UiPath Platform Reviews

At my company, we automate everything, including the ERP. It's for logistics as well as the production. 90% of our use case is automating SAP and the bonus software.

The user interface is amazing. If we want to look at the conditions, we can do so easily. We can just search and we can find it. It's very simple.

They provide architecture that is really amazing. 

It is quite stable. It is really good and very reliable, which is what I really want. 

You can scale the solution very well.

I have used automation. The report was helpful. It trains employees - even those that didn’t have any experience. In UiPath, it’s not as clear how you go about things or where to click. It's very difficult to change items. The best part of UiPath is the automation.

I have a downloaded code. When you ship the plan from one country to another country, there will be a lot of historical data in the item. Typically, we have to delete this manually. It is a lot of data. We have exclusively recruited people for this job in the past. Then, we came up with some designs for the automation and it has saved them plenty of time. We are able to finish all the deletion of unnecessary data in record time. That was a really easy way to help save time and human resources. Automation Anywhere is really helpful financially.

Manually, a task like this would have taken around 30 days to deal with 10,000 lines of deletion. Now, with automation, the same task can be done in two days.

In the past, our recruits have come from Ireland. I’m not sure how much labor time we’ve saved with UiPath, however, it’s significant.

I have tried UiPath’s Academy. I got certified from UiPath. The best part is that the lectures are really good. They also provide the trial motions, which is really helpful when learning.

I have watched UiPath Academy’s orchestrated videos and done the pre-development. I completed the entire video and then did the test. They have certified me for Orchestrator and the developer parts.

One really good thing about UiPath is the user community. We can just search for a term and get help with questions. Most questions will be answered by the community. That is really amazing and helpful. Participating in the community makes UiPath really easy. It's very easy to find solutions to questions you have.

The UiPath community compares well against other RPA communities out there. On a scale of one to ten, I would say that the automation ranks at a nine. It’s a helpful tool.

We use attended bots as well as unattended bots.

Attended automation has helped to scale RPA benefits in our company by automating departments or all specific processes that require human-robot collaboration. We know how to use automation with merchants so that they help you with authorization for the end-users. The robots have really helped us in specific use cases, especially around logistics, for example.

We have just started using UiPath’s AI functionality. We are exploring it now after we got some orientation from UiPath. Within one year, we'll start using it for the plans that we have created for this year.

UiPath automation has reduced human mistakes. That is the best part. If somebody, a human, does the same continuous actions, mistakes will happen. With automation, we’ve had zero errors at this point.

UiPath updates its software every year. The problem is the support for the old code. For example, right now I'm using the 2021 10.3 version. If I have developed a code three years back and I want to update the packages, it won't work as expected. They do not follow up with support for the old version. Therefore, a person has to exclusively work again with the old robot to make it compatible with the new version.

I've been using the solution for four years now.

Stability-wise, I would say, for an ERP, UiPath is good. If you are going to automate some websites, the stability is very bad, however, for ERP it is really good. 

The scalability is good. Based on the demand, we can actually scale up things. Again, it depends on how we implement UiPath in the organization.

We pay extra for UiPath support. For us, it's really good.

Since we are paying extra money for support, whenever we have a problem they exclusively send two people to our organization. They elaborate and explain the solution to the problem. That's only due to the fact that we pay extra money. We have experienced only positive scenarios with support.

While I'd rate paid support eight out of ten, when you don't pay for support the service may be only a five out of ten.

Positive

I also have Automation Anywhere and Microsoft.

Microsoft's solution is better than UiPath. However, UiPath compared to Automation Anywhere is better.

With UiPath, they should have at least some basic knowledge of .NET. It's very different from Microsoft. Somebody without any background can develop robots.

Compared to Automation Anywhere, UiPath is really good. Especially the user interface. Some of the Orchestrator functionality is also really good compared to Automation Anywhere. 

We had used an earlier version (8). We had to use that and log into the Orchestrator, et cetera. At that time, all versions were difficult. Now, they have the availability to make the setup easier and we have the entities to deploy the package. It's now very easy and very convenient.

The deployment takes about two minutes maximum.

For the deployment strategy for UiPath, we did a QA first. We had a tech that would create the instance, we'd deploy the Orchestrator and then just do the QA. We'd create another code request for the master branch. 

I have seen some ROI, however, I have only high-level ideas about what it is. Our team is in Denmark and in India. From what I heard, we are getting considerable value for money at this time.

The solution is a bit pricey.

More and more companies are coming out with similar solutions, and therefore the space is likely to become very competitive.

I have used the cloud deployment at well. Now I use the on-premises version. 

If anybody is going to evaluate UiPath, first, I would say, you need to look into what kind of automation you are going to do. If it's ERP, I would definitely recommend UiPath. If it's something, like a PDF or insurance kind of use case, then I wouldn't recommend UiPath. From my experience, what I understand is that UiPath is good for SAP. However, you can use it for any other kind of ERP as well.

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

As consultants, we have implemented UiPath for clients when they have asymmetric workloads because of COVID and they want to scale up but don't want to hire new people. We've implemented automations for clients that want to decrease their workflows. And we've seen efficiency gains as well when clients want to complement the work that humans are doing with the help of automations.

A good example of a client use case is a client that does mortgage loans. When someone comes to a loan officer, there's a lot of information that needs to be provided. There's a manual process that includes inputting the information into the system. Once the information is in the system, they need to run a lot of services, such as lien and credit checks, location verifications, inspections, flood reports, et cetera, before a loan application can be approved. 

We've automated this entire process for them. Our automations, built on UiPath, run all these services, generate all the reports, and store them in a centralized repository that can then be eyeballed by a human. That way they can make a judgment call on whether a loan should be processed or not.

Our in-house use case right now is around structuring reporting with UiPath. We have a Power BI layer and we use UiPath internally to check employee availability, as well as who is charging hours, and how many, to our projects. Overall, we use it for HR activities. We go into our HR management system, generate and download the reports using UiPath, and then modify and massage the data depending on business rules. We then publish that data into Power BI and that's used as a centralized dashboard for reporting for the organization. 

We recently did an engagement with some leaders in HR management. That organization has two kinds of certifications that they give out. We automated those processes as well as the reporting and the revenue reconciliation around them. They wanted to understand how many people were doing re-certifications, and their demographics. They wanted to see what the pass percentage was. They also wanted to be able to give the marketing team data about whom they should be targeting.

The automations we built for them using business rules produce information on whom they should be targeting. They help them understand which part of the world is doing their exams and which part of the world is not doing their exams, and where they need to spend more on marketing.

Before we automated these things, they had a team of four people doing that kind of work. Now, there is one person managing the automations instead of managing the actual processes. That was a big win for them as an organization. They were able to redeploy three people to do other work inside the organization. And in terms of savings, if the average person works 2,040 hours per year, we saved them around 8,000 person-hours of work annually.

Internally, in our company, the reporting process that we have automated used to take 45 to 50 minutes for the HR team to do. Now, reports are generated automatically. It has decreased the amount of effort that the HR team needs to do to generate reports.

There is also a lot of benefit with respect to human error. The tasks that you want to automate are usually repetitive, mundane activities—the swivel-chair activities where a junior analyst might be processing 500 loans in a day. People tend not to concentrate and they make mistakes in that kind of situation. Automation is not going to make those mistakes. There's a great reduction in human error when you implement RPA using UiPath.

In addition, as a small company, one of the biggest advantages we see from using UiPath is that they handle infrastructure, maintenance, and updates with the cloud offering. That helps a lot of small and mid-tier companies implement automation, companies whose IT practices aren't as mature. That's one of the most important features and benefits of UiPath.

The cloud version does decrease your startup time. Where you might have spent four weeks provisioning a server or a virtual machine, installing things, and then securing network assets, with this solution you don't have to do those things. It's all available directly, plug-and-play from UiPath. The time to value is decreased. Cloud instances are, obviously, a little bit more expensive than what you would pay with an on-prem solution, but because UiPath gives it to you at scale, the difference is that great.

For SMEs, the effort to stand something up themselves adds a lot of work to the automation. The ROI is quicker for SMEs when they do a cloud implementation.

The only way you're able to show true value with an automation program is if you automate something end-to-end. UiPath does end-to-end automations and, among all the other tools that are available, UiPath is the leader in end-to-end automation. 

In addition, they're growing their platform. It's no longer just an RPA program. It's a platform that gives you capabilities like AI, Computer Vision, and chatbots. It's not just about task or process automation, it's about the end-to-end life cycle. Previously, if you wanted to do a chatbot integration, there was no end-to-end solution for it. Today, UiPath offers direct integrations with chatbot services and direct integrations to some level of AI analysis on your processes. No other provider today does any of that. If you get into specific, end-to-end scenarios, UiPath certainly is a platform that allows you to achieve that end-to-end automation.

UiPath's AI capabilities are pretty good. Computer Vision is their AI functionality that helps you look into images. If you're automating inside a Citrix environment, for example, you really can't access the usual selectors or data boxes or text boxes. It's all an image. We had to do an automation in such an environment, and we used the AI capabilities of Computer Vision to build dynamic selectors. That was beneficial. I don't think any other vendor currently has that capability. The way they've implemented AI is not just a buzzword. They've really applied it in the Computer Vision feature.

And when it comes to the UiPath user community, nobody would be able to do implementations without it. It's a lot like Stack Overflow, but for RPA. It's a very strong community and it helps anyone who is doing development, management, initialization, et cetera. 

They can certainly improve their Automation Hub, which is their centralized place to gather new opportunities. The improvement could be, in part, in the capabilities. For example, it would help if there were a centralized dashboard. Maybe they could combine Insights and Automation Hub into one solution.

And they also need to revisit the pricing model of Automation Hub. It is an expensive functionality that clients don't really want to pay for. They feel that it should be part of the program and available out-of-the-box. Because it's not, clients just do things using an Excel sheet.

I started doing automations back in 2015, and I've been using UiPath since around 2017. I work as a management consultant. The company I work for provides consulting services to organizations that want to use UiPath, Blue Prism, and Automation Anywhere.

I started out doing development with UiPath, and now I do a lot of infrastructure initialization. I've done development and implementations on the on-prem solution, although I've never set one up, and I've set up cloud instances of UiPath myself.

As a company, we also use the free Community Edition in-house so that we can build a point of view on solutions, but most of our implementations are for clients as consultants.

Scaling is a benefit of the cloud offering because you can easily add a new license without provisioning a new server virtual machine, and you can also or decrease licenses. This is only applicable to an organization that does not have high IT maturity and does not have virtual machines that can be spun up. If a client is very mature, Fortune 100 or Fortune 50, with a very robust IT team that can easily spin up virtual machines, the cloud solution is not going to be beneficial when it comes to scaling.

They have multiple tiers for technical support. I've used all of them. With the Premium Plus Support you get immediate remediation. You have a support representative available who is like an account executive and who is the go-to person for any issues. It's very easy and very quick. 

The mid-tier is Premium Support where you don't have a direct point of contact, but you still get priority service. 

We recently had a production issue with Orchestrator. I opened a ticket on February 2nd and we just resolved it this morning, six days later. It wasn't a big issue but it took them some time. That was with the free support. I didn't expect them to prioritize it

Overall, they are responsive. The top-tier support is a 10 out of 10, the mid-tier is about an eight out of 10, and the free support is about a seven or eight out of 10.

One of the biggest advantages of UiPath is the ease of setup. Their cloud instance is probably four or five releases ahead of what Blue Prism or Automation Anywhere offer right now. You can buy a license in 30 seconds and get your own automation instance set up on the cloud within an hour.

UiPath has made setting up and starting an implementation very easy because it's a service. If you're going with the cloud, there's no installation, no setup, and no server or VM initialization.

UiPath also has something called REFramework (Robotic Enterprise Framework). The REFramework is built-in and helps streamline implementations with some of the industry best practices for development. UiPath provides that to everybody as a basic template to start an implementation. Blue Prism or Automation Anywhere usually provide you with a blank slate and a junior developer might struggle a bit to actually understand how to do exception handling or logging. UiPath allows you to do that very simply with REFramework.

We have also used the UiPath Academy courses and they have been very beneficial. UiPath started giving all their Academy material free of cost to everybody. They were the first RPA vendor to do that. By doing that, they created a competency, globally, inUiPath. It certainly helps everybody. If I don't understand something about a new feature that comes out, I open the Academy and watch a video, or I read some material or a white paper that they have published, and I understand it better.

The material is really good. It helps you understand their platform in a very robust manner. There are walkthroughs where you can do implementations and developments while the course is going on. That really helps as well.

The Academy helps us build an internal understanding of new capabilities and then go to clients and tell them, "This is another new capability. It's available to you free of cost because you've already purchased the licenses. Here is what its potential is, and this is how you should implement it." As a result of the Academy courses, we can advise clients better and help them unleash that potential.

UiPath changed the way that they do licensing, starting in 2022. Any partner that has status with them is now allowed to sell licenses, because UiPath itself does not sell licenses anymore. They have a sales team that manages licenses and works with vendors like us.

They can definitely work on the way that they publish material about their licenses. Every year they change their license SKUs. They change the definitions and the naming conventions. They change capabilities and functionalities. It becomes very hard, as a user, to track it. We recently had to renew our licenses and the way that they defined the RPA developer license had changed. The RPA developer license is now called an automation developer license. The two capabilities are very different. We had to go through learning to make sure that we would have all the capabilities that we had previously, and understand what the new capabilities are.

There was no material available on their partner portal or on the internet to help us understand which licenses give you which capabilities. That's something that they need to make more transparent and not reinvent it every year. They need a level of standardization.

There is a tool called Power Automate which used to be called WinAutomation. Power Automate is available to everybody with an Office 365 license. The only other competitor to UiPath's community would be the WinAutomation/Power Automate community. It is a very community-driven solution, similar to UiPath. That community is as strong as the UiPath community.

UiPath recently got into the process analysis space. They've started doing things like task mining and process mining, but I wouldn't say UiPath is a leader in that space. They do have something called Task Capture that allows you to document processes for automation. But UiPath's process analysis piece is not yet as developed as much as something like Celonis.

The way we break down the process around automation is into three stages: advice, implement, and operate. The advice piece, which includes process assessment and building business cases is an area where UiPath is not great as a tool. It has the capabilities, but it's fairly new.

But at the "implement" stage, obviously it's a great product.

And the "operate" is where they have realized that the stickiness comes in with clients. There's always going to be a need for "operate" and they are getting into it. They provide something called UiPath Insights that gives you analysis about how your automation is running in production and to help you manage the automations. It gives you quick dashboards to present to senior leaders to show ROI and business case creations. UiPath needs to grow in the "operate" space and they are doing so. Neither Blue Prism or Automation Anywhere offers anything for process mining or task mining.

In terms of innovation, I don't think that the cloud solution helps me innovate. UiPath's integration functionalities can help me come up with an innovative solution, but the fact that it's a cloud instance or software as a service, does not really help me innovate as much. I could do the same innovation with an on-prem solution.

Some of our use cases for UiPath range all the way from development to operational support through to business enablement. Our biggest focus internally is to enable a business to do what they do best. We generally provide solutions through the use of UiPath to cater for streams, e.g., Procure-to-Pay, Hire to Retire, and quote-to-cash.

We are using it to build solutions that can heal themselves. So, we make sure that our operational team is aware as soon as something fails with the processes that we have built. If one of the use cases or failures has already been listed, we note the fix and try to implement that. If that doesn't work, then we hand it off to a human to look at the task. 

In terms of some of the use cases that we have in the business, we do quite a lot of ERP automation. So, we work with SAP quite a lot. We also have a lot of back-end data that we need to bring in and process as well. So, we use our SQL databases to perform tasks, e.g., allocating payments to bank accounts in our ERP system.

Because our development team is rather small, we try to create as many reusable components and solutions on the UiPath platform to make our day-to-day jobs a lot easier.

What has helped us the most from UiPath is that they haven't just provided us with a toolset or range of products, but actually provided us with a framework and hyperautomation lifecycle that we could use as a guideline throughout our own journey in automation.

UiPath has definitely assisted us in speeding up our digital transformation journey. We have been able to create a whole bunch of different components that we reuse throughout our solutions. This means that when we have great, new ideas that we want to implement into our solutions, we have now found ways to do it in such a way that we spend less time trying to implement the fixes or cool new enhancements and more time actually realizing the value. In doing so, we have also seen a reduction in cost and an increase in FTE savings.

From a development point of view, one of the most important, useful features in the deck is definitely some of the offerings that UiPath has in terms of UiPath Studio. Having the components for the Object Repository and Data Service available make your solution reusable and decrease your development time so you can go to market more quickly for products that you are offering clients. That has been really useful in our landscape. 

UiPath has gone a very long way to make sure their tools are easy to use and the products that they have in their end-to-end hyper automation lifecycle are easy to learn and teachable to people that you work with.

UiPath has a wide range of features that they have brought into their ecosystem. If I look at something quite specific that we would like to see going forward, that would be the integration between Data Service and Insights. It is great that we are able to visualize our return on investments using Insights. We can see a whole bunch of metrics and how our processes are performing. I think what would give us a lot more power is if we could link that to Data Service and actually pull through some custom information.

We have been using UiPath at the company internally for roughly just over five years. 

We have been a reseller of the UiPath product to our clients for roughly three years.

UiPath solutions are definitely very stable. It is very easy for us to build quality solutions and put them into production, then be able to trust the solution that we have put into production. For any automation center of excellence, that is quite important. You need to have a level of trust in your organization, inside of your environment and inside of your solutions. 

This also is attributed to the quality of our developers. We have strong, skilled developers. Without a product like UiPath, stability would not be such a great factor, especially if we had to go with a different approach or tool sets.

We have had a lot of experience trying to scale our solutions. Because of our automation journey, when we started out, we created processes that were very specific to the problems that we were trying to solve. They were actually quite static. The processes that we developed were aimed at addressing a problem specifically. As time went on, we started changing our design-thinking approach and our approach to designing and developing solutions, in such a fashion that we now try to create our solutions to be more dynamic. 

Because of the life expectancy of automations, and specifically RPA, a lot of experts would say that you need to go back after 6,12, or 18 months to reevaluate your solution and see if it needs to be redeveloped. What we have seen in our landscape is that if we try to make our solutions more dynamic, and actually cater for more than what we set out to cater for, having to enhance our solution later on takes a lot less development time. So, scaling out the solution has become immensely useful and our way of work.

We have roughly about 100 people within our organization directly communicating with our UiPath environment, either through our robotic assistance or bots, right down to the granular level of developing solutions. Some of the roles include our developers, operational support, and business users.

I would definitely say that the UiPath technical support is quite proficient. They help us quite quickly. Their responses always direct us to the answers that we are looking for. If they don't know the answer or can't assist us, they give us that feedback. They go ahead and find the answers or make the needed changes. They then come back to us and provide feedback. 

We have really enjoyed working with the UiPath team quite closely throughout our partnership. It has enabled our journey further. I would definitely rate them as 10 out of 10.

Positive

If I look at some of the other technologies and tool stacks that we have used to do RPA or automation, the adoption rate is a lot less. This is because of the way that developers need to struggle in some cases to get through the learning and usage of these tools.

I was not directly involved in the setup of the applications and ecosystem. From what I have been able to gather, we did have quite a lot of support from UiPath and the setup was quite straightforward. It took four hours maximum.

UiPath has definitely helped us realize some of our full-time equivalent savings (FTE savings) in regards to some of the reusable components that we have and have placed specifically in the business. With the offerings that UiPath has, we are able to easily see what our return on investment is, how we have structured and deployed our solutions, what we have deployed, how long it has been deployed, etc.

If we take a look at the last six months, we have about 105 processes that we have in production at the moment. If we single out a specific process that we have been working on and has been in production for quite a while, then measure that over the last six months, we can see that we have saved roughly about 380 hours on that process. Or, we have saved 380 FTE hours. That equates to roughly 77,000 rand. That has been quite a big savings. If you take the time saved across our 100-plus processes, we are looking at close to 2,100 hours that we have saved in the last six months. That has a financial value of between 500,000 and a million rand. 

UiPath definitely has reduced human error for us. Because a lot of our processes are quite focused within the financial space and we integrate it with our ERP systems, we have seen a reduction of human error come into play. We have also seen that the provisions made for human error have also been reduced.

In the RPA industry at the moment and in automation in general, UiPath's pricing model is the most consistent. So, if you are looking at year-on-year growth and pricing, or even if you are comparing solutions, each vendor has their own take on how they are going to generate profits and expand their return on investment. By far, UiPath is the most consistent with their pricing. They make it quite clear what they set out to achieve with their pricing and product. That makes their product so much easier to design for, as you don't need to change your pricing and go back to clients every time that you introduce a new aspect into the solution.

If I did have any advice or extra information that I could give surrounding the UiPath product, one of its strengths is that you know upfront what everything will cost.

We found that UiPath Academy courses that they provide, as well as the help through the forum, have greatly enabled us to more easily use this platform. Compared to other vendors and other tool stacks, it is a lot easier to use as well. 

If I look at the UiPath offering and compare it to Microsoft Power Platform, and while Microsoft Power Automate has definitely come a long way and done a great job of making its way into the market, there are still key differences between the two platforms. Because Power Platform is still relatively new, the resources and support are a little bit more tedious to get around than with UiPath. With the UiPath community, because of their extensive work that they have done within the community to build developers, you get a lot more support on forums. 

In terms of usability of the platforms, UiPath has been doing this for a lot longer. So, the user interfaces and all around user-friendliness of their platform definitely show, in the time that they have spent working on the product. 

If I look at some of the things that Power Automate offered before the latest updates in the UiPath offering, Power Automate was able to allow you to trigger processes completely differently to the way that UiPath does. UiPath has since taken a step up and released their integration services, which has helped bridge that gap quite a lot. Being able to link to a process is a lot easier than it used to be.

If I compare scalability, development time, and ease of use of Power Platform to UiPath, specifically around the RPA components of the solutions, there is definitely a noticeable difference. 

As an organization, we took Blue Prism, WorkFusion, Automation Anywhere, and those types of vendors and platforms into consideration when selecting our platform of choice when our center of excellence was formed. When making the decision at that time, the stakeholders involved decided to go with UiPath, mostly because of what they had to offer and their consistency.

The advice that I have to customers who are looking to start off their automation journey, or essentially take on a new vendor like UiPath, I would definitely say one of the challenges for us was getting our governance and standards right. As soon as we got that right, and we fixed our design-thinking approach, we realized how we could make sure our solutions were scalable. We then started seeing a higher return on investment. My advice would be to focus on the small things, make sure that you understand your processes and what goals you are trying to achieve, and then start with the beginning and end in mind. So, know where you want to end up and see how you are going to break your solution up into phases to be able to get there.

UiPath has had a very interesting impact on our environment. We have found it quite difficult to find RPA developers within our country, specifically those who have the skills that we need and can do what we do. So, we have had to rely on upskilling people as much as we possibly can to be able to deliver the solutions that we are delivering. In doing so, UiPath Academy has been quite helpful and handy, specifically because it is a lot easier to onboard a new employee or somebody who has less experience with UiPath. The training is free and easily available. If there are any issues or questions, the Academy team and the community are always around to support and answer any questions. 

What is quite impressive about UiPath is that they followed the same trend of having two major releases a year. I think those are the two most anticipated events that we have within our team as well. Because we have a roadmap, we know more or less what UiPath is planning and hoping to do. Our partnership enables us to have a closer view at that information. UiPath Insider Program allows us to see some of the previewed items as well. 

For those who aren't quite sure where they want to go just yet, keep an eye on the forums, blog posts, and UiPath in general. Look at their major releases before making any huge decisions. UiPath has a track record of consistency, and they have got some great reviews and implementations that I think we could really all learn from.

I would rate the UiPath platform as 10 out of 10.

We are on-prem but we will be migrating to the cloud by the end of the month. 

My company has 100,000 people and uncountable departments. One of the biggest bots is in HR and finance. So far we have almost 57 bots in production, almost 45 in pre-production. We will have almost 100 bots by the end of this year. Our target is to reach 800 bots by the year after. 

No one can beat the automation. It's like you can sit back and play Tetris and let the bot do the work.

We see time savings, precision, and speed. Time is the most precious thing in the world. My company has saved around five million dollars this year. 

We use a standard approach when it comes to developing bots. By the end of this year, we are going to use Insights for reporting and we are going to use data mining the year after. We are doing a pilot right now, that captures the activities and try to figure out which is the high potential area. Based on the data, we will figure out and decide which route we should take.

Insights helps to determine which processes we will automate next. Based on that, we can get the data and write the defaults for leadership so they can make the right decision.

It's very easy to build automations. That's why we want to deploy 800 bots by next year. Our assessment is that it only takes 5% to 7% effort. The rest is trying to figure out the deployment process, the platform struggle, networking, etc. The development is very easy.

AI is a good feature. I am looking forward to that making life easier. It has enabled us to automate more processes. Based on the requirement, chat can hand over the process and we can kick off that bot to do the job. If someone has a problem with a ticket or with a schedule, they can connect to the schedule department or schedule bot. 

We have a citizen developer program in the company so we have taken the UiPath Academy courses. We bring the citizen developer on board and they have to go through the courses on our portal. We have tight integration of UiPath Academy with my company's internal learning process portal.

It's a wonderful integration and it's a very organically arranged process. We can start a raw developer and let them deploy a bot in a couple of months. It's a remarkable achievement. UiPath is very good at developing those courses. 

Creating the pipeline for the automation and then deploying it and keeping it there, is where the focus should be. I think UiPath realized that and is working on it. 

Support could use improvement. It's always a struggle to engage with them. We have a very tight relationship with support, but when things are in hot water, everyone wants to fix it right away which doesn't always happen. 

We have been using UiPath since 2018. 

The stability depends on the client's infrastructure. We're using a Citrix environment and internal infrastructure security has a lot of parameters. It totally depends. Every client has different challenges.

The scalability is a big value. If we have 100 bots today and we want to have 800 bots next year, on-premises is very challenging and expensive but with the cloud, it's very easy to replicate.

The quality of support depends on the support person that you get and on the situation. We started getting better support because we have a dedicated team.

Neutral

I have experience with Blue Prism and Microsoft cloud automation. The difference between them is like the difference between a Ferrari and a Toyota. UiPath is a Ferrari. It's a very mature and solid platform.

The initial setup is very easy because we created the right pipeline with the help of UiPath. However, at the end of this month, we are going to the cloud and we do not know the challenges that will bring. 

The deployment will take a few minutes. 

UiPath is revolutionary. My advice would be to try it out. In the beginning, it looks a little difficult, but once you get your hands on it and get used to it, it's the most wonderful thing.

I would rate it a nine out of ten. To make it a perfect ten, licensing and support should be improved. They should use the Microsoft model, where it's free. Once you develop it, the user will deploy it. You can make money on that. But let users have a taste, let them sit down in the driving seat and drive it.

I own the robotics process automation program for our life safety segment. I also own the mergers and acquisitions project management for our life safety segment. We've started out by using UiPath specifically for mergers and acquisitions when migrating customer data from the acquired companies to our standard ERP. We're also implementing sales and use tax, filings, and things like that as well.

With our most recent robot, we transfer information from acquired companies to our ERP. Typically, it would take about six temp associates for about four to six weeks to clean the data and move it into the ERP. About three weeks of that would be actual data entry. With this product, we took that three weeks of data entry, times six people, and rolled it down to 12 hours of robot running. It was a pretty significant amount of savings for us.

Citizen development is great. With it, it's easy to develop or have self-developed robot intelligence. For example, instead of having to hire a developer, you can make the robots do what you need using the UAPs studio tool. This has been the most valuable aspect. StudioX specifically for our newer citizen developer is useful and I really like using Studio for myself.

We have seen a reduction in, for example, time, and not necessarily in human error. For example, we did an interesting analysis. We wanted to see what the human error rate was for entering data, and, due to the fact that our ERP is Microsoft Dynamics 2012, capturing some of that data is a little bit harder. We structured error rates based on entry. What we did was we created a robot to go back and check all their entries to see if they were missing anything. Oddly, the errors that people were making were nominal. I don't see any data that showed that we necessarily reduced error rates. It was really the people aspect of the process where there were time-savings based on the needed amount of human input. We've been able to reassign workers to more valuable tasks where we can't assign robots yet.

We do about four to five acquisitions a year and those are typically six-week processes for each one of them. We could say that we save about 25 weeks of labor in a year, and that robot will be about a week's worth of labor. Therefore, we save about 24 weeks of labor.

We've been taking some UiPath Academy courses. We've actually found it more helpful if we chose UiPath South American Developers to teach us to build as we're building. For my team specifically, it's been really helpful to have an expert involved to say "this is the use case that we want to do" and have them walk us through building a specific robot. That way, it's real-life experience versus a video-based session. While the academy is helpful, hands-on experience is just much more valuable.

UiPath Academy courses affected the process of getting employees up to speed. It affected it a little bit. It probably more affected our decision to use UiPath over Automation Anywhere, or even the Microsoft RPA program. Just the fact that there was so much available content that we could lean on if we needed to was huge. The others had content, however, not anything close to UiPath's capacity.

The on-prem orchestrator was an issue for us. When we bought it, it was a mistake. Our IT team thought it would be the best option for us, however, it's way more complicated to use. Out of the box, it feels more complicated. That said, once you get to know it, it's fine, however, it was incredibly hard to set up on our enterprise systems. Whereas, with the cloud deployment, we were live and up and running in an hour.  The initial setup took us about two weeks. That was a little bit of heartburn. It would be helpful if UiPath could offer some sort of support outside of a ticketing system.

I've been using the solution for about three months.

I've been pretty impressed with the stability. We've had a couple of minor issues that our developers helped us figure out. It's programming and nobody on my team are programmers. Some of it could be just user error, however, overall it seems like a very stable platform.

The scalability is really unlimited. It boils down to the organization's ability to implement a governance model quickly and successfully. I know UiPath has a governance tool or some kind of a framework, however, it is one of those pieces where it's way more expensive than us using our regular service channel tool that we already have implemented to do those submissions and approvals, et cetera.

In our organization, the users include two developers - me and then one of my assistants.

The only interaction we've had with technical support was during installation. The ticketing system and not being able to physically talk to somebody were difficult to deal with during the implementation process.

The on-premises implementation was a bit difficult. We knew that we were going to have to pay developers to help us develop the robots, however, getting stuff installed, our only method of support was submitting a ticket and the turnaround time on that took a while. Our UiPath rep helped escalate what she could. It would be ideal if there was a setup hotline or something that we could call right away. Sometimes it's just easier to talk to somebody than emailing back and forth. That's probably the biggest area for improvement.

We handled the initial setup ourselves. We do almost everything internally. We have our own IT team, including myself. Our solutions architects set it up with us. What we ran into in terms of problems was that the instructions were really not very good. We weren't able to appropriately install it as the instructions that came with it just weren't comprehensive enough. In terms of the instructions that were published online, we found a couple of instances where they were saying to use functions that didn't exist. These might have been a little out of date. Eventually, the ticket team was able to help identify that. I would grade the setup probably a C-minus, and everything else an A-plus.

We're so early into the implementation, the ROI is a wash right now. That said, our one robot has paid for our development time, and then someone will be able to use it on future acquisitions. We will likely see ROI within a year.

You can buy enhanced support, however, it's an additional $30,000 USD a year or thereabouts. That's just too expensive, honestly. The competition didn't charge for that. We also felt pretty confident in our IT team's ability to be able to dissect the instructions and install it. However, the instructions just weren't that good. We had one of our top engineers working on it and it took a lot of effort to get it installed correctly.

The pricing, in general, is fair. It's a little bit more than some of the competitors, however, it's a little bit more flexible than some of the others. There's value there. The OCR pricing is out of market. We need it, however, we're actually going to use some third-party bolt-ons due to the fact that UiPath is way too expensive.

We looked at Microsoft and Automation Anywhere. We also looked at help systems and Brick is one that we currently use and one of our segments, however, they're only a five-person company, which is pretty small. I wouldn't even put them on the same level. We were looking for shared services. We were looking for the best in class so we could take a solution enterprise-wide. In the end, we boiled the options down to Automation Anywhere, UiPath, and Microsoft, and UiPath was the winner.

In terms of Brick, they don't have a citizen developer model at all, so their developers have to do it. They are less expensive and they're a little bit more turnkey where they do it for you, however, they're really novice. The methodology that we've really bought into it was the community developer, as we want to empower our associates to figure out what works for them to improve their work-life balance. Using a service like theirs takes that away as we have to do the due diligence and figure out what fits in the bucket, what doesn't, as opposed to just empowering the person to do it. That was the key to why we chose UiPath.

The sales process was way better with UiPath. Our UiPath rep was far more knowledgeable about the product than the other options in that we ultimately had more confidence, knowing that whatever we needed, UiPath would help take care of, which was huge. My organization's a little bit disjointed. We try to go after what we feel is going to be impactful without a whole lot of due diligence. That's why, with UiPath, having that resource to lean on was helpful.

We use attended automation right now. Primarily this is due to the fact that the ERP system that we have really can't function unintended. It's a Citrix space environment and it has some odd security protocols where it'll shut down or refresh out for so many hours and it's not planned refreshes. It's hard for us. It's almost random. It's hard for us to build an unattended robot to deal with that. I'm sure we could, however, right now, we want to start with attended robots as we know what functions we need. We decided to go that route and eventually we'll add unattended.

I'd advise new users to make sure they have team buy-in for the concept. That doesn't mean necessarily getting the team to know exactly what they're going to be automating. You just need to make sure that they understand it's not about replacing people. Rather, it's about making their jobs easier. That was key for us. That said, most of my team was overworked, and they were glad to take on the project of lightening their load. Most organizations would benefit from making sure the communication is solid in that regard, however. 

I'd rate the solution at a nine out of ten. With better technical support, I would give them a perfect ten.

Our use case is mainly for PDF automation for invoicing. Specific data from the invoice needs to be gathered, entered into, and compared within the SAP application we use. We face challenges as the formats of the invoices change and can range in length from a single page to up to 100 pages. 

We've integrated a tool called ABBYY FlexiCapture and ABBYY will help format and be used as the source of input for the UiPath bot. This bot in turn will process each and every necessary customer detail to the SAP application. If everything is correct, and the data meets the parameters, an email will be sent to the customer, attaching the necessary invoice. If there's an exception, we'll be able to look at that too.

There are some other sets of use cases as well, which include SAP or Hyperautomation. However, we also do generic workflows where we have data from multiple domains and will need to build our XML output. The XML output will contain a lot of data (such as the date, time or name of the customer) which will keep changing and is not fixed. I built a bot using UiPath that I host on Orchestrator which can monitor this data.

Another use case is placing job descriptions into an analyzing tool to search for keywords. Depending on the sort of description which we have pasted in, it will throw out a certain set of outputs, such as if the word is feminine, masculine, how many details it contains, how long it's going to take to complete the description, et cetera. This part has been done using an API key, and therefore it's not a normal cut and paste job. 

There are a lot of processes that are, even today, done manually. I can take a simple process in, for example, ServiceNow, where issues are made into tickets and put into queues. Previously, a person would have to pick up the ticket and then assign it to a variety of people, but first, before even doing that, they would have to check in on those team members and figure out who had the most or least workload to be able to address the ticket.

This process is automated now. There's no human intervention in assigning tickets. The bot will monitor the queue and when a person raises a ticket and can monitor which person is working on which ticket number, and who should get the next ticket. The turnaround tie has been reduced by a lot and is also saving us costs when you look at it in relation to the entire project as a whole. 

The most valuable feature is the API.

It's really compatible with other solutions and it got integrated when I was working with ABBYY. There is no dependency. I just need to trigger my bot and that's it. I didn't need to go and separately trigger to work on every part of it. It is really good when we talk about the integration of UiPath with any other tools.

I am currently working through the documentation to help with understanding the solution and it is really great.

From a studio perspective, I really like the feature of debugging.

It’s making automation really feasible and ensures that it takes less time.

The ease of building automation using UiPathis great, even if a person doesn’t have a development background. Just by going to the UiPath Academy and doing the basic certification, any user can start to understand the process and begin automating.

In my first organization, there were two or three developers including me, and our challenge was that we had a lot of projects. We had certain process analysts that would run on different sets of processes. We were able to train them and make sure that they understood the processes and could start developing. We saw a lot of progress in them, and, due to the fact that the tool was really easy to use and didn’t require a lot of coding, they were able to do a lot just by drag and drop functionality.

UiPath enabled us to implement end-to-end automation, starting with process analysis, then robot building, and finally monitoring automation. It really supports the end-to-end deployment of any project or any task and makes it very easy.

The Automation Cloud has helped decrease time to value. If there was no Automation Cloud, we would need to run the bot from the studio all of the time, or we would need to create an upgraded file and trigger it via a third-party application, like VBScript or something like that. It has reduced a lot of time. It also makes deployment really easy. For example, if I am working in a development environment, I publish to the cloud, it will start reflecting in the Orchestrator and I just need to push the package. From the Orchestrator itself, I can trigger that particular package to any other machine. That makes life a lot easier - just publishing the package and testing in any other system and understanding how the UAT is going.

The deployment in production is really easy. I have tested Orchestrator and production Orchestrator and I just need to copy the package from the studio and download the package and push it back to the Studio or Orchestrator production, and the work is done. I don't need to manually copy and paste the packages again and again.

Automation Cloud, in a way, helps decrease UiPath's total cost of ownership by taking care of things such as infrastructure, maintenance, and updates. There’s no need, for example, to host on different servers or a defined cloud. It has definitely reduced a lot of costs due to the fact that, instead of going for a different set of applications for a different set of projects, now we are relying on UiPath for most of our work. Whether it’s invoicing, finance, or an HR process, we can rely on UiPath to automate a particular process instead of going back and forth across multiple tools.

Automation Cloud allows us to also effectively scale up automation. It is very easy to monitor any process which is running correctly, and, with automation, you don't need to have any separate application downloaded into your system. It is just an URL. You just need to have a URL and you just need to enter the URL and you can monitor from any system and easily understand how the process is performing.

On top of that, with Automation Cloud, suppose you have 10 licenses. You can see how many licenses have been consumed by how many processes and what the outcome of the processes was.

Moreover, you can integrate your cloud with other tools and create a dashboard. With a UiPath dashboard you can see, for example, the percentage of success rates, the failure rate, and how many processes have been successfully done or what quality. From the management side, we don't need to go to the logs and check what has run. We can directly look into a dashboard and we'll come to understand how many processes are running successfully and what are the outcomes, and how many licenses have been consumed.

It is important that we can scale automation without having to pay attention to infrastructure. I’d rate the level of importance at an 8.5 out of ten. It is helping a lot.

When we talk about automating a web application or we need to work on a different set of applications, we used to get integrations and we needed to have, for example, a PowerShell scripting application license. Now everything is being replaced by UiPath, or most of it is. It does not require you to have a license for a different set of tools all the time. If you have UiPath it is easy to integrate with any third-party tool and it is easy to automate a web application or desktop application or even code. If I know the coding, I can just do coding right in UiPath itself. Instead of going for multiple tools, for multiple projects, it's just a single tool for multiple projects.

We can use the infrastructure and we can also host it. Suppose there are two users who are accessing the same VM over a different time zone. They can rely on the same VM and they can use the same UiPath tool and do not necessarily need to have a separate licensing for it.

UiPath has helped minimize our on-premise footprint. Mostly now, everything is on the cloud instead of on-premise and it is making life easy. For example, suppose a person who is working on-premise, if he logs out, then the other person can log in and cross-verify the work he has done. With the cloud, now the transfer of files is easy. If a person falls sick or something happens that he's unable to make it then the other person who has a login or credentials with him can just directly go in and start working. If a code is being published in the cloud, we can just copy or download the code and cross-verify how it's working.

We do use attended automation. We use it relatively less compared to unattended. However, in certain cases, where the project is too critical and we do need to run all the time, it’s nice to have that option. Attended automation helps scale RPA and benefits our organization by automating specific processes that require human, robot collaboration. There are certain processes where you can't automate end-to-end. We have to rely on a human being occasionally, and it’s nice to have automation we can collaborate on. At the same time, we do largely take advantage of automatons where no human intervention is required.

We use UiPath AI functionality, although not much is being used in any of the projects which I have worked on. I’m just looking forward to it, as I am currently working on documentation understanding before diving in.

UiPath speeds up the cost of digital transformation and has also reduced costs. I started with Blue Prism and then I got my hands on UiPath. Now, I can see the transformation which is happening and I can see the comfort which we have with the tool. I can also see how it’s a lot easier to deploy the tools.

The solution has helped our company reduce human error by a significant amount. For example, when I automated the complete process and I put everything in GPL step by step and automated using UiPath, the best thing that happened is that there was one invoice that got stuck and I could see that the bot didn't process it. The bot has sworn an exception stating that there is a certain set of values that a bot should not process, if it is not matching, the quality is not matching, then the bot cannot process it. When the customer logged into the particular invoice and they saw that, okay, the value which is being mentioned in the invoice is below the threshold critical value. For the first time in over a period of 13 or 14 years, they came across a particular invoice that got stuck with this particular amount, which was below the threshold level. The bot captured something that needed to be dealt with, and the client was so happy it was caught as it saved the company a lot of money - around $1 billion. After catching that threshold, they have monitored all the invoices for the past 13 or 14 years and they came across a lot of differences. It has played a major role in saving a lot of money.

UiPath has freed up employee time. The faster you deploy, the better. We look at months instead of weeks when calculating time. If a ticket, end-to-end, takes 24 hours to resolve, for example, with automation, we’ve managed to reduce that time down to seven to ten hours. It will keep following up and sending emails until there is a resolution, and those reminders are quite helpful in moving the process forward. It’s definitely allowed employees to focus on more important tasks and there’s less time spent on follow-up.

In terms of employee satisfaction, when we are developing something and we have a proper outcome, it makes life easier.

The product has reduced the cost of our automation operations. Not for all the processes, however. If the process is really simple, just like 10 pages or 20 sequences or 10 activities, then the cost is high for a particular license, for a particular process. That said, when you talk about the complex process, where the process takes 48 hours or 90 hours to process a particular activity manually versus what the bot can do in just five to ten minutes, it impacts the cost. Now, a single bot is taking care of that and there is only one person instead of many who monitor the process. Likely, it has reduced costs a lot, roughly 50 or up to 70%. Overall UiPath has saved costs for our organization. Processes that needed five people can now run with just one or two running things with a bot.

When the Orchestrator got upgraded and UiPath didn't get upgraded, we started getting errors regarding the managed packages, the packages were not getting upgraded. There are little things like that where we’ve had trouble. We have just made sure that if the company is upgrading and they have a license to upgrade Orchestrator and the Studio, they do it simultaneously instead of waiting for a week or two weeks or one month. If they have upgraded the Orchestrator, and they have not upgraded the studio, it will impact the developers.

In terms of the upgrading of the on-premise orchestrator, there are organizations that are upgrading their developing environment but they're not upgrading the production environment. Therefore, now, when the bot or the particular package will move from a higher-end environment to lower activities, it is not working well and it needs to get downgraded.

While delivering or providing the license, we need to explain to clients that this particular product, if you are working on a development and production environment, they have to keep them on the same packages or they have to keep your production higher, so that if they move the packages, it won't impact anything.

I've been using the solution for the past five years.

The solution is very stable. I have not faced any difficulties at all. 

Until now, it hasn't scaled a lot. From 2018 to 2021, the tool, the overview, the look and feel of the tool have been scaled a lot. It has scalability, definitely. We haven't scaled it a lot. 

In our organization, we have between 100 and 150 users on the solution.

The vendors are really helpful. Whenever we have a concern regarding any of the issues, including if there is an issue with upgrading, it gets resolved well. For example, when we upgraded the studio and didn't upgrade UiPath’s Orchestrator, there were some issues. The board was not connecting to Orchestrator. We had to raise a ticket to our support team and it got resolved. 

I'd rate them at an eight out of ten, as we've gotten a good response overall.

In the last five years, I have worked in two to three organizations. All of them have started exploring automation tools. I've used Blue Prism as the very first tool, then I got the opportunity to work with UiPath and explore the different sets of opportunities with it. 

At this company, WinAutomation was previously used. That was four years ago.

The initial setup is pretty straightforward. It's not too complex. 

We have a server we implemented the solution on. We installed the certificate to have the application installed with the Orchestrator URL.

The deployment took around two days of full-time work for us. There were multiple servers involved.

The implementation strategy was very simple. We got onto a call with the UiPath team and they had a lot of data with them, including all of the details regarding the applications. We wanted our certificates to get installed and we had our internal team involved as well. Between the two teams, it was working properly and it got installed in less than the expected amount of time. 

We have a team of 25 to 30 people that can handle deployment and maintenance. Maintenance would be, for example, if you have certain packages missing, someone would have to deal with that. Or if something wasn't working as required. Another example of maintenance might be if we are accessing multiple applications, or if we are accessing SAP, and there were tools that the bot accessed, the maintenance team would need to go and check the particular environment on which the bot is going to get deployed.

From the very first organization, I have implemented UiPath end-to-end.

We don't use a third party for deployment now. We have our own team. There's an internal team within our current organization which deploys everything.

I don't have any details in regards to the pricing.

We did POCs in the past with WinAutomation and we also looked at Automation Anywhere. At the time, we were looking to deploy more on the cloud, which is why we went with UiPath instead.

I am just an end-user of the product.

I'm not sure if the version we are on now is the latest. It likely isn't. We are in StudioPro currently.

I'm not sure about the infrastructure side of things, in relation to the cloud, as I'm more on the side of developing and deploying the project. We have an internal team that looks into cloud deployment and other stuff. While we were working on and purchasing the license from UiPath, the very first instance, then definitely the team got integrated with the UiPath team, however, after that, the internal team is capable of handling the end-to-end part of it.

We don't use UiPath as a SaaS solution and we do not yet use UiPath apps.

In the process of UiPath, speeding up and reducing the cost of digital transformation, I have never required expensive or complex application upgrades or IT application support, however, we have a different set of teams that work on the licensing part and the management side of it. They likely worked with UiPath to get their issues resolved. I do not have much knowledge regarding this.

A person who's starting on UiPath can also up-skill himself with the tool as well as it is easy to learn. 

The best part about UiPath is that they provide a trial version. Any organization or any individual or any business looking for automation solutions can give it a try. There are a lot of things which you can explore and you have a lot of integration. If we have a module that is already running, which has been designed in almost any language, you can just integrate that in UiPath and keep that running.

It is reducing a lot of dependencies on other tools and it's making sure that our lives get easier from the deployment and monitoring perspective. From the licensing and the cost perspective, there are a lot of items that are really helpful. In terms of integration with third-party tools, they have a lot of packages which are available on the internet. You can download the packages and integrate it with any other tool. It really makes UiPath a better solution for organizations compared to any other tool.

The biggest lesson I have learned from  UiPath is that if a single step of the solution is not working, you have to keep trying. There are other ways of doing things. You have options. There are a lot of ways by which a user can understand and explore.

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

We have worked on multiple use cases, but most recently, we have worked on a payroll system. Previously, every month, we had to manually get certain details from HR, and we used to do the pay run for all employees in the organization. Now, we automatically extract the required information from the current system by using UiPath. We then prepare a sheet by using Excel, and the entire Excel sheet is processed by a bot. The final sheet is sent for the payslips for the entire organization, and the entire pay report is sent to the bank for payment details.

Automation reduces dependencies. When I have a process that is done by humans, there are dependencies. For example, I need to make sure that the required number of people are available in different shifts. Any process that is done by a human has to be split into eight to nine hours of work. After every eight hours, I have a replacement happening for the same work. So, multiple people are working in different shifts. In addition, any work through humans can only be done from Monday to Friday, or I have to get the team over the weekend. Making our team work over the weekend requires special permissions or approvals. With automation, I am at ease. I'm not dependent on anybody. UiPath is easily accessible from mobiles for the orchestration part. So, if I have a critical process that I need to execute and get the results, I can do it from my mobile. Even when I'm traveling, I can get real-time statistics. 

Previously, I used to get a request at any time to do the pay run for an employee. If the employee was on a leave on that particular day or was not available, I used to miss my target or deadline. Now, we are not dependent on anybody. We are completely independent. If I get a request, the robot is automatically going to process it automatically. I don't even have to tell the robot to run a process after getting a request. All my rules and validations are taken care of by automation before the deadline. If I'm away from the office, my robot can automatically trigger a process on receiving a request. So, we are able to meet all the deadlines, targets, and standards set by the company within the given timeframe.

It has helped in minimizing our on-premises footprint. We work for multiple zones and across the globe. If I have a UiPath architecture, I can deploy it anywhere. Irrespective of the country or continent or zone, I'm able to use the same deployment or the same architecture at multiple locations. It has reduced my cost of infrastructure and maintenance. The cost of everything has come down. Previously, we used to have servers country-wise and continent-wise, but now, we don't need multiple servers and multiple teams to maintain them. I can do things from a single location with a limited set of resources.

The majority of our processes are in the unattended mode, but we do have certain processes in the attended mode where certain end-users provide me the real-time information. We have designed a process where we give a specific form to the user. When the form is filled by the user, a process is automatically triggered, and the robot starts processing. It gives real-time statuses and information to the end-user in terms of what we are doing, how are we doing the calculations, and how are they going to get the benefit by opting for certain features within our organization. I can run my processes in the attended and unattended mode. So, I'm able to trigger both modes of automation very easily.

I am able to keep my customer data integrated. With humans, a data leak can happen, but in the case of robotics, my data is very secure.

The way the processing happens is also very smooth. For example, if I'm on leave or on a break, and a customer calls at my help desk, I won't be able to respond. Now, we have chatbots or robots running throughout the day. When the executives are not there and anyone calls the customer support team, customers are able to get a resolution. They don't have to keep calling or wait. Automatically, the bot is able to respond to their queries and concerns. We have been able to reduce the response time. My customers are pretty much satisfied with it, and they don't have any complaints. Previously, the satisfaction level of the customers was not that great.

The best part of automation is that we can easily integrate multiple technologies within a single tool. I can do it at ease with all of my data flow. Automation is happening across the globe, not only in my organization. Every time we do automation, we feel that there is something overlapping in every process. If I automate a process for my organization and your organization, 50% of the things would be the same. I can very easily maintain common things in automation tools through common libraries or common components. For the remaining 50% of things, we use different technologies. We are integrating optical character recognition (OCR) technologies for document processing. We are also using multiple machine learning methodologies to do pattern matching. We are using artificial intelligence to give a response that is comparable to a human response. 

We use its AI functionality in our automation program. We get multiple requests, and they can be through telephone, emails, or documents. When a request comes through the telephone, the robot or automation is designed to convert that to text. When a request comes through a document, we are using AI features. The document might not have a proper structure, and a customer can give any set of data in any format. So, we have built a special template or format, and this AI is helping us to extract the document with the most accurate results possible. We are getting an accuracy of 95%. With this, dependency is also gone. A human has to properly go through a document. Then, we have to convert the data to the file and process it. With AI, irrespective of the size of the document, which can be 100 pages or 500 pages, we are able to exactly locate the data that we're looking for, and we are able to extract and then process it through automation. We are able to smoothly integrate multiple things within a single process.

Its AI functionality has enabled us to automate more processes. It takes a human 23 minutes to process a 500-page document. With AI features, it hardly takes 7 minutes to process the same document. There is a great reduction in the time taken to do the same task, which is a huge benefit. With AI, I can look for, find, and extract specific information in a particular document, and then I'm able to process the information at ease. I can have documents in different formats. For example, each insurance customer or service provider can have different formats. A human would have to scan through multiple pages to reach the conclusion that this is the right data. AI can easily process different formats, whereas a human being has to be trained for different formats. Humans might also understand something and forget something, but that's not the case with AI or automation tools. They always remember the instructions given to them, which has drastically helped us in making our processes more accurate.

It has contributed to end-to-end automation in our organization. End-to-end automation helps us in completing things in a shorter span of time and utilizing resources in a better way. Previously, for every step of a process, we used to have a different team. We had a separate team for the following:

• Requirement gathering
• Answering the queries for the customers
• Responding to the queries by the ticketing system
• Responding to emails
• Processing particular processes at the backend
• Supporting the infrastructure in real-time

Now, all these things are done by robotics. I only need a few people to maintain my infrastructure. 

We use the UiPath Apps feature, and it has definitely helped us. If there is something that is not available within our team, we can directly use all the apps and features given by UiPath. We don't have to dedicatedly set up a team to design that app. If I have to design a new app or a chatbot for my customers, I can easily integrate the UiPath Apps feature instead of recruiting people, training them, and expecting them to give me the output. UiPath provides help and documentation, and if I require any licenses or support, UiPath's team is always available to assist us.

The UiPath Apps feature has increased the number of automations that we can create. It reduces the time to create automations. We can easily create automation. For a small process, we're able to roll out one automated process every 21 days. We are able to roll out an automated and complex end-to-end process every three or five months to our customers. Previously, it used to take us at least six months to one year to roll out the new features or new functionality to customers, but now, the time has drastically come down. 

It speeds up or reduces the cost of digital transformation. Every time we automate, we are able to speed up automation. We are able to do more things, and more people are working on automation. By using new features that UiPath is bringing and the learnings from my past experience, we are able to automate very quickly. Four and a half years ago, a process used to take four months. Now, it only takes 25 days for me. They have added many features, and I don't have to sit and design those features. They are constantly providing new features in their quarterly releases, and I can simply make the best use of them and implement them in my process.

Previously, I needed people in different shifts, and every human being might not have the same speed or enthusiasm. Humans also need breaks. A robot works throughout the day, and it has a consistent processing speed, so we are able to process more and more. I can plan a target with my robot, and I am able to achieve that. If I'm adding new customers, I just have to integrate one or two more licenses, which is very easy. I can easily create or configure a new robot and start processing. With humans, I have to train them again and again, whereas with automation, once a process is ready, I can use it in multiple robots. I can use it for 25, 50, or 100 robots very easily. I can scale my process rate very fast.

Previously, we were able to process 5,000 customer requests in a month. By using automation, we are able to do the same amount of work within 10 days or even within a week. If we add more human resources, it increases the cost for my organization, whereas, with robotics, I can configure 10 robots or 100 robots. It doesn't increase the cost a lot for my organization, and I can process everything that I want. I don't have any backlog.

It has freed up the time of our employees. This additional time has enabled employees to focus on higher-value work. I am utilizing resources in a much better way, and I am able to give them the work that is interesting for them or is relevant to their growth. When people in my team started working, they found the job interesting. After working for more than two to three years on the same thing, they don't feel that they're doing something new or learning something new. By using automation for a lot of things, I am able to train my team on the new things or technology that they are interested in or want to work with. I am also able to give the work that they're looking for. It is bringing more satisfaction, not only from the customers' perspective but also from my team's perspective. I am able to keep the same resources in my organization for a longer period of time because they're very happy. They are not dissatisfied with the organization.

It has definitely reduced human error. Our accuracy is 99.2%. With humans, our accuracy was 96%, and by using robotics, we have brought the accuracy to 99.2%.

It has also reduced the costs of our automation operations. In the initial year, we saved 10% of the day-to-day operational cost that we had when we were doing things manually. In the second year, it was 30%, and it has increased in the subsequent years. So far, almost 60% turnaround in the business profit has been reported.

It has saved costs for our organization. Previously, for a process, I had to train, for example, 100 people and keep them in multiple shifts. I also had to give them multiple facilities to be a part of the organization, whereas with robotics, I only have to design the process once, and I can use it in any number of bots, such as 10, 25, or 50. It also helps in scaling at no extra cost.

By using automation, we need fewer people for support operations. If the customer queries are taken care of by chatbots, my data and patterns are being analyzed by using AI and ML, and the scanning of the documents is taken care of by OCR, I need very few people for support operations. I need only 10% of people for providing support around the clock.

We are using the entire automation process most commonly. We are also doing scheduling. Our processes are running on a fixed date, so we are also using schedulers or timers. 

We are also using AI technology. We have AI Fabric, and we are doing the entire extraction part of the document through UiPath, which is very helpful. We're able to do everything within this single tool, and we are not dependent on other tools. We don't have to license more tools from the market and go to multiple tools to do the same work. Within this single tool, we have every feature that we need for our organization. 

It is a very simple tool to work with for anybody. Simplicity is the best in UiPath. It also has the best community support. If we are looking for any solution, we can directly reach out to UiPath at any point in time. 

The new features or functionalities that come with UiPath upgrades don't work perfectly in the initial days. Their new releases are not stable. We always find some set of issues. I have to work with the UiPath team for a week or so to resolve the issues, and then I'm able to use it. The stabilization should be there. We expect UiPath to reduce the number of errors before rolling out new features to end-users or customers.

In addition, many times, the apps or activities that we use within UiPath for designing are no longer compatible when a new upgrade happens or the version is changed. We want UiPath to look into it.

I have been using UiPath for almost four and a half years. 

It is one of the very stable tools. We don't see any breakdowns happening within the tool. 

We only have to design the process once, and we can use it in any number of bots. It helps in scaling at no extra cost. After we design a process, we can reuse it in subsequent designs. I just have to work on the things that are not already designed. So, there is a 10% to 30% reduction in the new processes that we design. Scalability improves with each and every design.

There is a user base of 100,000 users who are benefiting from automation at the moment. With manual processing, if I had a team of 1,000 people, then with automation, I would need 50 people to automate all processes. I would have four to five solution consultants or solution architects and around 15 to 20 developers and testers. There would also be people who are doing the business implementation, giving guidance to the customers, and doing the production rollout and handover preparation for the customers. 

Our usage is increasing. With every new process that we design, we are able to integrate more and more. Previously, we only used to integrate with OCR, and now, we are also using chatbots, AI, and ML. So, our processes are increasing, and we are definitely expanding.

The support that we get from UiPath is one of the best. We are a direct channel partner for the product. Every time UiPath comes up with new features or functionalities, they come and demonstrate that feature and help us to understand them so that we can help our customers with their implementations. We get direct support and the licensing, pricing, and certification benefits from UiPath.

It was pretty straightforward for us. We were able to build the entire infrastructure within a week. This includes getting licenses, doing the installation, and configuring the robots. We found the UiPath documentation very helpful while doing the installation and configuration. 

If I design a process today, I can deploy a process to production within 30 minutes of time. It is very quick. In terms of the implementation strategy, we go to the customer and understand their pain points. We then identify the processes that can be automated and tell them about the benefits and the timeframe for implementing a particular process to their server. We also tell them when will they start seeing the result and how they can achieve what they need by using multiple integrations of the tool. They don't have to spend multiple licenses on different tools. Everything can be done within a single tool.

We use a tool called TFS. With a single click, I can deploy my process from development to QA. In the same way, I can move my process from QA to UAT, and then with one more click, I can move it from UAT to production.

As solution architects, our role is to help the design team understand the design that has to be built. They take care of the design and testing. For the production rollout, we have an infrastructure team. We also sit with the business team to make them understand the process, how robotics works on a day-to-day basis, and what are the things that they have to monitor. Whenever we design a process, we make sure that all the complexities are handled. We are also handling all the compliance, and the integration is done smoothly. After a process is designed and approved by our business team, our accuracy stands at 99%.

In terms of maintenance, it doesn't require expensive or complex application upgrades or IT application support. UiPath is pretty simple. The basic infrastructure works in most of the servers, and we don't need frequent upgrades and maintenance. It is very easy to maintain.

We have seen an ROI. In the initial year, we saved 10% of the day-to-day operational cost. In the second year, it was 30%, and it has increased in the subsequent years. So far, almost 60% increase in the business profit has been reported.

There is no additional cost apart from the standard licensing. There is a one-time cost for the infrastructure setup.

We did evaluate multiple RPA tools such as Automation Anywhere and Blue Prism. In terms of the ease of designing, the ease of use, and from the cost perspective, we found UiPath to be the best tool for our customers.

Anyone who wants to automate processes should understand the process, its complexity, and the volume of the processing or the number of transactions to be processed. You should do proper analysis before you select the tool and licenses.

UiPath provides a lot of benefits and reduces the cost for an organization. It is one of the best tools in the market. The support that we get from UiPath is one of the best, and most of the features provided by UiPath are simply amazing.

Initially, people are hesitant to use automation because they don't know what automation can do. Anybody who uses the technology in the right way will get lots of benefits from any technology. Your implementation strategy has to be proper. You should check the feasibility of using a particular technology with existing processes in the organization and the benefits you can get.

It helps us in reducing the time, and we are also able to bring more business to the company. By making my processes digital, I'm bringing more revenue to my company. We visit a customer's site and try to find out the processes and pain points. After that, we analyze the entire solution within UiPath and tell the customer about the best solution and what would be the reduction in time as compared to the normal process.

I would rate UiPath a nine out of 10.

UiPath was used in-house in my first company for automating processes. We had deployed it on-premise. In my current company, we are giving UiPath automation as a service. We help companies with automation. We set up UiPath from scratch and help them achieve their automation goals or strategies. As a service, we have done on-premises and cloud deployments.

From a service perspective, we deal with a lot of clients who are predominantly in the oil and gas sector and energy sector. They have SAP systems for their ERP, and their use cases mostly revolve around automating SAP processes such as invoice automation, joint venture reconciliation, balance sheet reconciliation, and intercompany netting. So, the use cases usually revolve around the finance tasks, but sometimes, we have also seen use cases related to the supply chain and planned maintenance, such as purchase order closures, work order closures, and comparison of the work order plan with the deviations. 

In terms of the version, we always have the latest version. I've also used 19.4 and 20.4 on-premise versions.

UiPath enables us to implement end-to-end automation, starting with process analysis, then robot building, and finally monitoring all of our automation. They have created a platform to handle everything from process analysis to deployment. If you just had UiPath Studio, you would have to procure something for your attended or unattended robots. You would also need a tool to capture the process or task itself. Similarly, you would need a tool to collect the ideas from subject matter experts. If you don't have a platform that covers end-to-end automation, it becomes very challenging, and you'll have to find ways to procure those applications. With UiPath, you don't have that headache.

It has reduced human error and saved time. These two are probably the best things that we achieved from automation. We recently did a deployment for a customer who had purchase orders and other stagnant stuff from 2011 onwards. These purchase orders were not closed even though they have been receipted and invoiced completely. We did robotic process automation to takes care of these purchase orders. It is a recurring job that takes care of all POs that were created in the last one year and closes them automatically. It used to take 5 to 10 minutes for the customer to close one purchase order and recheck everything. There were probably 22,000 to 23,000 purchase orders every year. The business benefit that the customer got was close to 1,200 hours in a year, which is a massive saving.

It has freed up employees' time. It has definitely reduced the time for our clients. The time saved varies based on the project. It has saved the time of associates in completing their tasks, and they can focus on a lot of other things. In one of the use cases, an employee was spending 10 hours every month to complete a process, which is 120 hours in a year, whereas the robot takes just one hour every month. So, the robot takes 12 hours as compared to 120 hours taken by a human, which is one-tenth of their effort. It has reduced around 90% of their time for this project. For the purchase order closure project, the robot has saved close to 1,200 hours in a year. That's a huge saving.

There are other use cases where savings were not huge in terms of the efforts or hours, but the robot was very much compliant with a company's processes. It eliminated any sort of human errors that could have occurred. For instance, balance sheet reconciliations always had some sort of issues and were prone to errors. The robot completely eliminated all those issues.

We use attended and unattended automation. We have a couple of robots on the finance team's laptops, and they trigger the process as and when required, such as for month-end clearing, which is a process where the end-users have to do some kind of clearing task in the SAP system. They can trigger it as and when required. This attended automation has helped in scaling RPA benefits. The overall benefit was in terms of the efficiency with which the robot gave them the mismatches. At the end of the day, it is giving the end-user satisfaction. They don't have to repeatedly do the same steps for every company code and intercompany code. It has definitely saved a lot of time for the end-user and provided satisfaction with the process.

With cloud offerings, UiPath handles infrastructure maintenance and updates, which saves our time as well as our clients' time. The clients do not want to worry about the infrastructure and other such aspects. We are generally the ones who provide services to the clients and deal with these things. When they use the automation cloud, it is definitely time-saving because we don't have to install patches and other things. If there is a new service that they introduced, such as data service, we don't have to install anything new on the automation cloud. It is all taken care of pre-default. We just have to enable it or disable it as per our need. That definitely saves some time for us.

Their automation cloud offering helps in decreasing time-to-value. It definitely reduces time as compared to on-premise because all that you need to do is procure an automation cloud and the licenses for the UiPath team and enable them. With the on-premises setup, there is an overhead of installation of orchestrator on the virtual machine. In this aspect, an automation cloud is better than installing everything on-premise for the client and setting up the orchestrator and things like that. The automation cloud doesn't have any other thing that reduces your time. Other solutions, such as Blue Prism, provide the same benefit when you use a cloud-based orchestrator.

It has a lot of features, but the ones that I'm really interested in and focused on are the Automation Hub and the Task Capture tool that they have created. Automation Hub helps you in gathering a lot of ideas, and Task Capture helps subject matter experts in capturing the step-by-step processes. It helps them build their SOPs or a document system wherever it is not already available. 

The Uipath Document Understanding framework is also very nice in comparison to Abbyy and similar sorts of OCR technologies. 

In terms of the ease of use, I would rate UiPath very high. If you have some kind of coding background in C#, .Net, or VBA, the development in UiPath is very easy. You can customize it as per a customer's requirements. It has an easy-to-use Studio where you can build complex automation. On the Citizen Developer side, people without much technical knowledge and coding expertise can also automate their basic processes. We have done some training internally within our management, and they found StudioX very easy to use for their developments. 

Licensing is one area where UiPath could do better and can be more competitive. It is a little expensive. Their bundling of products is a bit confusing. For instance, if we want the UiPath Apps license, it is bundled with Action Center, so you also have to procure the Action Center license. These bundles are not tailored as per our company's requirements. If we reach out to the UiPath partners who deal with the accounts, they usually take your request into consideration and see what best they can do, but it is still not easily customizable.

I've been using UiPath since the beginning of 2018. It has been three and a half years.

It has been reliable. We haven't had any reliability issues as such. Only the automation that we create could have inherent issues based on how a developer develops it. All of the out-of-the-box functionalities available in UiPath work as expected.

We have seen customers starting with PoCs and scaling up to have running production bots. There are around seven to eight bots per client, which is good. From a scalability perspective, UiPath enables you to scale things quickly. We could quickly procure all things and deploy an attended or an unattended robot from a PoC to production. So, its scalability is very high.

We have used their support. Most of the time, we reach out to the usual support logins that they have given. We also have a partner whom we keep in the loop if there is something very urgent. The support team has its own defined SLAs. If it is a priority one case, they get back within 24 hours or something like that.

We've always got a resolution for our issues, and they've always been helpful in that regard. They have got some technical guys who joined us over the phone and helped us solve some of the issues.

I have used Blue Prism and Automation Anywhere at the PoC level and the initial setup level. I've not developed any enterprise-level robot using these. So, I'm not qualified to tell the differences between these solutions.

When new clients ask us to implement UiPath for them, the implementation is almost always straightforward. We know whether they have a cloud of their own, and what they need to procure. We have that very neatly outlined, and UiPath has also given us step-by-step instructions that are readily available on their documentation portal. So, if you want to install anything, everything is very well documented. It is very easy to follow the steps and install it.

If you have everything in hand, it would take a couple of days. If your virtual machine is ready, we just have to install the orchestrator. We also have to install Studio on the machines of the developers. It definitely takes a couple of days.

Its price is on the higher side as compared to the other players in the market. They are tying up with a lot of other products such as Druid, but they are independently also very expensive. That's what the customers say when we start giving them options of UiPath.

Apart from the FKUs or the licensing that UiPath provides, if you are implementing an on-premise kind of solution for a client, you have to look at all the things that would be required, such as the virtual machines and the user IDs that the robot might use. We mostly deal with SAP, and if you are using SAP, the robot would have to log into the SAP system to get some data. So, the username that you would create within SAP is also licensed. There are a lot of other costs and related things that you need to focus on. There are a lot of things around UiPath that you need to deal with.

I would also advise using best practices while implementing the solution. Every developer has his or her own way of developing automation. A lot of times, we have seen a gap in the understanding and the kind of deliveries that teams do. So, it is very helpful to understand the skills and capabilities of a developer and see how that could impact the final deliveries from an automation perspective.

We provide solutions depending on our customers' use cases. For on-premise or cloud deployment, we follow the same sort of process and project plan. There is no huge difference in whether we use cloud automation or on-premise automation. At the end of the day, a robot has to do what is expected as per the objectives.

We don't use UiPath's AI functionality in our automation program. So far, we haven't seen any use case where we had to use any sort of intelligence or incorporate any sort of machine learning. We haven't had a necessity for that.

We are going to use UiPath apps in a new project that is coming up. We haven't used it so far. We did a PoC to see if we can connect the cloud apps to an on-premise orchestrator and if it is feasible, but that's about it. It is going to be implemented soon.

I would rate UiPath a nine out of 10.