UiPath Platform Reviews

We use UiPath for SAP automation, detecting document sections, web automation, and external applications. 

We use both UiPath RPA and UiPath Document Understanding.

UiPath Document Understanding is for data extraction, while we use UiPath RPA for basic purposes and use .NET.

We also used UiPath once to automate processes dealing with good causes, particularly in Ecolab. The company dealt with floor cleaners and hand sanitizers for hospitals in the US, and at that time, the demand for sanitizers and floor cleaners was through the roof. It was so high that we had to automate processes using UiPath to fulfill the number of orders coming in, for instance, thirty thousand orders a day.

We use UiPath in multiple departments, such as HR, Procurement, and Manufacturing.

We were able to scale our automation and operations through UiPath, for example, up to thirty thousand orders a day, and the direct impact was that all hospitals could order whatever they needed from our company and get what they wanted.

UiPath also helped us send information, particularly the list of requirements to vendors, for example, the number of materials needed, the size of each material, etc., so we found UiPath useful.

One of the features of UiPath that we found good is Document Understanding. We also like using the prebuilt AI models in UiPath rather than creating our own AI models.

We also liked how UiPath enabled us to implement end-to-end automation.

The UiPath Community is very good. When UiPath started, there was no community and documentation, but then UiPath built its community and started giving all courses and training for free along with IT requirements. We found that very helpful, especially then, because other solutions, such as Blue Prism and Automation Anywhere, were not providing free tutorials. Only UiPath provided free tutorials; it was the first company to do that. It even gave practical use cases along with the required data and even built its own application and website, which was why we could automate, including learning about automation.

We found the UiPath Community very helpful because we get answers when we input some queries. We feel that it's always good to look in the UiPath Community to keep learning from the questions other users ask and even reply to questions by other users. If we want to dig deep and further understand how things work, we go to the UiPath Community, which we find good.

The UiPath Academy courses beneficial. I've even completed the advanced course there.

We started using the AI functionality in UiPath for our automation programs. As the solution comes with three built-in AI models, we like that we can directly use those current AI models rather than building custom models. We can plug and play the built-in AI models in UiPath, which helps make our development faster than last year's development speed.

We found that UiPath made digital transformation happen within our company. Digital transformation increased for us.

We also like that the solution helped reduce mistakes and freed up the time or hours of our workers, as seen on our dashboard, which helps keep track of the number of hours worked. UiPath helped in freeing up sixty percent of the workers' time.

An area for improvement I saw in UiPath is API integration, particularly with Microsoft. If you compare my experience with Power Automate in terms of integration, it is seamless, and you don't have to create trust with other applications. Integration via Power Automate is easy, more of dragging and dropping and then starting, which is still not the case with UiPath, so that should be improved.

I've been working with UiPath for eight years now.

UiPath is a stable solution.

Scalability-wise, I'd give UiPath a seven out of ten.

I would rate the UiPath technical support as eight out of ten.

Positive

The initial setup for UiPath was a bit complex in 2017 because the documentation available at the time was not that great, but nowadays, setting it up may be fine.

We've seen ROI from UiPath in our organization.

Whether UiPath has reasonable or expensive pricing depends on the scale of your organization. It could be a bit pricey for startups, but if you belong to at least a mid-level organization, then the pricing would be okay.

I'm a customer of UiPath.

Whether building automation in UiPath would be easy or difficult depends on the application interface or the website. You first have to check if the application, interface, or UI is going to change over some time. If it won't, you must check whether the selectors are stable enough or if there are runtime changes. This is the initial check you must do to determine if it would be easy or challenging to build automation in UiPath.

In terms of UiPath minimizing the on-premise footprint, my company doesn't have anything on-premises except for SAP systems, so most of it is on the cloud and a portal.

I cannot exactly see currently if company costs were reduced or not by UiPath.

In terms of my organization's implementation strategy, the team started with one bot for development, which was the attended bot, and then scaled it into ten or twenty bots and also used bot operators for the implementation, and then after COVID, switched the automations to unattended.

The number of people required to deploy UiPath depends on the number of deployments your organization has.

UiPath requires some maintenance, but since my organization moved to the cloud, the maintenance part is only secondary and only involves updating the firmware, so there is no maintenance from our side.

Overall, UiPath is an eight out of ten for me.

My advice to others looking into implementing UiPath is to deploy it at a medium scale rather than deploying it at the start, as that would be a bit expensive.

We are a distributor and most of our customers were manufacturing and financial companies, so the use cases fell into categories like financial, accounting, and procurement departments. We used it to improve business processes.

With UiPath, my clients were able to free their employees and staff for other types of work. They saw value in that. Staff didn't have to get up at 6 AM or work around the clock in front of a monitor all day. It freed up staff that had been doing menial, manual, repetitive tasks to do something more valuable.

In some cases, it reduced the time it took to get a task done from hours to a couple of minutes. Workflows that would take up to four or five hours were reduced to taking 10 to 15 minutes.

It also definitely reduced the amount of human error to almost zero. 

UiPath Studio has all kinds of tools and it's practical to navigate around the application. Implementing any project can be done very quickly using UiPath. Also, the robot capacity is phenomenal. They work as long and as much as you need them to and provide optimal performance.

Building automation with UiPath is easy and takes a small amount of time. It's really intuitive and doesn't require advanced development or any technical skills. It's easy for anyone to pick up and understand. Any lower-skill employee or developer can learn to use it quickly.

We would usually do a pilot project with a company and, afterward, transfer all the knowledge and capabilities to them so that they were able to develop things themselves. Especially with the UiPath Academy, which provides online courses, and the UiPath forums, everyone could learn how to use it. My clients had no problem picking it up after our first pilot project. The advanced developer courses help a new developer quickly learn how to use it.

There can be technical issues, but it's rarely about a server quitting. They are more like connectivity, platform, and software version issues, but there are no issues with UiPath performance.

I would also like to see UiPath assist clients in scaling up their usage of the application because most of our clients had trouble expanding their usage into other departments. It was hard for them to calculate the exact value they were getting. Some of our clients were flying blind.

Some of our clients hadn't really seen enormous impact from implementing and using automation yet. They had just started, and they saw the value in it, but it was hard for them to expand or add more value to automations with UiPath.

I worked with UiPath from 2019 to 2022.

It can take their technical support some time to respond. And sometimes, the assigned staff doesn't have the right knowledge, but that doesn't happen often.

Neutral

The initial setup is straightforward. Our clients did ask for tips and tricks, but they didn't need a full consultation. They managed it themselves. It's really intuitive.

UiPath pricing is high and sometimes it's quite complicated as well, because there are loads of components and loads of product portfolios. It works, but it could be better. The pricing could be more attractive.

UiPath definitely speeds up digital transformation but whether it reduces the costs of doing so depends on a number of factors.

Over the years, UiPath has done a pretty good job of continuously improving its product by adding robot capacities and changing versions. In terms of features, they have everything covered, with AI features, data mining, process mining, and all that was done quite ahead of everybody else.

I would say that UiPath, as a company, was better in the past. Nowadays, I have less confidence in the company's situation, not that I don't think it's stable. And their ability to improve is a 10 out of 10.

My advice is to study your use cases and go to the UiPath Academy. You'll find everything you're looking for and there is a big community. UiPath is easy to use, but you have to understand your work processes thoroughly and not just depend on the application to help you.

We have very restricted usage, primarily around integration situations where we don't have any APIs. We primarily want to do just unattended automation. We discourage attended automation at this time. We have ten to twenty processes happening right now.

The improvements we've seen are primarily around the time and cost savings that surround someone sitting and manually syncing data between SaaS platforms. Although we use the latest and greatest SaaS platforms, they still don't have to interact with each other. There are no APIs in most cases. In those situations, rather than having someone manually sit and do it or have the product vendor customize it, we use UiPath.

For example, a couple of automations save us at least a year's worth of manual effort. Day in and day out, there is a SaaS platform that creates new data, and that needs to go through the different SaaS platforms. And that's the major statement we have. Then there are a few legacy applications we have that are near end of life. We don't intend to bring new APIs to them. Instead, we use UiPath.

I personally use the Academy often, and I have encouraged a couple of .NET developers within the organization to take up the certification. We have system integrators and local offshore vendors. They don't have certification right now. However, I am encouraging them to get certified. They're using UiPath Academy.

For me, the biggest win for the Academy was around the infrastructure and the sales switch around it. In my role, I'm required to go and talk to business functions and technology leaders. I have to tell them what the product can do, how it is deployed, etc., at the level of ownership. Plus, thought leadership needs to come from me, and those academic courses help me a lot.

The user community is definitely robust. I see lots of contributions, and people are willing to come and respond to any posted queries. 

The key reason we are not able to adopt it fully compared to other customers is the security model. Usually, what happens is whenever we talk to a business stakeholder, the first concern is data security. The moment that you talk about a bot in an unattended fashion going and reading the data source, concerns arise since there's not much control at a certain point.

Security remains a concern. We have completed all our security assessments. However, that continues to be a key question. There are use cases that are based out of Europe. If we have an instance in North America, again, the question of GDPR and all those questions arise. For example, does that mean that we have to have multiple tenants in different geographies? We are still trying to solve those kinds of questions.

There are situations in the community where, due to the fact that the product is so rapidly evolving, lots of the content out there is outdated. It leads to that lost effort when you try to do what they're saying, and it doesn't work due to it being a different version. That's probably one problem that I have noticed so far.

I've used the solution for a little over three years.

The stability of the product is very good. 

If you look at the key components and the visuals, I mean the Studio, the Bot, and the Orchestrator, the Bot and the Studio are within our environment. We haven't experienced any issues. What is left is the Orchestrator, and we haven't seen any outages so far.

I don't have any concerns with scaling.

I haven't created too many support requests. That said, the most recent one did not go well. The engineer had some trouble understanding, and the issue is still ongoing.

It wouldn't be fair for me to judge their support just based on those one or two tickets I worked on. I'm sure they have a good team. It was just that one ticket did not work out.

This was our first RPA tool. 

I was involved in the development and deployment. 

The virtual machine setup and the Robot and Orchestrator connection definitely were a little challenging. However, in the current version of the application, Orchestrator, it's far more seamless. Three years ago, it definitely was not that straightforward. Everything has gotten easier. 

The first automation took between three to six months, from initial procurement and development to deployment.

I did the deployment myself. 

In terms of ROI, we are getting there. It's not like as good as I anticipated. That said, we are getting there.

The pricing is fairly decent. It was not crazy expensive. Their cloud deployment gives you that sweet spot in pricing. You don't have to spend $20,000 for the Orchestrator, for example.

We assessed all the market leaders and did a couple of proofs of concept. It turned out that UiPath checked all the boxes from a capability standpoint and user-friendly developer experience, plus the deployment experience. UiPath was a clear leader.

We do not use UiPath AI functionality in our automation program. At this time, it is limited to OCR capabilities.

We currently are unable to automate more complex or involved processes. It is still in the conceptualization phase. We haven't put it into production yet. However, we are exploring their invoice management capabilities and more.

We have yet to develop some sort of social responsibility initiative using UiPath. However, we might in the future. 

I would invite potential users to look at the library of activities that are there. Make sure that the kind of use cases that they're looking at are present, and the level of security that they are looking for in terms of data. If you have less intensive security challenges, it's a no-brainer to use UiPath in the cloud. However, it might get a little tricky if it turns out to be healthcare or anything of that sort. You'll have to work with your data protection team.

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

Initially, we had some manual test cases running in the background, where we tried to call our UI and do end-to-end testing of the login, checkout, etc. We now automate end-to-end testing using UiPath to reduce the workload. We use UiPath for process analysis and making robots, but not for monitoring. We already have other tools in our system to monitor each and every step of our process

We work in a hybrid environment, but we're increasingly cloud-based. We are not driving as much traffic to our on-premises system. 

We were hiring developers to write test cases and perform automation for us. UiPath significantly reduced the amount of employee labor needed while cutting down on human error. The error count in our system dropped by around 10 to 15 percent. 

This is a considerable win for us. Our clients are happier because they see fewer errors in production. End-to-end automation helps us deliver quality work to our customers. UiPath helps us analyze every connected case with automated robot testing. 

UiPath has a simple, creative UI, where you can check on all the automated tools. Everything is well documented, and you can easily get support from the UiPath team. Whenever we were stuck, their team was always there to support us. The community is huge and powerful. 

The entire process of setting up automations is smooth. We could easily deploy each case on our cloud platform and make things work.

We aren't scaling up UiPath because it doesn't provide a satisfactory way to log and monitor data. Instead, we use other tools like Automation Anywhere for large-scale operations in our production environment. We're building solutions that can handle a huge amount of data so we can monitor real-time issues. I don't think UiPath solves that case for us.

We've been using UiPath for around a year.

We faced some issues with scalability, so we use another RPA in production. 

I rate UiPath's support nine out of ten. We always get a response within six hours. UiPath also has a massive user community, so you can get instant support from anyone. We faced some issues when we built our first robots, so we got help from the community. When someone else has problems, we try to help them. 

Working in the community, you are recognized for your support, and you can learn a lot from others. There are some complex things about using UiPath that we don't understand. 

The UiPath community is friendly, and they respond quickly. At most, it takes around six hours to get an answer from the community, based on our experience. I believe that anyone who adopts UiPath will learn so much from the community.

Positive

We deployed UiPath through a vendor provider who helped us through the entire installation and everything in our cloud environment. Initially, we tried UiPath in our testing environment. Once we saw that it was stable and improved our productivity, we moved it to our production environment with excellent results. It took 10 months for us to deploy UiPath fully. 

We had two people working on the deployment. One managed the installation, while the second person handled monitoring and other development areas. 

We had two developers working 20 hours a week writing test cases manually, so UiPath saves us 40 hours of labor costs. However, we spend about that much on UiPath when you factor in licensing, infrastructure costs, and other expenses. The value we see is from the reduction in human error. 

I rate UiPath eight out of ten. I deduct two points because of the shortcomings in terms of scalability and logging. It's a nice-to-have solution in our case. I recommend trying UiPath out and seeing if it's suitable for your use case. You should go for it if it fits. It's not too costly and it will reduce human error while improving the quality of your product.  

We primarily use the solution for operations processes in our corporate investment bank. For example, screen scraping, querying from databases, or any transactional processes. Those are what we're really looking at the most.

The orchestrator is very valuable for us. The ability to have processes, especially transactional processes, be fed into and triggered from there is excellent. I really like the ease of use that allows not just typical developers to use the Studio version, but also StudioX, which allows citizen developers with little to no coding background to be able to automate their own process. Studio limits a lot of the coding you would generally do in Visual Basic and offers a pretty easy use case for people who want to get into development, who might not have that background.

I’d rate the ease of automating within UiPath at an eight or a nine out of ten. Maybe even a perfect ten. They make it very simple. It's a really good platform and for everything I've used it for so far, I can't think of how I would do this X, Y, or Z differently. I really like it.

In terms of our adoption of it, we just started using it this year. We haven't had a large volume of bots delivered and put into production, however, with what we're using, we have a lot of proof of account sets and use cases that are getting pushed along that are going to save the company time in man-hours.

It's going to save the company a lot of potential risks in terms of manual error. It's also something that can be used to automate processes that are very heavily related to compliance procedures as well, where you don't want as much manual touch for the same reason and you don't want to risk, even if it doesn't take that much time for a person. With automation, you remove the risk of somebody making an error.

We don’t have a crazy amount of metrics. We're really in the process of adopting it into the organization. I'd say within the next year, we're really going to be seeing a very large adoption of it.

We have seen direct savings in costs. Every project we deliver in time save has an associated cost reduction to it. If you're saving, for example, four hours a day on a manual process, you're saving that money. You’re also saving on anything that's related to risk. I don't have any hard numbers on the amount of time that's been saved, however, it’s been positive.

Our teams have used the UiPaths Academy courses. It’s helped make the process of getting employees up to speed with UiPath very straightforward. It's one of the better learning platforms I've seen. Between them and Alteryx, they both have very good learning platforms.

What's really important is that you don't need to wait for instructor-led training, which is infrequent. We have it sometimes, still, even when we’re having it a few times a year it gets expensive. The online training, which covers most of the same material, is a really good way for people who don't want to wait for the instructor-led training and want to immediately get their own feet wet.

The Academy is very comprehensive. It's well structured and training is easy to follow. I've used other tools that have been much harder to follow online. This one I really like.

The biggest values that we’ve seen From UiPath Academy are ease of use and ease of scalability. The solutions you make based on the infrastructure that's built around it can be made to be very scalable. There's so much that depends on other terms, such as the data that we have on our own processes, that it's going to be the yes or no, whether or not a process we build can be scalable automation for other teams. As long as we get the data and the processes lined up in the right way, we can make very scalable processes, which is good as that's more cost savings for fewer bots and that's really like what we want to see.

There are some external dependencies. When we have APIs available, UiPath does have that option that we can hook into APIs. That's really where I'd like to be down the line, more like hooking into APIs, data warehouses, so that you don't have to worry too much about the screen scraping functionality, even though that's a great big part of what it does.

I would really like the ability to bring OCR connectors into StudioX, if possible. Right now we're only using OCR and Studio as that's where the plugins are available. I don't know enough about the back end of what makes this feasible versus not feasible. However, at the moment, with StudioX, you can only really read and digitize PDFs. If they can bring in the OCR connectors, they'd allow citizen developers to be able to read in a larger breadth of documents that they would generally need Studio to do.

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

The product is as stable as it can be for the processes we use to expand on that. We do a lot of screen scraping and web scraping a lot. I want to move away from this in the future. However, the stability of those bots is going to ultimately be reliant on how that webpage looks.

We're looking at very specific parts of the website, such as the HTML tags. If those stay stable and we build our identifiers on those sites to be relatively dynamic, the process will be fine. 

We do plan to increase usage.

The idea is to train up more citizen developers. We need to strike a balance between getting the tool out to the citizen developers and making sure that they're following the governance procedures as well. There's also a little bit of risk of it due to the fact that you give people licenses to build and then they can build something on their desktop. They can just, without going through the proper governance, run it. Therefore, you need to make sure things go through the correct governance. That's why we're trying to make sure we have a very good system in place so that when we grow and are training system developers, everything they do goes through the correct controls and governance process.

We're planning to keep building the users over time. We really want to start looking in the next year from more of a top-down perspective, across larger organizational issues where we can make more scalable bots rather than strictly or mostly automating one-offs. We're looking for where there's more commonality across different businesses that do similar processes, and maybe access similar data sources.

I'm not sure exactly how many people are using it across the organization currently. My guess would be at this point there are 75 to 100 users. However, I could be completely wrong. I'm just guessing, as I don't know all the citizen developers, and who in the operation's teams are using it.

I have not used technical support, however, some people who work for me on my team have. I manage a small team of developers. They have worked with UiPath consultants who are on contracts with our COE. They've been extremely helpful with working out some kinks that they've come across in their projects. 

I haven't used blueprints on my Automation Anywhere. We used to use Automation Anywhere and we are moving off it in favor of UiPath, though I never used those other tools myself. I use ALteryx and it has some RPA abilities, although I use it much more for just basic data transformation workflows. I have coded RPA bots and Python before. What I like, with UiPath, is it's still a tool that's based on code - Visual Basic, VB.NET. However, the coding is really for the most part restricted to your data manipulation, working with variables. The control flow that you normally would need to code in Visual Basic is all drag and drop. I really like that versus straight coding. It still gives you that flexibility of a lot of development environments, however, you can have that drag and drop canvas that allows you to really not need to program as much of that control flow. 

We moved towards UiPath as it's cheaper per bot and it enables more of a citizen development model as well. Automation Anywhere bots were only developed by our COE at the time and UiPath COE's going to use them also, however, they're allowing users in operations to use both Studio (if they have the taste for it) and StudioX. It gives a lot more citizen development capabilities for more advanced functions and automation-type stuff, whereas previously, you would normally need somebody on your team who happens to know BBA to do it. 

In the past, if you have someone from the team who knows BBA and makes something, and they leave and their code breaks, you're screwed. However, if you have a StudioX bot, if it breaks, it's going to be much easier to look into the issue and fix it. It's also supported by our C0E's tech infrastructure. Those are the main driving points for shifting off as well.

I was not involved in the initial setup. I've interacted with UiPath only as a user. I was one of the first users, however, I had nothing to do with deploying the tech infrastructure and developing the governance and controls. I'm just a developer.

We have seen a return on investment. Every project we've delivered that has some sort of time savings to it has had an intrinsic ROI. I don't know the total ROI across the organization, however. I work in one specific part of the company and it's been adopted in a few places. I don't know the total ROI that's been delivered yet.

It's my understanding that it's delivered close to a full headcount so far, in terms of productivity of capacity. There are approximately eight hours a day of time-saving for every workday of the year. That's where we are right now, as we've really just begun adopting it. We're not really deployed into production, and the larger-scale projects aren't in place yet. So far, the projects have been smaller tactical builds that we've been using and it's been delivering up around eight hours of time saving a day. 

I don't know the pricing enough to really comment on it. I know we're getting a better deal in automation than what we had with Automation Anywhere bots, at least per bot deployment. However, I don't know what the licensing costs are.

We do not yet use the Uipath apps feature or their AI functionality in our automation processes. That said, with AI, we're bringing it in and we're definitely planning to use it in the future.

I'd advise new users to make sure you have the controls and governance structures, first and foremost, and you want to make sure those controls are going to be in place and understood before you start deploying licenses to users. I make sure that everything is going to be done and compliant with the audit. As somebody who works in financial services, which is a very heavily regulated industry, that's something that really needs to be kept in mind. You don't want to develop what are essentially just user tools that are not going through the proper controls and treat it like a lightweight software development lifecycle project. You need to make sure those controls are in place, and yet, don't do it too much to the point where it's going to deter the users. At the end of the day, we're not making software, however, we still need to strike that balance.

I'd rate the solution at a nine out of ten. Nothing is perfect. I know you UiPath wants to improve the stuff that has not been perfected. I'm not going to say it is a ten out of ten, even though I'm struggling to think of what I don't like. Something that would be very helpful for UiPath is to go back to try to build OCR in StudioX. That would be ideal. Also, being able to implement different types of loops in the Studio would be great. Right now, you can only do a four-loop in a repeating loop. If we could implement wall loops, that would be nice. 

My company has multiple processes across various lines of businesses like finance, contact center, HR, tax, etc. Our use cases are based on the business corporation. They have to agree with the use case and what they want to automate. They have to provide the business details about the exact process. The developer or the lead will design the solution accordingly.

For example, in the revenue accounting area, we have around 5,000 to 15,000 requests in a day. It's all based on the number of sales that they made. We have implemented a multi-board approach, where the process can simultaneously run in almost 15 to 30 missions, whenever there is a requirement. We can increase the number of licenses based on the requirements.

We use Automation Cloud and Task Capture. They're trying to implement Task Capture with a couple of lines of businesses right now. We did not implement it completely, but it's in process.

If a person is spending eight hours in a day on a job, we can automate that process. He can validate it in an hour and the rest of the time he can spend doing other things. Our overall experience is good with automation. There are a couple of businesses that are really happy with our support on their daily tasks. 

If revenue accounting wants to do their responsibilities, they need 100 employees. Automation made their life easy and they can now validate quickly with 5 or 10 agents and get it done.

UiPath has saved costs.

We use the Apps feature. It helped to reduce the workload of our IT department by enabling end-users to create apps.

The Automation Cloud offering will help to decrease the solution's total cost of ownership, by taking care of things like infrastructure and maintenance. We are on-prem now. We are going to migrate this year.

We have various automations in various applications like desktop, mainframe-based, and SAP-based applications. I work with almost all of the applications. I see good progress no matter what we do. The most valuable feature is that UiPath works with all these solutions.

Building automations is easy based on whatever automation you develop, just drag and drop. It's easy to maintain.

We use the Academy. If you don't know anything about UiPath, you can go to the UiPath Academy and start using it. It will give you an overall idea of what is what. 

The greatest value from the Academy is that I don't have to go to a person for learning. I can learn on my own time, night or day. The portal is also good. 

They're planning to look into machine learning. They have a vision; they have a plan.

When we raise a ticket, they'll ask a number of questions to analyze the problem. It would be better if they connected quickly and it was a call so they can understand the issue and then schedule a follow-up call. 

We can't explain each and every thing. When it's on a call, we can explain it in a few minutes. 

The stability is good, but when we migrate to a newer version a few issues can emerge. We just have to do our best and make sure everything is up and running. Overall, the stability is okay.

We previously used Blue Prism. It is process automation. The user interface is different. How we interact with the development environment and how we manage the solutions is different. Overall, Blue Prism and UiPath are both good. 

I wouldn't say the setup is difficult. We need to work with various teams to get everything going.

The time it takes to deploy depends on the complexity. If it is complex, based on the developer and urgency, we'll split it into two parts, test it, and quickly deploy it. We have deployed on an emergency basis in one to two days. It's a complex process, but there are five or six developers who work without any sleep around the clock.

I would rate UiPath a nine out of ten. 

We're in the financial services industry, so we target the operations. We use it in finance but we're also going after our wealth management group, capital markets group, and fixed income capital markets group.

In one year we've done 17 automations in about 3,500 hours. We're just getting started. 

We use mostly unattended automation, but we do have both.

It's still early for us so we're selecting specific areas and items to automate based on areas that we believe will provide strategic importance for us.

We're now going to start expanding that and going after some of the larger jobs that we want to try to tackle, now that we've got some experience under our belt.

We have saved costs in terms of employee hours saved. There are definitely going to be costs associated with that. Some of those are pretty high net worth individuals that UiPath is doing tasks that they just didn't need to do.

It's definitely saving time for employees. One of our most successful automations frees them up from doing an entire task. Their quality of life has had a big improvement. It also happens to save a lot of hours. It saves a little over 2,000 hours annually.

We are still learning how to build automations but I'm a fan of the RA framework. We use StudioX to help with citizen developers to help fill our pipeline. The tools are pretty good and evolving.

The ability to bridge various applications that users are using is the most valuable feature. If we have a process that's entered in multiple locations, we can send a robot to do one of those processes on behalf of the person. We've had good success there.

Everybody on the team goes through Academy courses and continues to go back there for continuing education. Citizen developers are directed in that location as well. So we try to get them to complete StudioX. We like its ability to extend the life and the usability of some applications that by themselves can be a little cumbersome to use. I would like to make those apps and those experiences better for the user. And actually do more with them by extending parts through APIs that are passed to other applications.

We're looking to start to modify the meat of the process and then tag on pieces to the beginning and ends. 

Insights is a little clumsy. StudioX is a great start but needs more functionality. They should bring the document understanding into StudioX and make it go a little bit further. There's a pretty clear point at which you really need to switch over to Studio, but in the case of some of our citizen developers, they'd like to stay in StudioX. They just need more features. 

We have been using UiPath for a year. 

It's been very stable. The only problem we had were some digital certificates and those aren't UiPath's fault. It's partly our fault and how we manage them. One of those got in the way and shut some stuff down. It's not really the UiPath platform. That really hasn't gone down on us at all. It was the certificates. 

We're only at 17 automations now. We have a lot of headroom in the bots that we currently own and the licensing that we have. We're getting ready to put the necessary pieces in place so that we can scale it up.

The technical advisor is very good. 

Positive

 We have plenty of solutions that fall in the surrounding area, like various CTL things, automated software, and the types of things that are primarily used by IT.

We had a strategic partner help us with the setup because we knew nothing about it. They helped set up our COE and the basic frameworks that we were going to be using within IT. I came in about four or five months into the project as an analyst so I wasn't there when they did it. 

The strategic partner we used was very good.  They got us up and running and got our initial test trial into play.

The setup process was not straightforward. They purposely gave them some things that were a bit of a challenge. 

We are happy with what we got as a result.

The first deployment took quite a while. If you're considering standing up a whole COE in all those environments, they did that fairly quickly. I believe it was in about three months. It has then continued to evolve from there. That was the learning experience. If you look at our development, that first automation, there's a long flat line. Then it started to ramp up pretty significantly in the back half of the year.

Pricing is working for what we have right now. We set up two Orchestrator environments and we're unable to use our single license of the analytics on both. That's a bit of a problem. We'd like to see a dev environment for us that is free of licensing. It's development versus production. Charge us for production, don't charge us for dev. That's about the only complaint I would have.

Don't be afraid to jump in. Get the IT department involved early, get the security department at the table. As long as you have top-down management that's there to mandate and make sure everybody does what they should be doing, the proper sponsorship, and the proper buy-in from the people that have to execute.

I would rate it a ten out of ten. 

Our current use case is primarily to automate business processes pertaining to finance, HR, and IT. Finance and HR have been bigger players, and other supply chain areas are currently being targeted. It's still in the ramp-up phase. We do not use it in a contact center environment.

In my former employment, not my current employment, we implemented some banking processes during the implementation phase, and last year, when the lockdown happened, due to the automation, things were much simpler, much easier to manage, and it was less dependent on people. This was not an Indian client, however, I could see that in the Indian market, Indian banks were actually struggling with the same function. That is where we could see a very significant difference. A lot of banking processes are dependent on manual processing.

For our organization, the Orchestrator has the most useful setup. All automation is more or less the same. With UiPath, the difference is the Orchestrator. The amount of integration it has is actually what makes it different from all other vendors.

I would rate the ease of building automation using UiPath at a nine out of ten. For automation in UiPath, you use a package. For example, if you want to do MS Office automation, you have an MS Office package. If you want to do Outlook automation, you have a certain set of packages that support that. If you have the package for that purpose, it's very easy to manage.

For ServiceNow, they did not have a package until last year. There was a UiPath team-supported package that was an unofficial package developed by a UiPath employee. Last year, UiPath came out with its own package, and that helped. Now we have standard automation for ServiceNow. That's actually made things more streamlined.

In terms of implementing end-to-end automation, the process analysis is currently outside of UiPath, but everything except that can be done by UiPath. For us, creating end-to-end automation using UiPath is not that very critical. Process analysis is a bit of a situation-specific thing, and at times, it's usually better to keep it outside of the tool. It always helps within the tool, however, it depends on the convenience and comfort that the client has. I wouldn't want to expose my ERP data directly for automation.

Typically, it takes two to three years to see the breakeven. The difference between on-premise and on-cloud is that the lead time is a little less. That's about it. Therefore, the amount of trouble and setup and that sort of thing is the only item to consider.

The Automation Cloud offering helps to decrease the solution's total cost of ownership by taking care of things such as infrastructure, maintenance, and updates, however, only to some extent. It's not a lot. In the long run, it makes it easier to get breakeven from the initial implementation. The maintenance happens a little less as well. When you're updating the Orchestrator, that is where your major maintenance jump comes in. If you're not upgrading your Orchestrator version, it's more or less the same. From an ownership perspective, if you're not upgrading Orchestrator, only your VM license and hosting cost will be different. This depends on the client.

If you already have an Orchestrator in place, having an automation cloud doesn't really increase or decrease the ability to scale. That would only be only in the case where you want a complete separation environment. In that case, you'll have to use a multi-tenant kind of setup. If you do that kind of a setup, it's the same if you do it on-premise or on-cloud. The time to ramp up should be the same.

We use a mix of attended and unattended automation. Attended automation is primarily helpful for a few things like where the application's less stable, where things like Citrix are involved, which already have their own set of infrastructure issues.

UiPath has reduced human errors in the organization. The lead time is reduced, as well as the lead time to activity and the lead time to develop. Specifically, if you do development in UiPath versus any other OEM, you see a very significant difference in implementation lead time from a development perspective. They're much simpler to develop and manage in UiPath. If you go to other OEMs, it's very complex at times. If it takes 10 steps in another OEM, UiPath takes it in one to three, max.

The solution has freed up employee time by as much as 30 minutes per day. It's allowed employees to focus on higher-value work. The primary benefit of automation is doing low-complexity repetitive work outside of working hours. That's the biggest advantage that I've seen. Even if you're sleeping, there is already work being done in the background, so that the next morning, when the employee comes, he has more relevant work in front of him. He doesn't have to do any paper-pushing jobs. Automation can do that instead. That's the biggest advantage.

The fact that UI handles infrastructure, maintenance, and updates for Automation Cloud saves some time in the IT department. It is a trade-off. The biggest challenge that we've seen with Automation Cloud is primarily with documentation. At times, we raise it to UiPath, and after that, documentation comes up. I'm not saying that's bad, however, that's something that UiPath can work upon. This is a consistent behavior that I've seen.

Back in 2018, I was with another employer, not EY. I started using Orchestrator API within 10 days of its global release, and we had struggled at times for documentation. It's a theme with Orchestrator, with the new Automation Cloud, specifically on the Orchestrator side. For Tableau reporting, there was nothing. We had to raise it to UiPath saying, "Hey, do you have something for Tableau reporting?" They said, "No, we don't have anything for Automation Cloud." Very recently, they came out with it, however, before that, there was nothing.

The documentation isn't the best. It's pretty difficult to search. We would have to raise a ticket to the UiPath team, and they would have to come back with the relevant information. It's difficult to try and do a day or two of research only to have to raise a ticket to UiPath as a vendor.

I've struggled a lot with automating Citrix applications with UiPath. I know how Citrix is not very stable when it comes to automated logins. In that case, attended automation is good. We've seen some good use cases. However, it depends on the consultant's choice and the business's goals.

I've been using it since 2018.

The solution is very easy to scale and allows users to scale whenever they want.

In general, UiPath support is good. It is better than other OEMs. They're usually really good.

I have experience with other RPA solutions. The development time is the biggest difference. The amount of automation one can do with it, that's the main difference. It's huge. It's not even a small difference.

I've looked at leading vendors in Gartner's Magic Quadrant. I've actually worked on all the vendors that you can see in the Magic Quadrant. There is a reason why UiPath is leading. Development is great, and, if you want to integrate a third-party application, UiPath has a lot of integrations set up either in its Orchestrator or in its Studio. Something that takes 15 minutes in UiPath would take one day in most of the other options. In Automation Anywhere, for example, you have more trouble.

The Orchestrator setup doesn't take a lot of time if you have everything in place. Cloud deployment is a good option for smaller clients, or small to medium clients, that are just piloting or don't have any very sensitive data out there. They should go on the cloud.

It's a straightforward setup. It's pretty easy. That said if it's a new solution to you and if you don't know it, it might take a little while. Even then, it's easy. It's not complex.

Prior to StudioX coming in, it was very easy. Within 15 minutes for just a Studio client. However, with Studio, things changed a little. If you install StudioX and do not want to revert to the regular Studio, you'll probably have to uninstall the installation. StudioX usually comes with a separate installer and so on. With Studio Pro and the regular Studio, they come with their own thing.

UiPath is already working on providing an integrated installer for all of its offerings, so that should make it easier. If there is a wrapper application, and if from there you can select which one that you want to install, it'll be smoother. You'll be able to just click and go.

I have seen ROI in the past. My previous clients love UiPath. The current client is not in a spot to say just yet, however. It's a very new setup.

To see the ROI, that's where the off-work hours come into play. The automation works outside of working hours, and that actually speeds up a company's business processes in general. For those kinds of things, it's good. It shows a clear ROI.

The pricing is okay. It can be reduced a little. It's still fair, however, pricing can be reduced by the company if it wants to spend less. Depending on the industry, or depending on the features that an organization is going to get, it's possible to scale down. For example, if I don't want to use the AI set of features, I just want basic automation, I don't have to get what I don't need. They've already done a good amount of corrections in the product offering. If somebody wants only a certain section of the offering, they should be given modular pricing, especially for the managed cloud, which should be pay as you go. If I don't want that service at all, why should you pay for it? If I want something, it's a different situation and I should be charged, however, if I don't want something, it's good to have the option to opt-out and save money. You can't really put the whole cost on a customer.

SAP IRPA has a good model whereby their offering is based on the number of hits. The more API hits that you're asking for, the price per hit reduces. That should be the typical model. I'm not sure what UiPath is doing in that respect, however, I feel that is the best approach.

My organization has a business relationship with UiPath.

In the current setting that I'm working in, it's basically an on-cloud deployment. We have these Automation Cloud Services, to which we have been subscribed. In the past, I've used the on-premise UiPath deployment.

Since it's a SaaS offering, it's always available online.

We are using a relatively new version.

We do not use UiPath's AI functionality in our automation program currently. We also do not use UiPath's apps feature. That said, I am aware of some organizations that use it.

I would advise new users to fix up their processes first, check if their applications need to be upgraded or digitized. After that, they will be in a position to then take a long-term vision with UiPath and have a strategy, have a long, two to three-year strategy. It's not a good idea to take a "do as it comes" approach. There needs to be, ideally, a three-year strategy in place in order to get a lot of business benefits. 

I would rate the solution at an eight out of ten. If the pricing was better, I would rate it higher. 

Specifically, if you see Automation Anywhere's pricing, their basic automation is cheap, however, if you want to use the intelligent aspect, the intelligent aspect comes at a very good premium. That's most important. If I want to do simple process automation and if you're running a company at that scale, you need to understand your competition. There are a lot of players coming into the market and a big differentiator is going to be the cost. Power Automate is going to be successful based on that logic. It has high availability, big integration, and low pricing. It can disrupt UiPath's space.