UiPath Platform Reviews

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.

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.

I work for an international consulting firm and we work with enterprise clients. Our job is to provide them with RPA solutions and ultimately, we would like to provide opportunities for them to have every kind of automation.

We began with use cases in accounting and controlling departments, after which we moved to automate banking, legal, and IT processes. Nowadays, we are reaching out to HR to help automate some of their minor processes.

To this point, our implementations have been in an on-premises environment. At this time, we are in the process of migrating our on-premises UiPath environment to the cloud.

When I joined the RPA team, coming from a DevOps position, I assisted them with IT-related tasks such as implementation, packages, etc. I went on to become an RPA developer and began working on business sue cases. As part of my duties, I search for opportunities, help find internal clients, and improve governance inside of our enterprise. I am involved in all of the steps in the framework.

Our first automation was an on-demand service, used internally for us. We deployed an on-premises orchestrator, also used on an on-demand basis. Once we got this experience, we started building other solutions.

We deployed an internal chatbot named Alex, and our employees can ask whatever they want. For example, you can ask Alex what your salary is. Depending on your privileges, you will get more or less information. Everything is done using robots.

UiPath makes it easy to develop automations and this is the main selling point. I can speak with a client and in the meantime, I can prepare a demo on the fly that captures the client's thoughts at the moment. What it means is that as I'm speaking with you, I can start preparing a small demo. I find the product fun to work with.

An example of how this has improved our business is when dealing with internal clients. For example, if an internal business manager wants to use BI and needs to create a report with a specific set of data, they traditionally had to reach out to the IT department. IT will first examine the needs, then discuss how it is developed. It may need a database instance or other tools, for example. Traditionally, this is how it is done. 

One of the problems with this approach is that our headquarters is in France, and they are used to having internal discussions about everything. For a use case like this, they will consider all of the needs and other points before making a decision. It can be very time-consuming.

However, if we consider the same use case, using UiPath, we are able to create reports on the fly. We can be right in the same meetings with the IT people when we do it. 

If you're from a legal department and your solutions involve HR, as well as other company departments, I can automate several processes in four hours. Then, all of the processes can run during the night. It is an amazing product in this regard.

As we automate processes, another benefit that we receive is the ability to generate internal reports comparing departments and processes. We give these reports to the heads of the company to provide intelligence, helping them to better understand the organization. 

As an example of somewhere that UiPath has saved money, I implemented automation to replace a tool that one of our clients has. It is an internal timesheet tool and although the company uses SAP and SAP HANA for these tasks, this tool handles aspects that are specific to Spain. It is a small tool but is needed for a particular purpose.

The initial development of the tool, handled by an external third party, cost €20,000 (approx $22,500 USD) and there is a monthly maintenance fee of €700 (approx $790 USD). We discussed replacing the tool with our client but they were hesitant to change because they already had the solution.

We offered to replace their tool for free because we are trying to internalize processes, so there was also a benefit for us. We explained that once it was completed, we would be responsible for performing the calculations and analysis to ensure that the replacement was working properly. They agreed and it took me only one day to complete the automation. Now, it takes only a single button click from beginning to end. At the end of the day, it brings in all of the jobs. This automation saves them €700 per month in maintenance costs and it would have saved the initial development and deployment fee had it been implemented using UiPath from the beginning.

It was very easy to see that they were wasting money, and this is happening in a lot of places. We proposed to them that for these tasks, we would charge €600 (approx $675 USD) per day as consultants, and then for maintenance, we would bill them a monthly fee equivalent to 16% of the cost of the robot. For the bot used to replace their tool, it took me one day to develop and two days to plan and design it. The initial cost would have been €1,800 (approx $2,000 USD) and the monthly maintenance fee €200. They switched from their tool to the robot, since it was only costing €200 instead of €700 per month.

After they switched, they realized the power of automation and have since asked us about automating more of their internal processes. They have presented a storm of ideas, and the potential for savings is amazing.

You cannot compare whatever you do with a robot to a traditional software tool, package, or service. This example of the tool that we replaced is only one use case, and there are others but they are all more complex. Overall, it saves a lot in terms of time and cost.

The most valuable feature is the forum, where there is lots of help available. For me, UiPath is the perfect partner to converse with. I have brought four or five topics to the forum and every time that I was stuck, the problem had already been registered. I see the comments from the internal team and they are always tuned to the issue, always looking to fix small problems that have been found. We find that after they have been pointed out, fixes come included in the next release.

The interface is intuitive and very user-friendly.

The UiPath Academy provides courses to help you get up to speed with the solution, and to my thinking, it is crucial to start with this training. Developing a report in UiPath and other RPA solutions is very different from the traditional way to learn. When I studied in university, software development was focused on data structures and optimization. This varies a little bit depending on the programming language but more or less, this is what every framework follows. It's logical and we are always trying to optimize our processes. With RPA, it's different because you base your process on the logic, and then tweak with the tools. It's the difference between painting a picture and shaping an object. For me, the training was crucial and it helps a lot to learn right from the beginning.

The basic course took me four or five days to complete. Just with that, it was enough to become familiar with the framework and quite enough to start making your own automations.

I'm always looking for new courses from the Academy. For example, I completed the architect training, as well as the course on governance. The academy is well structured and very useful, although not mandatory because you can start by yourself. That said, I definitely recommend it.

We use the AI-enhanced document understanding capabilities, as well as other related features.

UiPath is based on the .NET framework, which means that we are currently limited to Windows deployment.

The update process has resulted in several small issues for us. Sometimes when you update, there are several lines that are not included in the package. This kind of technical error, even though it's small, has to improve. I understand that they are trying to implement all of the services that they can, and this kind of thing happens when you expand your model. The same thing happens to us. That said, it needs to improve.

The .NET formwork is well known, as is C#, but it requires a lot of computing power. Everything is JSON-based, so it always has to preload all of the information. This means that there is overhead in the performance and if it were only a simple query, it might be slower with UiPath. However, with a cloud-based environment, we don't have to worry about this.

When it comes to migration, it's always painful. We have found several issues that require changes to be made from a coding perspective. In our current migration from on-premises to the cloud, we had a problem that delayed us by approximately a week. However, I don't consider this to be a pain point because it's a normal thing that happens when you try to size up your company by introducing many new services.

From a technical perspective, the migration is straightforward but we haven't completed our migration yet because we have not set up the gateways to access our services.

I have been working with UiPath since 2019, approximately three years ago.

Starting from version 20, UiPath has been very stable. Prior to this, it has not been 100% stable. That said, we have not had any troubles with the platform in general.

The problems that we have encountered were when we tried to upgrade or to migrate by uninstalling and reinstalling the Orchestrator. There were some internal issues where people didn't read the communications that we put out.

Generally speaking, Orchestrator is very well built. We have put a lot of stress on the system and haven't experienced any problems with performance.

Scalability-wise, UiPath is quite good. This is an interesting topic because, in the beginning, I didn't put much thought into scaling. I was used to building solutions, and that's all. UiPath offers special packages that target scaling up. These packages become relevant when you have more than 20 processes.

For example, you can have activities that trigger processes, and you can include one activity inside of another. With these features, you realize that a huge amount of work is already taken care of.

More to how well it scales, they have a very useful package of integration tools.

Personally, I have automated 70 processes and the total for the team is approximately 300. Within the past year, we have delivered more than 200,000 hours of automation.

Since I joined the group, we have brought a lot of RPA clients into the enterprise.

I would rate the technical support an eight out of ten.

The reason for my rating is that I have been waiting since last year for integrations that are coming. With respect to getting support for other things, I have not had any problems.

The support wants to teach us how to build an automation ecosystem inside the enterprise by combining artificial intelligence models, data analysis, and these kinds of things.

During our implementation and afterward, they have given us ideas about how and where things should go. This has been helpful but from my perspective, it is all still a little bit hard to understand. There is a lot of documentation to study. This is, in part, because they are growing and building.

I have done several RPA jobs in telecom when I worked for another company.

We first deployed version 18 of UiPath, and we found the initial setup to be quite straightforward. It was well packaged and easy to install.

The only pain point for us was issues related to implementing the solution inside our ecosystem. It contains VMs, firewalls, and other things that add to the complexity. This, however, belongs to us. From the perspective of UiPath, they gave us a package to install the Orchestrator, and another to install the runtime in every machine that we want it to work with. Things are quite straightforward in this regard.

In our case, we needed a newer version that came with some of our internal tools preinstalled. This is because we used to have access through Citrix. The installation was very easy.

It took approximately a day for each installation and within a week to two weeks, the service was working. There were five of us working on implementation and deployment. Four of us were working on installation and testing, and three people in the team were IT architects.

UiPath has saved us a lot of time. We calculate our benefit by counting hours saved and last year, we saved 200,000 hours. This means that we replaced between 120 and 140 people by using automation. This is our main metric for calculating cost savings.

When we first started with RPA, we compared UiPath with Blue Prism and Automation Anywhere. We chose UiPath right at the beginning.

For me, it was a straightforward choice. UiPath has a lot of help available, and they have a lot of tools. The forum, for me, is the winning factor. For now and in the future, UiPath is the product that I will use.

Another factor in our decision was the ability to use the product before purchasing it. Blue Prism had a demo account so they were a little bit open. However, Automation Anywhere wasn't open at all. They wanted us to pay while we learned how to use it. For me, that was the breaking point because UiPath could be used for free and was open from the beginning.

Coming in as a developer, I very much appreciate that the platform and the code are open. They don't keep everything that they are doing a secret. They have their own business model and they provide the tools. They let you play as much with the solution as you want to.

The interface is also more user-friendly than the other products for creating automations. In fact, I didn't use the other tools very much. In total, we evaluated them for two months, although this time included installation, learning how to use the platform, and trying different automations. Ultimately, based on everything, we chose UiPath.

We tried to compare the products while we were creating simple automations and on every point, we found a huge distance between UiPath and the other tools. For example, the interface was much more intuitive than the other two products.

At the time, UiPath wasn't as big as the other two solutions. However, it had a lot of potential for growth. This was another point that my boss took into consideration when making the decision.

Since the beginning, UiPath has been trying to work out a partnership with Google, including the main tools and main services. For us, and from an enterprise perspective, that is very good. We expect UiPath to grow a lot.

If we have a server and a good investment in machines, virtual or physical, then we don't have anything to worry about. 

As I continue my career in RPA, what I understand is that it's the beginning of a new industry. It's like an industrial revolution, but for automation. When we began with use cases in accounting and banking, it was all related to numbers and we were always using structured data. However, today, we are using things like chatbots. We are also expanding into AI use cases and UiPath continues to grow to include new capabilities and functionality.

In the next ten years, I expect there to be a huge demand for automation. This will be in every kind of enterprise, as well as our day-to-day life. One example is the smart house, with implementations for domestic processes.

My advice for anybody who is implementing UiPath is, firstly, not to panic. It is a new way to develop and understand your business model. Second, do not go too fast. Sometimes, the easiest way to develop robots can lead you to forget about your basics and best practices. Third, bring a strong internal framework, including your business model, best practices, and internal documentation.

It's crucial to be able to scale up in the future, so be sure to consider your larger processes at an early stage. Don't look at things in a traditional way. For example, you can use Python for automation, which is a very open framework, but Python doesn't let you do all of the things that you can do with UiPath. You need to follow a more structured coding approach. Essentially, you always have to be organized and try to take things step-by-step. Otherwise, you will have an internal fight between robots in your Orchestrator.

I would rate this solution a nine out of ten.

We typically solve for any use cases that falls under different business functions within our company. That includes finance, supply chains, services, IT by itself, and a little bit of engineering.

UiPath has improved the way our organization functions. The flexibility with which the business processes get changed is great.

A lot of times we know the method of operation, however, certainly it'll not be the same after a few months, a few years, or longer. Our dependent script or whatever is in place (that is dependent on that business process) has to be adjusted. The flexibility with this tool has enabled us to adjust those workflows quickly and deploy them so that our business can continue using those applications or the workflows that we’ve been using before, even after changes to the underlying system.

The most valuable aspect has been the workflows. They have helped to deal with legacy applications. We have a lot of legacy applications in place, which we cannot get rid of. The processes around these legacy applications are something that cannot be automated in a typical way. The RPA is helping us to automate the business processes that have to work with legacy applications.

The ease of building automation using the solution is great as it is a low-code solution.

I'm able to create workflows. By the time I'm familiar with one process, I'll be able to automate the next one. This is the case especially with tools like task capture; I'm just working through the process. In the end, it will be a skeleton workflow and it can be used for deployment once we are done with the cleaning. It has reduced the development life cycle by about 30%. It’s done this by making use of the features that are enabled by task capture and certain other features within the Studio.

Overall, we’ve seen the solution has saved costs. That is our value realization.

Our first target metric is to bring up the number of processes that we can save. We have a formula to convert inter-dollar values in terms of the user experience we are benefitting from. That’s the user experience that is enabled by automation. Those are direct savings which can be calculated by multiplying the number of dollars that we have spent for one resource per hour. Indirect monetary benefits can also be calculated by looking into the user experience factors and adding them when we do the value realization. In the last four years, we would've saved $3 million.

The human error rate has been reduced. Initially, when we targeted some of the business use cases, they were straightforward. They were linear in nature and there the accuracy had the upper hand 99.9% of the time. The reason is that the process by itself is quite linear. It doesn't have multiple branches or exceptional routes that it has to take to complete a particular transaction. We have good accuracy, however, we have had challenges with the accuracy when the business processes get complex. If there is any human intervention or if the quality of the data is not proper, or if the user errors are low, that is where the accuracy rate used to be low. It's better now.

Due to the fact that all these are role-based bots, if there is something that is getting changed, the bot will fail. Down the line, I can see that, for linear processes, accuracy will be great. However, when it comes to some of the complex processes, that is where we have challenges that we are facing with accuracy and we are continuously fine-tuning the process in such a way so that the accuracy can get better. It's great we can continuously tweak.

The solution does free up employee time and allows for the employees to focus on higher-value work. We have a lot of examples within our organizations where they have to deal with some kind of manually intensive task, such as just reading something from the document and putting that into the financial system.

We normally take up the customization portion that comes directly from customers. Those kinds of customizations have to be updated back into the financial system in order to make sure that they are appropriate. These updates take a while as they have to do with talking to the customer, understanding what changes are needed for a given order, or based on specific correspondence from the customers. With automation, employees can focus on talking to the customer to understand what changes they have to incorporate. And they can offload all the data entry tasks to a robot. This way, they can focus on how they can engage more with users to understand the pain points faced by the customer rather than spending time taking all those inputs and then doing the data entry job. They can be more client-facing.

I’m not sure exactly how much time is saved with automation. I could say that we have around 150 purchase processes that we have automated. We don't trace back how it has replaced a team or member of a team. We always go with the number of hours saved. We go the route of checking and saying “okay, so we have done this, but it needs a constant involvement from them in order to make sure that someone is owning the process.” We still own only the work.

We have started to use the solution's AI functionality in our automation. We started it recently and we have finished the proof of concept on document understanding, which involves AI, of course.

In terms of AI automation, we will be leveraging this tool for all business functions. There is no limit with any of the business folk that we talk to. Whatever the process is, as long as we feel that it is feasible to automate, and there is a value in automating it,  or as long as we feel that we are automating the right processes, we will just take that up into our pipeline.

AI does help us handle complex and involved processes. We include a lot of use cases where the sole core RPA capability would not suffice as a purely role-based automation. We often encounter a lot of use cases where they say, "Hey, this is something where there is no logic in doing it." If there’s analysis or natural language processing, et cetera, we are making use of AI. However, the process isn’t in use yet. We’re just starting.

We have used UiPath’s Academy courses and we are also encouraging our implementation partners to refer to those materials so that they can be approved.

It’s kept us up to speed with the solution. We refer to the Academy daily. Of course, we get help from UiPath whenever we face any hiccups; we normally ask them questions and they're able to sort it out for us. That said, the materials are great for trying to sort out issues or problems on our own.

It's been four years of practice and we've matured with the traditional RPA candidates. We have a strong foundation with what we have showcased to our business folks, and we are good with the healthy background that we are building. However, when it comes to the roadmap of what's next, that is where we are not clear. While we get the concepts, bringing them to reality is looking to be quite a challenge. We are unsure as to if UiPath can actually bring our vision to life.

UiPath is very clear in defining items such as this is what the high automation needs, this is what the process planning needs. We are getting clarity into those concepts and we are able to explain that and take that back into leadership to get other approvals. They are able to understand what UiPath is talking about within these different concepts. Really, it's just figuring out whether we have the right arrangement at this point and if UiPath can get us there.

I've been using the solution for four years.

I'm impressed with the version that we have today. 2019.10 is a version that is quite stable, compared to how we did with 2018. A lot of pieces that are enabled as part of the new version, 2019, are stabilized. We have zero downtime with the tool.

Today, ith X number of bots, if we want to reuse the same solution, and if there is an appetite for consuming those kinds of robotic solutions, of course, buying more bots is going to solve the problem.

If you think in terms of scaling this platform by itself or the other business functions, that is where the discovery piece will come into play. We have to constantly talk to businesses to understand where the opportunities are to scale in the correct manner.

Scalability is possible in terms of reusing existing automations. It's related to the number of bots that we are going to purchase. When it comes to the number of business processes that we are automating, during the discovery process, twe have to engage with our customers and constantly follow up with them. When we understand more about how they're doing business, we're able to locate the kinds of tools that are going to help them.

Currently, we have eight bots in production and 150 processes are automated. I’m not sure how many users are actually on UiPath currently.

We always follow up with our business to build our pipeline. That goes hand in hand with the implementation. We off-load all automation ideas and requirements to the pipeline, to our implementation partners, so that they will be able to implement our vision.

Traditional support for the RPA is great. In terms of the help that we are getting, if we end up with some issues, running operational issues, it could be better if they can propose some fixes. It's not that automation is going to solve every other problem that the underlying system is having. However, we expect some kind of expertise from the tech support when we face issues that are related to the system. We need to understand if there's an ERP error, if it has to do with the underlying system, or if automation has to solve the issue. Often, technical support will say "Okay, so this is your error, go and solve it." Yet, due to the fact that support has seen more issues like this, they should have more insights and they need to be able to share those inputs in a way that is going to help us.

While I didn't use a different solution previously, the finance team has used Blue Prism before. They implemented Blue Prism and they engaged Blue Prism to automate the processes that they have added for automation. Now, we have aligned on a single platform. It is UiPath now, however, they initially had around 50 processes that they automated using Blue Prism.

We proposed UiPath as the one solution based on Gartner ratings.

The initial setup was quite straightforward as we understand how RPA works and we understand how UiPath is going to help, how UiPath is a tool to help us to automate things. It's quite straightforward in terms of that. Whenever we are doing some kind of initiative, like document understanding or data capture, it is quite straightforward.

However, with process planning, we didn't understand the documentation right away. That is where we used to get help from UiPath.

The pricing was great at the start, and so, down the line, we have been enhancing all these features. We are seeing that, as we are looking for opportunities to grow, the number of robots that we need to purchase and the software cost is going to go up.

UiPath has increased the cost. We feel that it's good, however, based on all the new features, which we are pursuing. That said, we expect that whatever robots that we have purchased or whatever the standard platform that we have from UiPath should continue with the pricing that they had earlier.

There will be an offset, however, when it comes to the existing platform like Orchestrator or robots, and we are expecting that the margin should be less.

Back in 2017, we evaluated three to four products. Blue Prism was already used by the finance team, however, we evaluated WorkFusion, UiPath, and Automation Anywhere.

Of those other three, we evaluated WorkFusion and UiPath extensively.

The two reasons that we went with UiPath were, one, the learning curve, and, two, the community edition of UiPath, which had everything we needed to dig into the solution. Whereas with the other companies, there wasn't that option. With Blue Prism, for example, we had to buy a license in order to check whether the tool was going to work for us. In 2017, we were not sure whether this was going to work or not. At that stage, UiPath was the only company that gave us the entire set of tools to try and it worked really well.

We are customers and end-users.

While we're using the on-premises deployment, we are open to moving to the cloud. There are a lot of cloud solutions that we already use in our organization. However, with UiPath, we have stayed on-prem out of concern for security. We don't have clarity on if a cloud solution is going to work securely.

The other concern is around how we are augmenting the capabilities of core RPA. We know that process mining is going to help us, however, whether process mining is already added into the RPA, do we have any solid use cases that we can start with.

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

We are a services company. In terms of how we use UiPath, we handle a lot of the financial processes, including our customer billing, our time tracking, and our time reporting exceptions - such as looking at who has not submitted a timesheet. When this exception happens, there are automatic emails that go out using the RPA, from UiPath. 

The whole process from our inventory, which is our asset, is automated. With the asset, which is the time that our people spend on clients, we make sure that we capture what we need to create and send invoices out. The whole collection and AR process, including making sure that we get the money and send reminders to clients, that whole process, is automated - with human intervention, as needed.

The solution has decreased the processing time of the client's invoices for IT. Just IT. Not the rest of the organization. That said, just there, that’s 600 hours of annual savings in one department. On top of that, we’ve decreased processing time by 90%.

The automation cloud offering helps to decrease the solution's total cost of ownership. More than that, it creates agility so companies don't have to worry about delivering the infrastructure team and setting up sellers and all the things that they need to do to get to the stage of actually installing the software and internal security. That all takes time to go through. With the cloud, you avoid all that. You basically create agility for the clients to jump onto automation and not wait for all these things. It can be frustrating sometimes in large companies. That's why we tell clients to avoid all these headaches. With the cloud, you’ll get going very quickly within a matter of a day or so.

RPA is not the only thing we do. We do a lot of ERP, CRM, all of these things. Traditionally, we are a full-service organization for clients and their journey to the cloud. Everything's going to the cloud. There are some organizations that still have on-premise ERPs to migrate from the on-premise to the cloud. When those fundamental applications are going to the cloud, automation is a no-brainer. We would always promote the cloud version over on-premise.

The RPA is the most valuable aspect. The power of machine learning and AI along with the document understanding capability that UiPath has is great.

By implementing that portion of the solution, we get clients to 95% accuracy in reading invoices for processing into the ERP. While running basic automation will continue, the world is moving towards intelligent automation, which is with all the machine learning and AI.

Overall, the solution has saved costs for our clients.

It has reduced human error. Machines can do anything faster, cheaper, and of a higher quality than humans can do. That is just a universal fact. I don't think we have measured the accuracy, however, there's no doubt accuracy has gone up. The client recognizes that the accuracy rate has improved.

We're not talking about removing errors. In some cases, errors may happen. However, when I say we’ve seen a 90% efficiency rate, it doesn’t mean the remaining 10% are bad decisions. We're talking about how it could not read those things. The confidence level is low, and therefore, it's kicked to a human to review. It did what it's supposed to do, which is to flag for human review, which is how processes should happen.

The solution has allowed the employees to focus their time on other higher-value work. That's what we pitch to our clients. We never tell clients that oh, you can lay off people. We do not tell the clients that that's what they should do. Rather, we advise clients that what they can do with automation is free up people's time. That means either freeing up a portion of the time or fully freeing time or completely reassigning a job. 

After automation, you may have to reorganize your department. However, with the freed-up time, departments can focus on the most important thing, which is what can they do to create focus on the customer and create an experience for the customer, where the customer feels they want to be connected with your brand.

I have a case where I was talking to the CEO of a big restaurant company. HR, payroll, finance, all those areas that reported to him. He also handles customer experience. I told him about automation and the power of automation and how it will free up people's time. He said, “So what you're telling me is I can free up a portion of my staff so they can focus on all these customer complaints we're receiving?" For him, that is going to be a game-changer.

UiPath has also positively affected the employees themselves. They've become a little bit more satisfied with knowing that they can focus their time on higher-value work. In most cases, initially, there'll be fear for them. They don't know what automation is, and why they're doing it, and what it's going to do to their position in the company. That fear will always be there with humans. That's why leadership needs to focus on change management and communication. Those things become very, very important. Once you do it right, people will actually feel happy. They will no longer have to say "Oh, no, I don't have to stay until six o'clock, seven o'clock every day to finish the SaaS." Now it's much easier. They can focus on the things that they truly enjoy, which has nothing to do with the heads-down work that they do all the time.

We use the solution's AI functionality in our automation program for our clients. For simple processes, you don't need AI. However, the complex process where machines need to mimic the human thought process requires AI. AI is not perfect. It's not a holy grail that is going to solve all problems. That's not the case. We have to be careful. However, if you use it right in the right way, then you can truly solve complex problems.

I’m not sure if the solution's AI functionality enables us to automate more processes overall. It's hard to say. For me, the way I look at technology is that it is not a hammer that's looking for a nail. You have to look at your business needs and then figure out what technology will best fit or solve the problem. It could be simple AI, or, maybe in some cases, you need more advanced AI. I would look at it as what's the right technology for what purpose. That's the way I look at it.

We do use UiPath’s Academy. We have several people that we've pushed through training and certifications through the academy. It’s helped get those employees up to speed on the solution.

Also for us, as we are a services company, that gives us a stamp of quality seal in order to market our services better as we are certified and qualified.

UiPath continues investment in machine learning and AI. That's one thing they have to do. The fundamental thing UiPath needs to understand is the competition, the market, is not Automation Anywhere or Blue Prism. Rather, big competition is coming from Microsoft.

It's around the corner and Microsoft is going to come in a big way. I’d advise them of the parallel of Power BI. Power BI three years back was not a good tool. Other tools, like Tableau, were the kings of the BI space. Fast forward three years and today we do a lot of BI for clients. Almost every client of ours is migrating to Power BI, like Power BI's matured to 80% of Tableau, and that's good enough for them. On top of that, Microsoft was throwing free licenses to their customers. When you do that, versus buying $2,000 a pop or $1,500 a pop from Tableau, users line up behind the free tool to reduce their costs. Microsoft is doing that with Power Automate now. I just talked to a client, a big client, a $10 billion company, where they were at Blue Prism. They just told me that Microsoft just gave them 70 free licenses. Now, they are forced to bring Microsoft Power Automate into their RPA strategy even though before, they were not considering that.

UiPath should take several steps forward to be prepared for this competition and create differentiation with capabilities that Microsoft does not have. The innovation within UiPath is going to be very, very crucial. However, the most important thing is to clear the differentiation in the messaging. That's very, very important. They should be ready and arm their partners with information about why UiPath and not Power Automate.

I've been around the industry for 35 years, and I've seen lots of incumbents getting blown away in various technologies at various times. The big power comes down hard. UiPath has got to be ultra nimble to not get crushed.

We started working with UiPath in 2018. We partnered with UiPath in late 2018. It's been about a three-year journey so far. 

In terms of stability, I've not heard anything bad at my level. That means no bad news is good news.

We do plan to scale beyond the client's IT department and to the rest of the organization. When they scale it up to the rest of the organization, and this organization operates in 25 countries, they have over $190 billion in assets in these countries that we can add efficiencies to. The scale of efficiency that we will get with what we did will be huge. That’s the next step is to roll it out to the rest of the organization.

General scalability is an issue when it comes to processing large data sets. However, with the right creativity, you can solve those things due to the fact that you can have the right infrastructure to catalyze or do whatever you have to do to create scalability. We are used to doing that. We deal with ERPs and we create architecture and design the environment in such a way that it can scale. That said, you need to know how to do that. 

Technical support is very good. We're very pleased with that. When we ran into problems with a client, with the document understanding, initially the success rate was not very high. Then we had to reach out to the support and they actually jumped in and assisted us and told us what we needed to do. Once we did that, then things took off and we got to 90% accuracy. Initially, it was only 50%. Therefore, for us, it's been good.

We did not previously use a different RPA solution.

We did partner with Automation Anywhere,, however, ultimately, we didn't do anything with them.

The initial setup is straightforward.

We're a consulting company, and we work with several clients. For some deployments, we were able to do the first deployment in 30 days. With other clients, it took about three months or four months, depending on the use case or the initial use cases that they picked.

Different companies operate differently. I always advise clients that they need to pick simple use cases and deploy them first before they go into complex stuff. Sometimes clients make the mistake of picking their most complex use case and say, "Oh, let's try that." No, that's not a good way. It's not a good way to embark on a journey that's long-term.

You've got to think big, start small, and be agile. If you get a complex use case at the beginning, you lose agility.

We looked at Blue Prism, Automation Anywhere, and UiPath. The momentum was with UiPath. I knew where the momentum was and how we needed to align ourselves. That's why we did UiPath.

We looked at where the market demand is. For example, Blue Prism. We knew that Blue Prism is a lot more IT-centric, IT heavy, programmer heavy, which defeats the whole purpose of self-service automation. It's never going to succeed in the marketplace today as we promote self-service for everything.

That's why we didn't want to waste our time with Blue Prism. UiPath obviously has the community edition, which was brilliant. Basically, they saw a gap in the market. That's a parallel to what we do, for example, in Vtech space. Also, for example, Tableau is a good tool. So many people love Tableau. They've used Tableau. You had the established players in BI space like MicroStrategy and Oracle OBIEE, however, they were very IT-centric and Tableau came in and beat them. They sold out into the business and you could download, pay $2000 and download a license and start creating your dashboards. I was glad that UiPath took a similar approach by creating a community edition, and then letting end-users download and then play with it.

We basically help clients think through their RPA strategy, their automation strategy and figure out what the right technology would be. We are a reseller. If it makes sense, we'll resell and we'll advise clients regarding UiPath for their RPA journey. We also use the solution ourselves. We have automated certain things, certain processes within the company. That becomes a practice round and a learning ground for our people so that when we go to clients, we can take some of these ideas and do to the clients as well as reaping the right expertise.

I'm not sure if we are using the UiPath apps feature or the applications feature. In my role, I just lay the strategy and the team executes it.

A lot of times things stall. In company setups we see a lot of cases where they did a few automations, a few bots, and then things stalled. That's a problem in the industry and the way to solve that and truly embrace the art of the possible is with automation. To get there, you need to execute across senior leadership. Without that education, they just don't put their weight on their departments to do the journey. Education is one thing that is very important. They understand the art of the possible.

Another important aspect at the outset is having RPA as a corporate strategy. Pushing to make it a corporate strategy is really going to help. That way, you can stall it for some time, however, eventually, it will have to get done. Otherwise, they are left behind when your competitors take advantage of the agility. There needs to be a center of excellence and companies need to develop internal capabilities. If they don't have capabilities, then they fear not knowing how to handle something. Those are common problems. And those need to be overcome.

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

Our use cases are all across our enterprise, from HR to finance, to customer service, to laboratory operations, to logistics, to compliance, to medical, et cetera.

The unattended automation is the most valuable aspect of the solution. 

When COVID hit, and we needed to manage 200,000 samples a day and figure out where they were in the world. It would take humans about half a day to get an answer. Within a week, we put together automation that pulled data within 30 seconds from every single information system across our network.

Building automation using the solution is very easy. It's super, super easy. We have a citizen developer model where I've got 60 citizen developers trained. I've got people who started out answering the phone in customer service who are generating millions of dollars of value in automation.

Overall, this solution has saved costs for our organization by as much as $10 million.

While the solution is reducing human errors, I don’t have specifics on that.

The solution has freed up employee time. It’s hard to ballpark as what we're doing mostly is consolidating time and not back-filling from there. If you had the same amount of people as before, you didn’t really save, unless you were able to have more revenue with the same number of people.

It's been incredibly instrumental in a number of brand new business paradigms that popped up over COVID. For example, pre-COVID, if you had a respiratory tract infection, you would go to the hospital to get care, however, during COVID, the hospital wouldn’t even let you in the door. Our business model went completely upside down. The average general practitioner has 2000 patients. Our order entries went up by 500 fold. There was a backlog of testing. Automation helped manage that.

We use the UiPath Academy courses. They have been extremely helpful for us due to the fact that UiPath actually allowed us to host the fundamentals foundation training on our training platform. Now, I can assign it. I can track it. And I can reward it. The advanced developers class has been great. Getting users through that is very helpful. I take all my citizen developers through advanced training. No Studio X, no halfways. They have to really know how to do it.

The pricing particularly on the bot licenses is placed to maximize revenue for UiPath and is not in the best interests of the customer. For example, if I have 150 robots, our utilization of that is about 27% as my demands come in spikes. Most of the robots sit there doing nothing, and I paid for them.

I'd say I need better error handling capabilities, however, the updated 2020 is going to give me a better interface, so that's already there. 

If I were going to wave a magic wand, I would like to see tighter integration of task capture through the PDD generation. That process is not quite as smooth as I would like right now. I haven't really deployed it as widely as I would like as I don't want issues surrounding the document. I've got the template built up, however, we have had trouble deploying it the right way. If the integration were better, the process wouldn't be such a concern.

I've been using this solution for three years.

The stability has been good so far. 

The scalability is fantastic. We learned that during COVID. Suddenly, we have to set up accounts differently. We were doing 15 to 20 a day. When I said "Oh, by the way, schools are going to start doing testing, and I need to be able to set up a hundred accounts a day" we got to a hundred.

We have 75 users currently on the solution. We do plan to increase usage. 

The initial setup was pretty straightforward. The deployment took about six weeks.

We had the infrastructure in play in December 2019 and were functional by April 2020.

We had pieces set up already, however, we had people running orchestrators on boxes hidden in closets. We decided to centralize. Now, everything is in the data center and going on the virtual machine. Everything's under that control. Therefore, in total, it took about four months to have it properly set up.

I am extremely unhappy with the pricing model. I want a model similar to an electricity meter, whereby if I use more I am charged more. That's the ultimate model. They should also make the Studio free due to the fact that they should want developers developing. You want to maximize that capability. Why charge for that? Charge me for the Orchestrator. Charge me more for licensing if you want, however, UiPath should be maximizing my ability to create automation.

We had some experience with Automation Anywhere, Softomotive, and Blue Prism.  When we got serious about it, we did a runoff and selected a single vendor.

What set UiPath apart was their handling and selectors. The selector was head and shoulders above anyone else. We had a lot of experience with automation platforms that did not do well. Screen coordinates and scraping and control methods to move to a script, for example, were not reliable methodology.

While we are currently on version 2019.10.2, we are upgrading the 2020.10.2 version this month.

We’re just starting to use the solution’s AI functionality in our automation program. It’s a bit too early to comment too much on it.

I'd advise new users to get their governance together early.

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

For a current client, we have around 22 to 25 use cases, and it's all based on the financial side of things. The client is in finance, and we have use cases all of which are comprised of different tools, including SAP and their in-house CRMs. It's about automating the process where we take some data from the CRM tool and upload it to SAP. It also involves uploading the files to the FTP server. 

For example, one use case is where the applications used are Oracle, and SAP, and STP. We just download the data from Oracle. There are different files that we download from Oracle and upload to the FTP server. From that FTP server, there is a different team that takes those files and creates a Tableau dashboard. 

UiPath Studio helped us automate many processes that have helped us save money. Even though the tool price is there and the license costs are there, it has given good ROI. For example, automating a process can reduce the work to half or maybe 60%. We divert efforts to different work. Therefore, it has been pretty useful in terms of savings and quality control.

For example, one client had a focus on quality control. There are instances where employees make some minor errors that could lead to major losses to the organization from the department's point of view. We automated that process and it gave us more return in terms of quality control. Fewer errors ultimately were made which saved the company from losses.

UiPath has a full suite of capabilities. It has, for example, an end-to-end automation suite. From a development point of view, it is pretty helpful to have access to all of the activities on offer that anyone can understand. 

The Studio as well as the process mining are great. Document understanding is another useful feature. It has eliminated the business analyst side where you have to go through each department and find out which processes are there, and take a different tool to get those all processes in one place and create a process workflow. All of this can be done with process mining. 

With document understanding, we have the capabilities of having UiPath understand and create documents, which previously was quite a lengthy endeavor. You just have to install it and follow the steps. It will automatically take a screenshot and create a document for you and then create a brief description of it. 

It’s easy to build automation using UiPath Studio. From a developer's point of view, it is easy due to the fact that you don't need much of a coding language or coding background. You just should have a clear logic behind it. If you're clear with the logic, a layman can handle the task. They do have Studio X features, which is for the layman who doesn't have any background, who doesn't have any coding or developer's background. They can automate their own work. Even an SME who doesn't know anything about automation could automate small tasks.

It’s great that we can scale automation without having to pay attention to infrastructure. That is very important actually. For example, scaling automation plus giving attention to the infrastructure can be a little hectic and time-consuming. If there is any way where we could reduce this work or optimize it, it would be great from the implementation point of view.

UiPath enables us to implement end-to-end automation. Right from the start, you have document understanding and process mining as well as the Orchestrator, which helps you with getting an overall view of the bots in our organization.

End-to-end coverage is the most important thing, due to the fact that, if it is end-to-end, we don't need to go to the market and look for any other application. If you can get end-to-end, you don't need to go for other products which simplifies everything. It's easy for us to maintain and work with it instead of having to integrate and manage multiple systems, multiple products, and multiple applications.

UiPath has helped minimize our on-premise footprint. It has helped us with quality control savings. We have saved many efforts previously requiring full-time employees. It’s one of the most important factors when we work for clients. If a client is hiring us to automate many processes, there are different intentions of doing it. If we are able to help them reduce cost, reduce and do some quality control, it is important for them. For example, previously, if work required ten employees, we have been able to reduce that down to six or sometimes four personnel maybe.

The UiPath Studio has reduced human error. It has helped us with quality control very often. In the past, mistakes have cost us. It has saved costs as well as saving us money related to fines or penalties.

The solution has freed up employee time. Instead of doing the same mundane work every day, we have just automated that part and now the employees have more free time to do more meaningful work. In terms of hours, from a department's point of view, we have saved around half, that is four hours per day, maybe about 80 hours per month. The additional time enabled employees to focus on more important work.

We have found that the product has reduced the costs of our client’s automation operations. With my previous client, we calculated an average of 40% in reduction of personnel and 40% in cost savings. UiPath has saved us money across the organization. The average saving is likely around 40% to 45%.

I'm pretty much happy with all of those tools. I don't have anything in mind that I could see improvement.

While UiPath Studio helps speed up the cost of digital transformation, in a way, it requires expensive or complex application upgrades or IT support, as it needs an entire setup. That setup requires support from different departments, and that comes with a cost.

I came across one problem while upgrading. We were upgrading from the 2019 version to the 2020. There was one thing that was not mentioned either on the website or documentation, and we had to take support from UiPath. The documentation needs to contain each of the scenarios which could occur while upgrading the solutions. As it is now, this is not the case. That said, when we ran into issues, UiPath Support helped us through it.

I've been using UiPath for five years now.

We've had outages once or twice. For that, they have a workaround. If a server goes down, we should have a backup server for it. If that's the case, it is just a few steps needed to migrate or we can take the setup from another server. That's it. It's pretty good in general. 

The scalability is fine. For example, if the bot count is about zero to 100, we have the capacity. And if it goes beyond that, then we have to increase the features of the systems and servers. It could take time if we scale beyond the limits, however, it's still possible. It just requires an upgrade. 

What's required is managing all the infrastructure and getting all the permissions from the client which is what could take time. Scalability can be an issue when it goes beyond the mentioned limit.

In the current organization we're working with, it's totally unattended bots where no user is actually using this tool. That said, the bots are in production, which works 24/7. No user is having this access to the tool. It is all unattended bots.

In the previous organization, there were 58 to 70 users as we had attended bots. They were using bots in their daily routine.

It's a routine for us to use this product every day and deploy this solution. We are definitely looking at increasing it and scaling. We have a lot of work in the pipeline.

I've contacted technical support many times and they are very helpful. Based on the severity and priority, they do help us on priority and they are very helpful in terms of responding, supporting, and maintaining. If they can't help us by email, even after giving clear instructions, they'll bump you to a different level and help. It can be just like spoon-feeding us. They are very patient and try to be very clear.

We were doing automation, however, it was just .com and .net. We used to write five lines of code just to click on one button, which is just an activity right now we have in UiPath. We switched to UiPath to do end-to-end processes which would require large amounts of code if we kept doing what we were doing.  

I've implemented UiPath from scratch many times. 

The process is quite straightforward. You just have to have the installer and just click install, and then after a few steps, it is done.

Setting up just UiPath Studio hardly takes ten to 20 minutes or maybe one hour if you're facing some complexity. Setting up an Orchestrator with all the robots could take a while.

Our implementation strategy is based on whatever the customer's requirements are. Different clients have different requirements. My previous client, for example, didn't want the cloud as they were pretty concerned about the security as they deal with financial data and they don't want the data to go to the cloud at all.

Clients have the option of on-premises or cloud. Based on that, we just go with the requirements. Some clients want attended bots due to the cost, and some want unattended bots due to the features. 

In terms of maintenance and deployment, how many people you need depends on how many processes you have with the client. Right now, with the current client, we have 22 to 25 processes that we have automated. We are just three users who are developing, testing, maintaining, and supporting this project. However, it varies and often depends on the process and client and how many bots.

For maintenance and support, you don't need many people. For development, if they're at 10 people, five or four could do the work in terms of support and maintenance.

We handle the deployments for our clients. 

While the clients might have released some reports, I don't have much knowledge about ROI. 

I do know about the prices of attended and unattended bots as well as Orchestrator. 

There are costs related to Orchestrator, Studio, and attended bots. There are also infrastructure costs, and, while implementing this tool in any organization, there are different costs attached to it.

The price for the attended bot is between $1,800 and $3,000. The unattended bot was $8,000 last year.

Orchestrator is around $20,000.

We looked at Automation Anywhere and Blue Prism, however, about five years back, where UiPath, Blue Prism, and Automation Anywhere were the leaders in the market, at that time, just UiPath had the free training and Intuit training for their tool. The other tools didn't have any training, or if they had, it was paid. That's why we chose UiPath, which ended up being the best out of the three anyway.

The company I work for is a UiPath partner.

There have been multiple companies that I've been working with. Two remain the same. I've been using different tools as well. It's been on and off with UiPath.

We are not using the latest version of UiPath. The latest version is 2021. We are using 2020. This is due to the fact that the client that I'm working with has a stated policy as to using a minus one version. They believe it could not be a more stable version for any product. 

At this time, we don't use the SaaS solution or the AI functionality. However, I have enrolled in AI training to better understand it. We do not yet use the automation cloud or UiPath apps either.

In terms of employee satisfaction, from the experience I had from interacting with the client and different users, they are happy as well as sad. They are happy in terms of moving away from the mundane work that has been taken off from their hands. They are, however, both sad and afraid that they could lose their job.

I'd advise users, if they're a layman, to go with the training. Just start with the training from the UiPath website itself, in the RPA Academy. That is sufficient for anyone to start with. They have all the courses that start right from scratch for every role, be it business analyst, solution or product developer, et cetera. In six months, even starting from scratch, you can excel on this product.

With UiPath, it really is possible to optimize so many things. 

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

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.

I have worked on a number of use cases, and one of them that I can discuss was used in a contact center environment. This is a project that we had done for an automotive insurance company, and it had to do with incident management. Our contact center received the first notice of loss (FNOL) from incidents, such as an accident.

When an accident occurs, they raise a ticket to our customer service representative. This can either be done using a chatbot, which is integrated with our ServiceNow platform, or they can call the customer service representative. In the latter case, the customer service representative will pick up the call and get the details. This includes adding their insurance ID and a couple of other fields, and that is integrated into our system.

Our system was acting as an intermediate between their existing platform and ServiceNow. Part of the system included a database, where they were checking to see if the insurance amount the claimant is asking for is above the limit. There were other similar business rules, as well, which the bot was responsible for checking. Based on the result of these checks, the claim was automatically approved, and then a corresponding ticket was raised in ServiceNow.

There was also a manual process, where there was a person who would go to the site where the actual accident took place. They do their analysis, and then they create a review report, and that report would automatically be handled by an attended robot. The robot would take the detail from the agent and based on the review, fetch certain details like the approved amount.

The bot is responsible for sending other information to ServiceNow, including, for example, details about damage to the vehicle. If there are scratches on the front or scratches on the back, then these details are all posted to ServiceNow. At that point, ServiceNow has a workflow that is initiated.

The workflow uses the information taken by the representative and moves from the review stage to agent verification, and then to a mainframe. The system running on the mainframe is responsible for generating checks, according to the amount that is approved, and then mailing them to the claimant at the address they have on file.

In our FNOL process for the insurance company, we use unattended robots quite extensively for both chatbots and IVR. We use the AI capabilities for language understanding and based on the user sentiment, it will trigger the unattended bot. If instead, they want to speak with a representative then it will trigger the IVR process.

In terms of the robots prioritizing and correctly routing a transfer to agents when necessary, it is a work in progress. From a priority perspective, if you talk about chatbots, let's suppose a customer sale is highly urgent, the AI model can use language understanding to determine an urgent message and in turn, create an urgent ticket. It is something that we can do but it is not 100% accurate. I would say it's 80% of the way there, because of the different types of sentiment that people express during interactions. As an example, when a customer says "I need to have this resolved as soon as possible", there are a number of different things that can happen. According to our business rules, when somebody says ASAP, it should be treated as a high priority, but 20% of the time, this does not work. Overall, at this point, the AI models and machine learning models are not very accurate.

The robot-enabled self-service channels have definitely increased the resolution of issues through self-service. Prior to using the robots, 90% of the calls would need to be addressed by a representative. Since implementing the bot strategy, only 10% have to be handled by a human. We have used UiPath Apps for this and also created some web pages, but those are just to help the bots. Definitely, self-service is one use case that has really benefited because of UiPath.

The Studio is where the development takes place and the interface is very user-friendly. You have the ability to drag and drop components, and this is part of why I think that Studio is the best feature in UiPath. The next best feature is Orchestrator.

The Orchestrator is quite good because it is a one-stop shop where you can run robots after creating them using Studio. You can create queues, monitor the bots, and if there are any issues then you can debug them at the Orchestrator level.

UiPath has a low-code feature called Studio X, which is specifically for business users. They can just drag and drop activities like reading emails, retrieving email attachments, reading data from Excel, and posting data from different sources into different platforms. It is a very good platform for business users who don't know much about coding. It is customizable in the sense that business users can have the system follow a set of simple steps, although it won't do complex things.

UiPath Insights is a feature that has everything from a tracking perspective, which tells you how the bots are working at the production level. It provides statistics about the live environment including how many processes are being run, how much time the bots are being used, and the productivity in general. There is more analytics available from data services, tests, and the AI center. All of these features really help when it comes to analyzing the data, not only from a development perspective, like tracking data on how much a robot is at a log level, but also from the end-user level in a production environment. Reporting on productivity in a single day will show how much time the bot was run, for example, 80% in terms of time or 90% utilization, and other such details.

The UiPath App feature is something that we can use to create simple apps, and these can act as integrators. Suppose there is a process that uses 10 different screens, we can create an app that will be integrated with all of them. As a developer, all 10 screens are used in my workflow, and instead of going to each of them, I can create an app that uses all of the fields that are relevant to me on each of the screens. 

The speed at which we were able to create automations for our contact center was very good. One of the reasons that we choose UiPath over other tools, such as Automation Anywhere and Blue Prism, is the ease of development. When it came to setting up the contact center, it was only the connection between different platforms that took time. The bot creation and the workflow creation were quite easy. It took approximately one and a half months to create the whole automation for the contact center, which is quite good.

The AI and machine learning capabilities need to be improved.

The task mining and process capture methods are capabilities that we use, but they sometimes miss part of the task. For example, let's say that for one of my tasks, I need to open my email 400 times a day. This is something that we can automate but for some reason, probably because it is related to email, it is not accurately evaluated. In this regard, the process mining could be improved and lead to better results.

The built-in OCR is only 60% to 70% correct if you're analyzing a PDF that has images in it, so this is an area that can be improved. Different companies use their own OCRs; Google has one, and Microsoft has one. The UiPath one requires that we use a validation step between workflows in order to improve the accuracy.

I had been using UiPath for three years, up until a few months ago when I joined a new organization.

From what I have seen, the biggest factor for availability is the strength of the internet connection. Whether the deployment is on-premises or cloud-based, they both are the same in terms of stability. I have not seen any deviation between deployment types.

Scalability is not an issue. In my previous company, we started with 10 machines and then after one year, we had 85 machines. There were no issues and the implementation was not a headache.

The technical support is very responsive.

Prior to working with UiPath, I was an automation expert with Selenium for web testing. I was not able to fully automate a website because if there was an image that was used as a security check, where the person had to click an image to get through to the next page, I wasn't able to do it.

However, when I switched to UiPath, it was pathbreaking for me. I was able to accomplish what I couldn't do with Selenium and since that time, we have deployed more than 100 production bots.

The installation is pretty straightforward. We usually get issues when we upgrade to a new version but I think that is a different discussion. Strictly from an installation perspective, we have not had many issues. We had no major issues and when we contacted technical support, the team was quite responsive.

The length of time required for deployment is about half an hour per machine. However, if you have 100 machines then you can do them concurrently.

For some of our projects, we used an on-premises deployment, whereas for others, we used Orchestrator and they were cloud-based. Cloud-based deployment gives us the ability to run bots from anywhere, including outside of our network.

Our clients with the contact center did not see a very large ROI in the first year, although that was because of the consultancy costs that we charged to implement the system. From the second year, onwards, they definitely saw a very good ROI.

We had different metrics to calculate RPA implementation ROI. The first is productivity, which increased by more than 60%. If I recall correctly, their investment was between $110,000 and $200,000 after the first year. I don't remember the exact numbers but it was a huge improvement.

It was not just productivity, but also other things like a reduced error rate. The quality of the processes improved quite drastically.

We analyzed and compared the costs of RPA from different vendors and we found that UiPath was the most cost-effective in the long term. An unattended robot costs approximately $8,500 annually. 

We evaluated other RPA tools including Automation Anywhere and Blue Prism. One of the reasons that we chose UiPath is its ease of development.

In terms of ROI, we found that UiPath was the best when you consider the long term.

The length of time it takes to develop and deploy bots for a process depends on its size and complexity. We categorize processes as simple, medium, and complex. Based on how they are classified, we estimate the deployment lifecycle from one month to two months.

My advice for anybody who is planning to implement RPA is to begin by doing research on the vendors. You need to speak with each vendor and start planning, but don't think about clients at that moment. Rather, think about yourself. Consider that you want to implement internal automation, and consider the ROI you would garner during the first year or during the second year.

Once you choose a vendor, as we did when we chose UiPath, you need to make sure that at the very start of your project, it begins with low-hanging fruit. Don't start with all of the complex processes; start with some simple processes. That's why we have divided ours into three sets of processes. Then, don't think that you will achieve a hundred percent automation because that will never be the case. My thinking is that if you achieve more than 70% automation, that is a very good target. Keep your expectations clear.

Another thing to make sure of is that you secure your bot at the workflow level. UiPath provides very good security features that you can use, such as assigning permissions for who can access your workflow. Also in terms of security, be sure that you have all of the required certifications.

Once you have implemented some basic processes and you are getting good results, hyper-automation is something I suggest. Start expanding it to different technologies, such as AI. Also, engage all of your employees as much as possible.

Start with the community version of the software. Although this review is based on the licensed version, the community edition is free and you can create your bots for free. I always say that even one hour saved because of automation will yield a good return annually, and your results will be very quick.

If you keep all of these things in mind then RPA will be fruitful for you.

I would rate this solution a nine out of ten.

We have automated tasks within our organization and are automating our marketing applications. Internally, we have automated in-person and webinar event creation for Microsoft. Whenever there is a request for creating an event that is covered on, for example, either on Jira or the Dynamics 365 application, the task makes an API and pulls data from both sources. It then creates an event on Marketo. It runs totally unattended. We have actually saved the build time that was previously around 45 minutes and we have reduced it to just four minutes.

Previously, we had a build time of around 45 minutes just to process one request. This was kind of a disaster because even in 45 minutes of build time, and this is the average build time, people were making mistakes. When these errors happened, the company had to actually pay money to the client. For example, if a company has an event at 3:00 PM on September 1st, and due to time zone issues, someone manually wrote \ 4:00 PM then people would arrive at 4:00 PM, whereas the event had started at 3:00 PM. Mistakes like that could become a very, very big issue.

Using UiPath, we were able to reduce these kinds of errors. We were also able to reduce the time by more than 90%, just by deploying the bot that could do API calls in order to complete a specific point of data gathering.

For the portion that we automated, the errors that were happening were reduced to 0% and the efficiency was up to 90%.

We've found the usability of Studio very easy. It's simple to understand everything. It's very simple to just start developing within UiPath. 

The Orchestrator is fantastic in terms of usability as all you have to do is just need to deploy your bot there. It gives you several options of how to schedule it, how to monitor it, and it also gives you the dashboard that allows you to see the performance of your bot.

I really like the fact that we have a cloud model, where we can actually go ahead and use their cloud to run our bot. That is a very good kind of feature. 

I really like AI fabric and the documented understanding model, as that actually allows us to do a couple of very complex POCs. They went very well and right now, those prefaces are currently in the pipeline. Hopefully, they will get started with them next month.

The ease of building automation using UiPath is very easy. When it comes to comparing it against other tools, UiPath might be the easiest one. It's totally subjective, of course. That said, there are scenarios where automating certain kinds of scenarios with UiPath is not that easy. Overall, it's pretty good at automating all kinds of stuff.

UiPath enables us to implement end-to-end automation. End-to-end coverage is very important. While working with clients like Microsoft and Google, we have to actually go ahead and make sure that you're actually providing all of these kinds of services. With services such as documentation you also need to be on top of the latest market trends. UiPath actually provides us with not only the ability to handle all of this but to also document all of these kinds of things. That is available, either as a part of some other products or is embedded within the Studio itself as a part of an extension. That is something that I really like as that actually reduces the time that I invest in the creation of the documents. That, and the client actually requires all of these documents before even we can go ahead with the contract, makes having them on hand so important. 

The Automation cloud has helped decrease time to value. Earlier, the deployment of an on-prem Orchestrator took around two to three days for proper configuration and for making sure that there's a disaster recovery mechanism. Automation cloud has everything built already within it, which makes things faster and easier. This reduces the amount of time that is required by us to deliver. Within our area of work, within marketing, time is everything. Once you have taken on the project, the client expects you to deliver it as soon as possible. The requirements that you're getting from the client are very, very time-sensitive. If you're essentially not delivering it on time, that is going to be an issue. Automation Cloud actually helps us to do that without thinking about other things. It actually goes ahead and does a couple of things for us that we don't have to worry about, such as deploying the Orchestrator on the cloud, making sure that everything is properly set up, and making sure that the disaster recovery option is there. These kinds of things actually save us days of time for installation, if not days of debugging time. 

It's very important for our company to scale up automation without having to pay attention to infrastructure. There are a couple of projects that we have where we don't really care about the infrastructure. If it is handled by UiPath, it's absolutely fine. However, for example, in the case of some of our elite clients, what happens is that they actually need to know the details and how data is being propagated amongst different servers. If we're not controlling the environment, if we're not handling the entire knowledge, we won't be able to give them the same thing and the project might go away just because of this fact. Therefore, I'm not saying it's not very important. It's actually very, very important. That's why we use both services that are provided by UiPath - both on-prem and cloud. That said, if we have projects where we don't need to worry about it, it's nice to have the option not to.

UiPath has helped us minimize our on-premise footprint. Their customer service has actually helped us reduce that. UiPath was released in 2015. There are experts on this particular thing in the market, and most of those experts are found via UiPath only. When help is provided by UiPath themselves, that can actually resolve the issue in a matter of hours rather than days.

We use attended automation. We usually use attended automation within the HR department. Basically, we're using it for onboarding, for monthly salary management. It's great for automating some of the basic SAP projects as these are the places where we require human interaction, either to handle the credential part or to provide some inputs. This actually helps bring confidence into the process and also phases out the work of a particular human. Automation has integrated with some human day-to-day jobs so well that now when employees come in, the primary thing that they have to do is just to trigger the bot and start providing input. Work that they used to do for the first half of the day, is completed in the first hour of the day. That's the kind of benefit that is being provided by attended automation.

There is good AI functionality and we use it for some proof of concept projects. That said, we haven't yet used it for more complex or involved automation or processes just yet. We have one project in the pipeline that we have to start working on this month. 

We use UiPath Apps. We use UiPath Apps as a form. Essentially, we have created UiPath Apps in such a way that helps HR people to onboard individuals. For example, whenever someone has to get onboarded, they have to actually provide some details in terms of who they are, their previous company, and some other basic details. Also, HR will need to provide some extra details, in terms of who will be the individual's manager, et cetera. Finally, IT has to assign some kind of role. What we have actually done, is we have created an app where a user or a new individual has to actually provide all the information. Then, HR just needs to select the particular role. Everything is pre-configured. We automatically assign specific roles. In terms of IT, we can now automatically assign specific resources such as laptops, monitors, or headsets to that particular person. Since everything is automated, within a couple of minutes of registration the person receives his new ID password and details. Instead of waiting for an entire day, it happens in just a matter of one or two minutes.

UiPath Apps has increased the number of automation we can create while reducing the time it takes to create them. Earlier, we used to create automation, in terms of forms. Those automations were types of attended automation. A person had to have specific access to that particular computer before doing this kind of work. In this scenario, the issue we had was that every time it was not possible to handle manual steps if we were onboarding ten people at a time. Everyone had to wait for their turn and that was not very efficient. What we have done is we have actually deployed UiPath Apps whose links can actually get loaded onto an individual's mobile. One just needs to open it on their mobile and get started. That's it. Everything executes parallelly. We have also made our system scalable so that multiple VMs can learn the process at the same time.

UiPath speeds up and reduces the cost of digital transformation. Doing so does not require expensive or complex application upgrades or IT support.

We have found that UiPath has reduced human error. We were getting some human errors related to time zone issues and some of the other issues such as daylight savings. There were several other issues related to accidental typing or of people not focusing properly, even after several integrations. That's part of the reason we went ahead and automated processes. Obviously, a bot only follows what you have programmed it, what you have programmed within it. The errors are literally reduced to zero within that specific section.

UiPath has freed up employee time. We have actually retrained the freed-up employees into UiPath to act as support engineers. As a rough guess, I would say that we have saved around 120 hours a week just by deploying UiPath.

The additional time enabled employees to focus on more essential work. For people who were actually acting as build personnel, we have re-deployed them as a person who actually interacts directly with clients or who does QA work. This is a higher position that comes with a higher salary as well. There have been promotions simply due to implementing UiPath.

Employees are pretty happy. Initially, everyone was scared that they might lose their jobs. However, but adopting UiPath methods and retraining people, some are even getting promoted and we find that they are actually encouraging automation processes so that new work can come in and the remaining people could also get on better.

The product has reduced the cost of our automation operations. In terms of marketing operations, for example, it has reduced the cost. Along with the help of similar investments, we need fewer people and more bots currently. That's definitely a big thing for us. We had a cost reduction of approximately 20% in our operations. This is just a ballpark. That said, overall, UiPath has saved our organization a lot of costs. I cannot speak to exact savings, as that requires business knowledge, which I do not have complete access to. 

The AI Center area could definitely improve. The StudioX model could also improve just a little bit so that the introduction of variables is better and would make it possible to pass on a similar kind of data in between multiple activities. This is a very simple concept, however, this kind of feature is not available within UiPath. 

From the business perspective, a little bit more insight on the dashboard that is currently available in Orchestrator would be ideal. I agree with UiPath having a dedicated tool for insights, however, right now, it's a paid tool. 

If I can get a little bit more data and a little bit more customization on Orchestrator, that would be really great.

I've been using UiPath for three years and eight months. I've used it for the same amount of time the company has used it.

The product is quite stable now. There are certainly some places where UiPath has to work, specifically in terms of actual stability, where there are still some unknown errors that are coming in. 

In terms of Orchestrator, I have noticed there are some places where there are glitches. Things are not very clear at first as everything is changing quite quickly, I'll say that. Even in the enterprise version, everyone wants to be on the very latest version. However, there is a drastic change between the versions themselves.

For example, 2019, 2020, and 2021 versions, all three are drastically different amongst themselves. This kind of change is definitely good for the provider in that they are doing something better. However, as a consumer, I don't really want to go ahead and go through an entire learning curve all over again along with handling my current job of handling all the work, just so that I can cope up with what changes the product team has made. It should not be necessary to go through this level of adjustment for each and every release. At this point, I have been through three to four migrations and in each migration, I have gone through some kind of a learning curve.

Automation Cloud actually helps us to rapidly scale up. We don't have to invest time now in configuring Orchestrator, or the cloud version of UiPath. All we have to do is we just need to basically request for a particular package and, maybe, either with the help of a package or with the help of the UiPath team, it is pre-configured for us. That way, we just need to utilize it. Therefore, scaling is simple.

The scalability is great. It has actually allowed us to schedule the bots or maintain the bots in multiple VMs without having any worries about how to utilize licenses, or how to actually go ahead and deploy the bots manually or install the bots manually on certain VMs. Everything is automated within the UiPath environment.

If we talk about attended users, right now, we have more than 10 people using attended bots. Their roles are essentially from the recruitment team, from HR. Some of the marketing staff are also using it in analyst positions. 

We definitely plan to increase usage and we're using UiPath pretty extensively. We have a couple of projects in the pipeline and currently, we're also working on some of the more complex projects within the team.

All the projects are having a specific date of delivery. Everything is running parallel as we also follow an Agile method. In this Agile method, if something is stuck, it will eventually impact the date of delivery. And we really don't want that. UiPath actually helps us a lot by providing 24-hour support and it helps us in setting a lot of the items we need to use. They do it quite easily and quickly.

On the scale of one to ten, it's definitely a ten. Whenever I have a doubt, they are always there. They even offer to get on a call with them and actually go ahead and resolve the issue themselves, if they know how to do it. 

Many times, there have been scenarios where the issue was unique to us. They actually presented us with some debugging steps that we can do on our end. Most of the time, those debugging steps actually helped us to resolve the issue. When none of these options work, they were very keen to figure out how they could actually improve the experience and what could be implemented by the developers within those specific parts of the product in order to resolve the issue. We have given them feedback in the past and in a couple of future versions, we were able to see those ideas implemented.

We were using AutoHotkey before this product, as well as Selenium. However, after implementing UiPath, we have not used anything along with it.

The initial setup was straightforward. The installation of the Studio was quite straightforward. We just had to go through all the legal terms and everything. Once we went through those, we just had to install it. The same thing is true for Orchestrator as the on-prem installation of Orchestrator is pretty straightforward. You just have to get the setup, link it with the skilled server, and then install it. 

Apart from that, the configuration within Orchestrator was very simple as there is only one file that allows us to log on to everything. It made it pretty obvious.

The deployment took somewhere around two days for the entire setup. 

In terms of the implementation strategy, firstly, we decided to set up all the databases and all the dashboard-related services such as Power BI. We decided to do this first due to the fact that the dashboards and databases are the base of any application. 

We decided to implement it first in Azure. On the same day, we decided to get the cloud version of the Orchestrator as well. It was quite easy in terms of Azure. There's a three-way plugin that is available there. We just had to install that on the specific VM and we were done. Finally, on the second day, we went ahead and installed all of the Studio. Once Orchestrator is up, we could install Studios and link them to Orchestrator in order to get the license. That was our strategy and our approach.

We essentially have one dedicated resource for maintaining all the deployments and to watch if anything goes wrong. We have three dedicated resources for maintaining all the bots that are currently running as well. We don't need a big team to maintain everything. 

In one of our projects, we actually used Azure Cloud for the deployment of Orchestrator and the deployment of packages. The experience is quite good. Azure provides the DevOps side of our service that allows us to set up the pipeline and automatically deploy any kind of project to the Orchestrator as soon as it is committed.

While the company has likely been looking at ROI, I don't directly deal with those details.

A couple of our clients cannot actually go ahead with the initial investment of Orchestrator as it costs quite a lot. The thing is that we don't need that much of a license in order to automate our processes. Having a free version of a cloud or having a cheaper version of Orchestrator has actually helped a lot.

Automation Cloud helps decrease UiPath's total cost of ownership. However, overall, if we talk about scalability, once the number of licenses that I need increases, ultimately, Automation Cloud might be a bit expensive. It depends upon the version you're using. Yet, since the license cost is increasing, what happens is if you go ahead and buy more than five licenses, then essentially you would have been in better shape if you would've actually bought the paid version of Automation Cloud and installed it on-prem. That would've been a cheaper option. It's subjective. Our scenario is just that we need two unattended licenses to do the job.

Some of the clients do consider the initial investment of UiPath to be expensive. It's seen as expensive specifically from the cost of getting a licensing for an on-premises setup. For some projects, UiPath can be overkill. However, it is the best software a company can invest in for automation purposes. 

I cannot speak to the exact cost, as I don't handle licensing directly.

It's paid per year. We get licenses not directly from UiPath. Rather, we get them from a vendor.

There are additional costs as well. For example, the cost of an SQL server is one. We are definitely using the Azure product suite as well. We had to actually invest quite a lot in SQL Server in terms of database management, just to make sure that everything gets logged properly and that the Orchestrator is functioning properly. 

We switched to UiPath after we compared multiple tools. We looked at certain parameters such as the ability to automate marketing tools, the ability to automate quickly, and how user-friendly it was. Out of all these three parameters, UiPath stood on top.

We looked at Automation Anywhere, Blue Prism, and PEGA.

I specifically have been using the community version of UiPath. The company has been using the enterprise version.

We do use the Automation Cloud offering.

We do not use the SaaS version of the solution. 

I'd advise users to give it a try. I started my career in UiPath and since then I've been loving it. I became a UiPath MVP as I really enjoy working with the product so much.

That automation does not need to be very complex, so you don't need very complex tools to automate any software. Tools like UiPath can do most of your job.

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