrator is very beneficial because we only need to create a particular robot once and then we can simply connect it to machines. It definitely saves time because we only need to maintain the versions of a package and the code, and that can be done locally or via Studio. Because there is a chance code could be deleted on a local machine, the fact that Orchestrator is in the cloud means we can definitely retrieve it from there.

Orchestrator also helps save time because there are scenarios where we have multiple stages of input, where something depends on a value. As developers, we don't need to provide the particular input and again publish the same package. We just go to the cloud, check the process, check the assets, change the value, and it will automatically update. It's a robust solution. Like its name, Orchestrator really does help us orchestrate things.

Also, non-technical people, the users, can see what is happening in their jobs. They can check the status of particular scheduled jobs and see whether they are running or busy, and how many bots there are.

Attended robots are also helpful because sometimes we have a scenario where a user cannot share credentials because everything must be secure. In that type of situation, we need attended automation that can be run on a particular machine in front of the user. While it's running, they can do other work on the same machine. That kind of implementation enables us to automate while keeping things more secure. This is important to us because security is a main concern. It allows users to keep their information safe, rather than making it available on other machines. It's their intellectual property and we respect that.

The most valuable features are some of the panels in UiPath Studio. For example, there is a debugging panel and a Designer panel. The debugging panel is useful because without it we could not solve any problems. The debugging panel provides functionality such as Step Into and Step Out, and we have highlight buttons. It helps us to analyze our code, what is wrong in a solution, and debug from the start to the end, to make the solution better.

The Designer panel is where we create a workflow or step-by-step process, the place where a developer develops the code.

Within UiPath Automation Cloud, we are using Orchestrator in which we can

• deploy the bots and maintain services
• create attended and unattended robots for different versions of machines and manage which robot runs in a particular environment
• use the queue to manually configure the times that bots repeatedly run. Using Orchestrator, we can simply schedule the target application. The queue also has a retry mechanism so that it will automatically take input, and we can specify the number of retries
• store a user's ID and password credentials in the Orchestrator database
• check the Orchestrator home page for what processes and jobs are running, and see any feedback on them, as well as the output
• see the logs in Orchestrator.

They are currently working on most of the things I have thought about that need improvement, such as connectivity with other software and AI/ML capabilities.

But one area for improvement is connected to the fact that it's completely based on Visual Basic .NET and C#. I would like to see some more basic activities that are particular to the VB.NET code, as well as activities based on LINQ queries because that is one of the fastest and most integrated languages. I would like to see pre-written activities so that we could simply drag and drop them into place and use them frequently. It would be better to not have to go into the syntax for that particular language code. I would prefer if we could use activities from the Activities panel, and just provide the input and output, and they would work in the backend.

I have been using UiPath for the past two years. I have very good experience in this particular tool, as an RPA developer. I have created enterprise solutions and business solutions from end-to-end.

The solution is stable because it has been developed precisely and it's already optimized. It depends on the user's input and on the architecture and the environments. We have very good stability.

UiPath is very scalable. It depends on the user's requirements and on the approach we follow. A modular approach makes it more scalable. For example, if we have different VMs, different accounts, or different licenses for the machines on which we are running, we can simply create one package and we can deploy it on the various machines, if we have the licenses for those robots. 

You can create one set of code or a package and run it anywhere, if it is suitable and the requirements are met. That's one reason the scalability is very good. 

We have a huge market and a huge environment. We can continuously run with a multi-bot architecture. If the code is developed that way, it will definitely increase the scalability.

UiPath is used by many users in our company. Their roles are varied. They could be in data analytics or they could just be doing some tedious task.

The business side is happy with the solution because it is decreasing tedious and repetitive tasks. They are happy with the time and money savings. As a result, they want to do other things via UiPath robots. They want to find other processes where the work can be done more productively.

UiPath support enables us to manage issues by creating non-production and production tickets. We can discuss issues in calls and show them examples of the particular issue or activity under discussion. They provide us with support. Sometimes, when activities are not working, we can upgrade and downgrade the version of that particular activity. We can even send logs to them so that they can analyze and troubleshoot issues. It definitely helps.

I have only used UiPath for RPA. I have read about tools like Blue Prism and Automation Anywhere,  but I cannot compare them. They all have their own advantages and disadvantages. I like UiPath because it's user-friendly and it has a very big community in the forums. We can learn from the community. And the UiPath Academy provides training, certification, and diplomas so that a person can learn and develop the ability to create a solution.

The initial setup is a little complex. You need high-end knowledge. You need to create the Studio setup on the different VM environments, deal with the licenses, and the Orchestrator setup. All of that requires good knowledge. You need to understand infrastructure and how things are set up. It's complex for regular users. The installation itself is relatively easy, but understanding the infrastructure is challenging. With guidance and training, it definitely becomes easier.

Licenses are costly, but, in the long run, UiPath will definitely help the business. Developing a solution is a one-time investment, which can be completed in a couple of days. But that work will be done next month, and again and again for the next 10 years. It definitely helps with digital transformation because it can connect solutions and create better opportunities.

UiPath is a good investment and return on that investment is very good. We can create robust solutions with UiPath.

Some licenses might be costly but it depends on the type of work involved and the turnaround time required. If you want to include AI/ML bots, it will definitely cost you more. If you want to use some of the latest features, like UiPath Insights, that will cost more.

But for low-level bots and automation and normal use of Orchestrator, the cost is per-bot.

Overall, pricing of the Enterprise Edition is pretty good. And for practice, we have the Community Edition, which is free. They also provide trial robots for two months so that we can use them for learning.

When it comes to implementation, we think about how to make a solution robust so that it can be controlled and configurable. That way, if something changes in the future, we can work on it accordingly. It should be a modular approach.

You need to focus on requirements-gathering so that you can focus on exactly what the user wants, how the application behaves, and what kinds of errors might happen. You need to check all the environmental factors. Those are all lessons I have learned from creating UiPath automations. You also need to analyze things from the business perspective and think about how much money and time is being invested and what the ROI will be in the end.

End-to-end automation, starting with process analysis, then robot building, and finally monitoring of the automation, is a very important aspect of UiPath. Rather than starting directly with the coding, we analyze the business process so that we know how the business is manually doing something and understand their problems and how much effort they are putting into it. We then start to think about how we can use a bot to save time and money. Each phase of the process life cycle is important because, phase-by-phase, things need to be passed from one to the other as input. After delivering the automation to production, we need to provide monitoring services so that if there is an error or downtime, we can make changes. That is why each phase is important in the life cycle of RPA.

From the business perspective, we check what kind of automation is involved and how much time and money we can save by automating, as these kinds of projects are high-budget. The main goal is to run the business as fast as we can. We analyze whether it is suitable for the business and how it can be profitable. We look for processes where we can save 85 to 95 percent of the time or money involved. We also consider how much human error is involved in the process as it is.

Currently, we are not using the AI/ML functionality. But because I use the Community Edition of UiPath in my personal work, and it has the latest features, I have attended the training for AI Center provided by the UiPath Academy. I tried some analysis with these models, as well as the checking of words by AI/ML, in the Community Edition, and it is one of the excellent features. It's very useful. ML models are amazing. They are using APIs which are connected to Orchestrator and they are running those kinds of models. We can also deploy our own custom models if we know the AI/ML tools.

UiPath is one of the best tools available in RPA and it's currently booming. It's the perfect tool because the UI is very friendly. It is widely used. I believe pretty much everybody in the IT industry is working on an RPA solution, many with the help of UiPath. It depends on the particular business and whether they have the capacity, but everybody wants to increase use of UiPath because it provides cloud-based automation and it's a robust solution. Everybody is happy with the solution. They want to create more automated processes so that they can decrease that time and costs in their overall projects.

We use UiPath for cases where we have to do a workflow-related mechanism. Most of these use cases are small, Excel-based solutions and desktop-solution-related workflows, where one or two applications have to be connected, along with the Excel operation, for the end-to-end workflow creation.

We use both attended and unattended automation.

We have created 10-plus solutions using UiPath, and the savings that have been generated from these solutions are around $1 million. They are very cost-effective solutions: finance, order-to-cash, and protocol-to-pay processes. It has created value on the higher end, because the processes were quite cumbersome. We re-engineered the processes and started using UiPath for workflow automation.

We have saved roughly 50 FTEs on a yearly basis. It also enables us to use a lower skillset workforce, which is a cost-effective measure.

Quality, no doubt, is one of the key parameters of automation. UiPath has resulted in quality improvement for the overall processes where it's deployed.

It's on the OCR side and the workflow side where UiPath creates value to us.

The most important and valuable feature of UiPath is the ease of creating automations. It's a workflow-based model. End-to-end coverage is, no doubt, very important, because when you use a fragmented solution, the overall process flow becomes shaky. UiPath has the required capabilities to create an end-to-end solution for a business case. For our scenario, the business cases are quite small. That way, the turnaround time to create a solution is short and it becomes very easy to deploy, which is quite helpful for us.

Another important feature is the OCR capability, which integrates quite easily with other kinds of tools. We have integrated with ABBYY and we have even used the Amazon OCR engine. From an integration perspective, it is scalable enough to integrate with third-party solutions, whereas that kind of thing becomes a bit of challenge when we use Automation Anywhere.

We are able to use Python scripting and Python libraries for data extraction.

We also use the solution in creating attended automations. They are very much division-specific and are currently used by the procurement and the finance teams. These are on-demand, data reconciliation activities that are performed once a week. The bot is clicked by the person who is attending, which is generally a procurement or a finance guy. These are tedious activities so that's why we have the dedicated license for the attended format.

It is quite user-friendly with the drag-and-drop functionality. It has connectors which are quite suitable and industry-standard for basic applications that we use on the desktop, like for the Microsoft suite. From an integration perspective, it has done well.

We have also used its selector technology to automate processes with dynamic interfaces for one of the finance applications, where the UI screen is changing.

The cognitive area is one where there is room for improvement. Automation Anywhere has grown in that area, whereas UiPath still is more dependent on third-party integration. That is something which they should be focusing on more. They should acquire a product and get it integrated.

I have been using UiPath for around two and a half years. I have used both Automation Anywhere and UiPath. We have both tools.

UiPath Robots are quite robust, and from a maintenance perspective it has become easy, if you create logs. It's pretty good.

In terms of scalability, as I mentioned, it has certain challenges, but with the minimal capacity which we are running, it becomes easy to maintain the bots.

We have 10 to 12 automations already in place, and there are around five to six more in the pipeline, which are still being rolled out. The RPA tool we used is determined on a case-by-case basis.

UiPath technical support is pretty good. Most of the answers are provided by the community forum. If you raise a ticket, they are proactive in getting back to you and addressing the point. It's good.

The initial setup was okay. I was involved in the setup of Automation Anywhere four years ago, and with UiPath. Compared to Automation Anywhere, it was much smoother because the community side is quite good with UiPath. In the early days when we were facing issues, we had the UiPath community support to find answers. We did not have to raise a ticket with UiPath because we were able to get our answers in the community forums.

The first case took us around seven to eight months to put in place. The first one is, obviously, always a tricky one. We also picked a use case of medium complexity and it took a bit of time. Later on, we started building more of a workflow solution using our low-cost workforce and, after that, the journey was quite smooth. Initially there were some hiccups, but once the team understood the tool itself it became easy.

We deploy developers who require a lower level of skill sets, developers who do not have that much training. They are normal .NET developers whom we train for one and a half months on UiPath and they start developing UiPath solutions. We have a center of excellence with our developers who work on UiPath. We recently hired two more, so we now have around 11 developers who are working on UiPath.

Taking UiPath courses to get up to speed has been very helpful. I am certified for the tool because of the courses. The curriculum is at least on par with that of Automation Anywhere, although I would say it is much better. The only issue is that the courses are very limited. The AA University has increased to a vast number of courses, and most of them have become free for the end-user. The UiPath course material is good, but there are notably fewer courses and less certification available for people like us, who are more on the business side. AA has a business analyst program and a program manager certification, but I was not able to find anything specific like that in the UiPath Academy.

Our strategy with UiPath is that we generally go for unattended automation because that doesn't lock up our licenses for the bots. We prefer solutions which require unattended automation, because of a lack of budget and other constraints. From the deployment perspective, we have a dedicated server and we're following the minimum guidelines which are required to conform to the deployment standards.

The ROI generated is quite high because of the cost factor.

It is much much cheaper than the Automation Anywhere. That is a key differentiator. It is targeted at mid-level enterprises. It is cost-effective.

There are no additional costs beyond the standard licensing fees. We have taken few of the training-related services from them. Once we move to the cloud version we may require some consulting services to move from on-prem to cloud. That would be the only other cost associated with UiPath.

When it comes to the main differences between UiPath and Automation Anywhere, UiPath is cost-effective. It is quite a lot cheaper than Automation Anywhere. It is also drag-and-drop, a fact which makes basic automation very easy compared to Automation Anywhere. It's quite user-friendly. In addition, the OCR functionality is quite robust in UiPath because it also provides a third-party integration. Python scripting becomes easy and that means our OCR solutions are quite good. These are the pros of UiPath. 

Regarding the cons of UiPath when compared to AA, the first one is the level of scripting details. Custom scripting is quite lacking in UiPath. It's more a drag-and-drop functionality which doesn't allow that higher level of customized scripting when compared to AA. Secondly, the scalability is quite robust in AA as compared to UiPath. Even though we are not pushing the limit, the general opinion out there is that UiPath fails quite visibly when you try to scale solutions that involve operations plus a new product rollout. That's a challenge with UiPath. And, as I mentioned, AA has improved a lot in the cognitive area and UiPath has not reached that level. It relies more on the third parties.

Even if you are a large enterprise and you're trying to start your RPA journey, UiPath is the answer. It sits in the top one or two solutions, along with Automation Anywhere. It's one of the leaders in RPA, and with the low cost model of the license structure, it is very easy to start with UiPath rather than with Automation Anywhere.

If you are looking for a strategic approach, where you have projected that within five to six years you will roll out 250 to 300 bots, scalability is something you have to factor in when starting your journey.

We haven't used the solution's artificial intelligence. We tried to run a PoC using a chat bot, but it didn't do well. I don't think UiPath has its own AI engine. They provide an API-level integration with other AI tools. We had a challenge there because most of the AI functionalities had to work on the cloud. We had to integrate with the Google Cloud and Amazon cloud, but both are in the public domain and transferring data from our office to the cloud was a challenge. We hit a wall. For that scenario, we moved on to Automation Anywhere, which provides us an on-prem solution.

RPA - Novigo Automation Framework Solutions - Setup an Automation Factory Model.

Automation Focus has been Productivity, Quality, Cost, Process Optimization, and compliance.

Focused on delivering Process Automation for Oracle EBS ERP application for various departments including IT, Finance, Operations, Engineering, Sales .etc 

1. Manufacturing: Master data maintenance & monitoring Inventory transactions, BOM error fix & transfer, WIP issue & complacent
2. Finance: Financial closing, IC transaction, security & FA master & transactions, Master data, duplicate check, auto-CM creation & auto-payment, Customer Master, running letter, print errors & auto-receipts
3. Supply Chain: Sales order Integration with the portal, shipment, RMA, digital shipping & backorder, item cost update & inventory interface, procurement, receiving & monitoring
4. System Admin: Access provisioning, - Creating responsibility, Monitoring pending transaction & analyzer.

RPA Automation has accelerated heavily within the organization. 

It started with task automation and ended up with process automation.

• Increased Operational excellence - With multiple FTE savings every month.
• Lowered operational cost with a minimum saving of 780+ Man hours every month.
• Overall $1 million annual savings through improved process efficiency.
• Increased Shipping Order execution velocity by 2x times -At least 10,000 orders in every 4 days.
• Amplified shipping process efficiency and employee productivity by 100% - with one click execution.
• ABCDi (AnyBody Can Do it) technique enables Zero dependencies on SME requirement to perform the task and Zero dollars spend on training the Shipping operators.
• Prevents human error, increases data accuracy, standardization, and quality of data for the shipping process.
• Excellent ROI with investment cost recovered in 1.25 months timeline and an Annualized ROI for 5 years is 68.50%
• Built from LTI Novigo Automation Framework, it provides the agility and speed required to customize and deploy the solution quickly.

• Attended Bots have been star cases as it totally removes dependencies of user literacy to know the application. 
• ABCDi (AnyBody Can Do it) technique enables Zero dependencies on SME requirement to perform the task and Zero dollars spend on training the Shipping operators.
• With Novigo Automation Framework, the implementation lifecycle is accelerated by about 25%-to-32%, while drastically reducing the implementation services cost. Identification of possible use cases along with efforts required, time involved, and cost savings can be easily envisioned by using NAF.

• RPA AI capabilities - UiPath is leading in this area.
• UiPath should focus more on recommendations of process automation based on ERP Applications like Oracle, SAP etc. They should also provide a list of possible RPA cases as per departments, processes and based on various industry domains. 
• More on RPA Governance features to be provided out of the box. 
• RPA Capabilities with IVR Channels to address voice commands will be a game changer for Customer call center cases.                                                                               

We have been using UiPath for two years.

Excellent in stability. 

Easily scalable in a few minutes.

No.

UiPath Cloud Orchestrator setup is pretty must straightforward, we manage to do a complete setup in a matter of a few hours time.

We deployed it in-house - SI - LTI.

>30% ROI  - we recovery of overall investments recovered in seven months' time.

UiPath is very cost-effective.

Yes, we have evaluated all top RPA products like Automation Anywhere and Blue Prism.

We are using Studio, the Orchestrator, and both unattended and attended bots. We are using the product primarily to index and process patient records into patient charts when records come in from outside sources.

An example of how this product has improved the way our organization functions is that it has doubled the number of records that we process per hour.

The most valuable feature for us is the unattended bots. They are valuable because records come in automatically from the vendor with a cover sheet, and that cover sheet has a QR (Quick Response) code. An unattended bot will take the record, and based on the code can index it and upload it to the patient's record with no human intervention.

On a scale from one to five where one is not stable and five is very stable, I would rate the stability of the UiPath platform as three right now. There are some nuances in it that are throwing some error codes when reading the QR codes. But we are in the process of working with UiPath to get that issue corrected.

Right now we have about five people in our organization involved in the automation program. We can expand that as necessary.

Our team used UiPath Academy RPA training. Two of the individuals on the team have gotten their certifications.

On a scale from one to five where one is the least beneficial and five is the most beneficial, I would rate the UiPath Academy as a four. The team really liked it. The two people that have certification are our two main developers. They had been doing their academy in concurrence with our deployment while they are still working on the project. They both said the academy has been very helpful.

We also have a customer support person dedicated to us. They call them Customer Success Managers. We use them and then we have also had to reach out to the home office in Romania. They are working on a solution for us right now. The service, on the whole, is very good.

I was part of the decision process in choosing UiPath as our RPA solution. We had not previously been using another solution but knew that we needed to invest in one because we looked at our employees' overtime records. We were paying for overtime and did not see the need to just for scanning and indexing. A bot can run 24/7, so the bot takes care of processes that can be automated instead.

The initial setup process was complicated because of us and the requirements of our organization. It was not because of UiPath. But even with those complications, from the time we purchased the UiPath license until we had our first robot in production took only about three months.

We did not use an integrator, reseller, or consultant for the deployment. We used internal staff and the UiPath engineers helped us along.

On a scale from one to five where one is very bad and five is excellent. I would rate our experience with UiPath as a five. They have been very responsive and have given us engineering support at no cost. They seemingly did that just to ensure that we were successful.

We are starting to see a return on investment. It has only taken us about a month to realize that. Basically, we have seen a performance benefit. Where it was taking a human about an hour to do ten records, we have estimated that we are going to be able to up that count to about 80 records an hour. One of the humans that is doing the manual part of it has already said that the product has helped double their workflow. The solution has also helped to eliminate human error by approximately 85%. I would say that it is going to save us at least 40 hours a week right now. I also think that is a conservative estimate.

For our licensing cost with this solution we have invested $90,000 right now, but that is to cover several facilities. The UiPath solution is not expensive considering that.

UiPath was the only RPA solution we looked at. They are TRM (Technology Reference Model) approved and they appeared to have the best platform.

On a scale from one to five where one is very difficult and five is very easy, I would rate the ease-of-use of the platform for automating our company's processes as a four. The UiPath product has fit our model the best. Number one, because in the VA (Veterans Affairs) hospitals the RPA solution has to be TRM approved and not all RPA solutions are. They have also been very helpful because we have a little bit of a unique system. There are some nuances in an older system that we are still using that can not be changed at the moment. They have helped us work around those issues and they have provided the technical support that we needed.

On a scale from one to ten where one is the worst and ten is the best. I would rate the product overall as a nine. From everything that I've heard from the staff, the ease-of-use and the effectiveness of it are really good.

If I were to give advice to a colleague at another company who is researching RPAs, I would tell them to go with UiPath because of the product and the culture of the company. I think the culture of the company is one of the reasons that you are going to ensure that you will be successful.

We are using Studio and Orchestrator, and we purchased an unattended bot.

Our UiPath is integrated with Kibana, which is a free tool.

Our primary use of this solution is to automate manual processes. We have approximately eighty use cases to automate.

The RPA team includes two developers, a manger, and two BPOs.

We run automations in a virtual environment, but I am not familiar with the details.

With respect to how easy it is to automate our company's processes, on a scale of one to five, I would rate this solution a five. We just drag and drop. If you want to write something we use "Type Into". If you want to click, we use the corresponding click application. For me, it's very easy, and we also have tutorials available on the UiPath website. That is something that is very useful for everyone who wants to learn, and even a non-programmer can start learning to become a developer.

The Academy RPA training was very beneficial and I would rate it a five out of five. You cannot skip one step. There are ten sections and you cannot skip any of them. It means that until you pass a certain test, it will not allow you to go to the next lesson. This restricts people from jumping directly into another section. I really like the training and it is very easy. The tutorials are not very lengthy, they are simple, and the way they are explained is relatable. The practice tests that were conducted at the end were really helpful.

We partnered with IVy to create our first two pilot bots, and from the point that we purchased our UiPath license until we had our first robot was approximately six months. It was very easy because they helped us.

This solution obviously helps us when it comes to eliminating human errors. I cannot estimate the percentage, but our company is manual process-intensive. We have a lot of manual processes like invoicing, where we have a process with the business team. They pull out an invoice number and a purchase order number from a PDF, and the source PDF is not structured. When it was being done manually, they had encountered issues entering data into one of their applications. This is one place where human errors have been reduced.

Using this solution has saved us time. For example, we have a huge process and I have heard that it saves us millions of dollars every year. Each human takes forty hours to complete the task, whereas it takes the unattended bot between ten and fifteen minutes.

Any savings in time for humans gives them time to work on something else.

The most valuable feature in Studio is the macros. They are very useful but at the same time, it depends on how we write them.

UiPath is very easy to learn.

When we deploy code into Orchestrator, sometimes there are macro activities that worked in Studio but do not work correctly in production. For example, I have implemented a Text Reading Activity that worked fine in Studio, but after deploying the code into Orchestrator it does not read the text exactly. I was able to create a workaround by using a split function in the code. It was reading the text fine because the data is being read using split functions, but this is something that I would like to see fixed.

I would like to see more AI and natural language processing.

Having chatbots available would be a helpful inclusion in a future release of this solution.

Customer support and technical support are very nice. I would rate them a ten out of ten.

We did not use another RPA solution prior to this one.

We partnered with IVy to assist us with the implementation. They helped us with two pilot bots. One of them was not up to the mark, so our CEO decided to have it reprogrammed. I would rate them a four out of five.

We have our own IT team that looks after connecting the servers with Orchestrator.

I am not updated regularly about how much money this solution saves us, but I have recently heard that we saved $400,000 USD in six months.

After our CEO decided to invest in RPA, we chose UiPath because it is easy to learn.

I have heard of Blue Prism and Automation Anywhere, but I have not learned them or worked with them.

We are looking forward to the new tools, and when they launch, we are definitely going to use them.

My advice to anybody who is implementing this solution is to speak with UiPath. Many people do not know how to start. The basic things they should have are a proper PDD (Process design document) and a recording of the manual process. These two things are essential. It is also very important to hire the right partner if you do not have your own developers because some of them are not up to the mark.

This solution is simple and easy to implement. I know there are lots of new features coming and every year they are providing good solutions with every release. There is always something new that minimized errors in previous versions.

I would rate this solution a nine out of ten.

We have a bunch of uses for the product so it is hard to judge which is the most important. We started working with data structures for websites and then moved into more complex automation like speech detection and making more cognitive decisions based on rules. Our automation using bots is essentially on the verge of using artificial intelligence.

There are a lot of ways this product has improved our organization. Even a simple project can bring us a lot of recognition. One example is retrieving passwords on Amazon. Imagine that you have a user who forgets their password. Amazon lets you reset your password but there are a lot of steps. In the background, Amazon is validating that you are the person that you are saying that you are with a lot of manual steps. We automated that with a bot and other tools and the customer experience skyrocketed. We reduced the processing by five minutes just for that service. Not only did we apply that solution for one country, but we also applied it to seven different countries. It was a success story.

What I think is the best thing about UiPath is that it is fairly easy to understand and learn how to use it. One of the most valuable things about the product is the improvement they are making with the tools. They are offering around thirteen new products now. With these additions, there is a lot of value-added enhancement that we can provide via the automation to augment what we already have implemented.

The studio's Orchestrator is the tool that we use in order to create the scripts for the bot. It is what enables us to deliver automation. Having these new technologies within the studio is what enables us to be more creative. With the Orchestrator we can monitor the bots, we can "orchestrate" them, and we can deliver that tool to customers so that they can manage their bots. It is really like digital workforce management. If we created a bot for a business, usually it would just do its job and the customer would not see what the bots are really doing. With this tool, the client has that opportunity to see what the bots are doing. 

The bots automate the work that otherwise would have to be done with other interventions and resources, so reallocation of resources and focus is the most valuable thing overall.

There are a lot of things that can be done to the product to make it better. The feature list that I develop between releases is often covered new releases of the product. That is good. But there are still a lot of enhancements that I would like to have within the Orchestrator and the queues. For example, how we manage the queues is an important thing.

I would like to see the ability to have other ways to look for one transaction within the queue. If I am looking for a single transaction, it would be good to have a filter that you can use to specify a detail, like just looking for a reference name that starts with a particular letter — but not the entire reference, but wildcards. Those are the kind of things that can be enhanced and make a big difference. Maybe they are not on the roadmap for the company when it comes to upgrades at this point because those are tiny things within the tools. But even those tiny little things can make a lot of difference in the functionality of the tools.

On a scale of one to five where five is the best and one is the worst, I would rate the stability of this platform a five. The stability of the platform is very good. During the four years that we have been working with UiPath, we have not encountered any issues with stability because of the platform. There are always issues with the environment and that can affect stability and performance, but with the platform itself, there are no issues.

Within the RPA suite, we have around 40 people working with the product. But we also have to consider that we usually engage people from other places to contribute to every single project. There are a lot more users than are working with us within the project and within our immediate company team. The peripheral people are going to be people from security, people from IT, people with specific business backgrounds, etcetera. The number of users and the product itself are scalable.

The technical support is actually pretty good. We worked a lot with our CSM (Customer Service Management). They are always doing a great job to find someone to help us out when we have issues. They get the right person for the right issue. For now, if I had to rate it from one to five where five is the best, it is going to be a five.

At the beginning, we would try to automate tasks using spreadsheets where we had calculations. We had macros and things of that sort to automate small tasks. The next step in moving to a new era was to turn to RPAs. There were a lot of things that we needed to implement through this new technology. So we did have another solution before for some types of automation but it wasn't really a dedicated system for automation and it wasn't capable of this scale.

We have a turn-around time of four to six weeks. In order to go to implementation and production, it depends on the complexity of the project. A normal project that is not that complex will obviously take less time. We have to take into consideration the time that we have in assessment, in the evaluation of the project, and in development, and only after that do we do testing to put it into production.

There are, of course, always challenges, but not all of them come because of the UiPath platform. There's a lot of things that are an issue because of the environment or the target applications that we're using. It is often more because of that than the platform itself.

We have in-house developers, we have a QA team, and we have a training and communication team specifically for the RPA suite. We also have managers for the teams, the support team, and solution architects. We do our own implementations and assist others in doing theirs.

We usually try to calculate return on investment within a year or two depending on the project. But we start to look at the benefits from the first month we put the product into production. Not really the ROI exactly, but the benefits. What I mean by benefit is if the automation is achieving the goals it was intended to achieve. Once we pass through the cost of implementation, license cost and any additional expenditure of resources, then we look into ROI.

We have seen a lot of benefits in a variety of ways depending on the projects. Most of what we have been seeing is capacity creation. There are a lot of things that can be introduced to automate processes. If there is work that can't be handled by a team and they are not going to meet SLA (Service Level Agreement), creating bots and putting bots into their team to take over redundant tasks is letting the team use resources differently. It creates additional capacity so the team can focus on more important things — like quality or process. That enables the business unit to accomplish their tasks while raising quality. The bot can always be depended on to do a specific task in the same way. If we have the right steps and if we have the right process to execute, the output from the bot is going to be right. That is another incredible benefit. Of course and for example, giving the customer a response in one hour instead of five hours enhances the customer experience. Proper use of automation can do all of these things.

Bots can also be used in eliminating human errors. Being cautious in estimating that, it could be as much as a 60% to 80% reduction. It will be reducing human error, but there is always some level of error in processing.

The percentage of time saved using UiPath bots depends on the projects, but most processes can save teams 85% of the time they would spend on tasks that can be automated. Some other automated tasks we have the efficiency go up to 90 or 95%. That is pretty good and a great way to allow for the reallocation of resources.

The cost depends on how many licenses we have and how we use the bots. We have a rate for attended bots and a rate for unattended bots. The price itself depends on the project and the number of licenses required. The prices, in general, are good — actually they are the best — but they could always be cheaper. Right now there is no one that is cheaper. The cost is in line with what we thought that it should be.

In 2016, we started to evaluate vendors. We went through Automation Anywhere and a lot of the competing products. We decided to go with UiPath not only because of the cost and the model that they have, but also the relationship that they have with customers. They actually care for you. They are always looking to provide you with the newest and best technologies. They try to make you use it in the best ways and they try to make you test out new features and provide feedback. If you need it and you realize that it's really good, then they help you make it happen. That is the best thing. They are being humble even though they are growing a lot. It is what actually made us go through UiPath.

We are using the entire UiPath tool. We are using the studios, we are using the orchestrator, we are using the bots. That is both unattended and attended bots.

We have two different environments. One is on-prem within Costa Rica data center and then we have another in the U.S. that is on an internal cloud and we use VDI (Virtual Desktop Infrastructure) and Citrix.

The virtual environment is actually pretty functional. There are some pros and cons. The pro is that it enables you to add virtual machines if you need them. The con might be that sometimes you need to enable connections that are not enabled. You might have to go through firewalls, go through network issues, etcetera. With that, it is a little bit more complex to build out automation sometimes. You have to go through configuration hurdles when you encounter them.

On a scale of one to five with five being very easy and one being very hard, I would rate the ease of use of the platform as a five. It is a five because when comparing it with the other RPA (Robotic Process Automation) platforms, it is easier to navigate within the studio and it is more comprehensive. There is a saying in usability that if you need to take more than five clicks in order to find what you're looking for, it is not easy. Finding what you want in one or two clicks is what makes a product easy to use.

We use UiPath Academy RPA training all the time. Every new employee or intern that we employ in our company goes through the RPA academy training first. That is kind of the bible for us. On a scale of one to five, five being very beneficial and one being not beneficial at all, I would rate the academy as a five. 

My advice for anyone considering this solution is very simple: It is worth it, go ahead and give it a try. You will like it. Try to experience everything within UiPath and go through every single feature that they have and can provide currently before you commit to it. The company's support will back you up and they will make sure that you find what you are looking for.

On a scale of one to ten, where ten is the best and one is the worst, I would rate the product as an eight. To get a ten, a product should be perfect. Nothing is perfect. It is not a nine because it is just a cautious rating. In technology, we always say that for every question there is an answer that says "depending on...[something]". Depending on what you're looking at, it is going to be an eight or it's going to be a nine. It should never be a ten.

We're starting within our finance group, so a lot of different processes in our finance group are being automated. Our main project was for our tax department, extracting data from PDFs and putting them into Excel.

We have two people involved with RPA in our company.

We just purchased this solution last week so we're still installing everything. We did automate four processes with the community edition. The length of time in development varied by the process. The longer ones required help from UiPath. They came on-site for the PoC, so that helped us out. Some other easy ones we just did ourselves within a couple of days.

With respect to how easy it is to automate our company's processes, on a scale of one to five, I would say that it is a four. But with Studio X, I think it will probably be a five. I say four because as you get more complicated with your processes, you need to learn how to code and there's a brunt learning curve. A lot of people will get turned off by that. So, I made some good sessions with Studio X, it's all drag and drop, mostly, so that's perfect for the business users.

On a scale of one to five, judging how beneficial it is, I would rate the training a five. We are actually in the process of taking it right now. It's good that they have something like that available. There are not that many who have aced it.

So far we haven't gone too far, but I expect that people will be a lot happier because they won't be doing the jobs that they don't like doing. They'll have more time to learn and up-skill technologies like this, which can help further their careers rather than just learning, or not learning by copying and pasting.

The most valuable feature is automating processes and tasks, giving users time for more value-added activities. This results in cost savings.

The free community edition allowed us to test out the technology before investing in it.

I would like a better ability to connect and integrate with other software systems. An example would be integration with data and business intelligence tools. I don't think they have a native connector yet. So, just something that a user can connect, and have RPA in the middle, would be helpful.

I would also like to see an easier UI for the user. It may have already been taken care of with Studio X, but I think if they keep improving that, it's going to get a lot of people interested because users are attracted to it.

We were just using community edition for about six months.

With respect to the stability, on a scale from one to five, I would rate this solution a five. I mean we haven't used it too much so we haven't really pushed the boundaries, but for the stuff we've, done I would say it is stable.

Their sales and pre-sales support is very good. They've been very willing to come onsite and help us out and help with our pilot as well.

We got introduced by RPA from PWC. They came and talked at one of our finance summits.

The paid version, I'm still learning how to use, how to connect everything together. There is still a little learning period for that as well. Learning how Orchestrator works, how the licensing works and things like that, were necessary after using the community edition.

UiPath helped us with our PoC and they were great. I mean they came for free and through just a pilot or a proof of concept. We could actually see if the technology works for a use case.

Before we start anything we evaluate the process and we take down how many hours it saves, the costs, and ROI. In our main project, it took someone approximately three hundred hours a year to do all that data extraction, data input, and that also came along with errors because someone could fat-finger the value.

Then, through the PoC, they're able to turn around within two days. A bot can basically do that entire process and do it error-free as well.

It is a savings of three-hundred hours, and the cost savings is a multiplier of hourly pay.

We also use it as an ETL tool sometimes, so instead of paying for an API connection, we can use RPA. Simply just to run a simple report of the system.

I don't have any other software vendors to compare it to, but I would say if you're fully utilizing it then there's definitely an ROI in it. Obviously, if you have only one process running five minutes a day with the bot, it's not worth it. For us, what we did was we built enough use cases before we bought that enterprise license to make the ROI on it. We've got eight or ten and then we realized that we can cover that license cost easily with ROI before we purchased it.

Ultimately, we realized ROI within six months.

We got purchased the basic minimum package and it was around $35,000 USD, annually.

We tested out Kryon RPA, and we looked but did not test Automation Anywhere and Blue Prism. Those two were out of our price range, and at that time, neither of them had a free community edition, so we couldn't test out the technology.

UiPath sort of fit our company well because it was priced reasonably, and they also had a free version so we could test out the technology. Ultimately, we chose UiPath because of the price. It was not as expensive as Blue Prism or Automation Anywhere. It has a free community version where you can test new technology, which was huge. They also have a local office next to us so we can get their help pretty easily.

They have announced features in the next release, and I think that they are all the things that users would want. There are easier ways to document processes and a better and more user-friendly UI. A lot of people just got turned off by having to learn code. So that was a lot easier, and then being able to track all your RPA projects and the ROI on them saves time. Doing them manually is time-consuming. Fortunately, we're a small company because I couldn't imagine if you're trying to implement this for a bigger company.

My advice for anybody who is researching this solution is to, first of all, do their own research on the ratings and independent research. Secondly, I would just say a lot of them now have free community editions, so there's nothing holding you back from testing out the technology and seeing if it works. I think Blue Prism is the only one that doesn't have it now. That's a really high cost and a barrier to seeing if the technology works. Just going and validating the software and doing a simple automation task is important. All of those vendors have free training so you can just go step-by-step and learn something. I think that's the biggest thing someone can do, and then obviously finding enough processes within your company as well.

This is a good solution but there is always room for improvement.

I would rate this solution a nine out of ten.