UiPath Platform Reviews

When I started at my company, they were building their RPA journey. I was the first person to help them do that. As no one in my company was aware of what RPA is, we needed to showcase and publicize what UiPath is and what RPA is.

I work for an insurance company and there are handwritten scripts that need to be scanned in, and this was the first use case that I had to work on. We used the OCR technology to scan handwritten documents and its capabilities are evolving day by day. When I initially started, it was not as robust as it is today. We had some challenges with the OCR technology, but today we are able to do it successfully with validations.

Right now, there are 24 automations of which 22 are in production and two are being built. These are all unattended bots. I also use this solution in a personal capacity to delete all the junk emails I receive as I usually get 20,000 junk emails a week. This saves me a lot of time. 

The UiPath's user community, in terms of the value that we gain by being part of it, is very helpful. If I'm stuck with coding, that is the place I go to get assistance. The ideas and the solutions that they provide are very helpful. There are a few people in the community who are very accurate and their solutions always work.

I have also made use of the academy. Currently, I'm taking the certification training and planning to get my certification done by the end of this year. It has taught me new ways of doing things including dynamic selectors. Previously, the bots used to break because of a selectors issue, but the dynamic selectors solved this. 

We have an internal process that is manual and takes three days. The first day involves pulling in the data, the second day involves validation and the third day involves delivering it to the relevant system. We automated this process using UiPath.

The errors have been minimized. Whenever something goes wrong, we immediately get an Outlook notification. This is when our business customers get to know that there's something wrong with the input data that they're getting. They can directly deal with the input information data team and get that information corrected and this usually happens within three hours. 

The OCR technology within this solution has been most valuable. We are able to scan handwritten documents and scrape their contents to be captured within the system. 

When I first started using this solution, the OCR technology was not that good, but it has since improved. Most of the handwritten documents are easily read by the OCR technology. 

I have been using this solution for three years. 

The stability does depend upon the applications we are using but overall the stability is good. 

This is definitely a scalable solution. 

The first time we had issues was during the setup and we haven't needed to contact the support team since then. Their support is really good and the solutions that they provided really worked from our side. They provided step-by-step instructions that really helped us a lot and saved a lot of time. Our initial estimate to get that UiPath deployment was two and a half weeks, but we finished that in three days. This was made possible by the support and the instructions received from the support team. 

I would rate the support for this solution an eight out of ten. 

Positive

I was the one who did the deployment. During the deployment, we had some challenges but received assistance from UiPath support. Even though we had some hiccups in the initial days, we were able to still overcome those with the help of UiPath support. The deployment took two to three days for an on-premises installation. 

Our business has been highly satisfied with the RPA solutions that we are providing thanks to UiPath.

The pricing for this solution is reasonable. 

We evaluated Blue Prism but felt UiPath is easier to use and offers better performance.

I would rate this solution an eight out of ten. I would rate it a ten out of ten if this solution worked better with our other applications. 

I would definitely advise others to consider UiPath because it is easy to learn how to use. A lot of documentation is available and accessible to facilitate learning including YouTube videos. 

When I was evaluating Blue Prism versus UiPath, the training materials were not the same for Blue Prism. Coding using UiPath is really easy and is mostly drag and drop. 

We have multiple use cases for this solution. We have applications built on Microsoft platforms and we use UiPath for our automation and automation testing. Being able to do this means that we do not need to keep reverting back to test every use case when we complete upgrades. 

We also use this solution for the automation of responses to support tickets. Any tickets that come through that can be automated, rather than it being done manually. 

UiPath has improved the ease of building automations. We were using SeleniumBase testing which is a legacy application and required a lot of manual work to maintain it. 

UiPath has made a significant difference on our staff's workload capacity and freed up team members to take on new endeavors versus getting stuck with manual tasks. 

This solution has been most valuable for our support ticketing processes. This has created efficiencies within our team and freed up time for them to focus on project work. It has prevented the need for them to stop what they are doing to complete a mundane task and then get back to what they were doing. 

We previously built automation repositories before it was offered by UiPath. There's no smooth migration from what we built to the newer studio that they have at the moment. This is the biggest hurdle we are facing. We would also need to rebuild all previous automations built in another solution called SeleniumBase.

I have been using this solution for one and a half years. 

We experienced some performance issues because our libraries are growing and we experience crashes from time to time. This usually means we need to reboot. The stability could be improved in this regard. The ability to handle large-scale applications or multiple applications could be improved as our operations and libraries are going to continue to grow. Currently, our libraries need to be split and this creates more maintenance for us. 

We are satisfied with the scalability. We are aware of new features coming in the future and we will be able to adapt and expand our applications based on these new features. 

The technical support for this solution could be improved. They take longer to respond than I would expect. We would like a 24 to 48-hour SLA in place to manage expectations. 

I would rate their support a six out of ten. This is not due to their ability to resolve an issue. It is due to their lack of transparency and keeping us updated on how issues are being resolved. They are not good at communicating when we can expect our issue to be resolved. 

Neutral

We used SeleniumBase. We needed a solution with enhanced technical capabilities and this is why we switched to UiPath. UiPath offered us a lot in terms of functionality. 

I was a part of the implementation team in our organization where I made sure there were no roadblocks. I was working with UiPath's points of contact and they were coordinating and making sure the implementation happened as planned.

The initial setup was complex. It happened three years ago and we still have some questions about the setup. In order to get answers to these questions, we need to raise a support ticket. I feel like the knowledge of the support individuals could be elevated so we could receive answers right away. 

We implemented this solution in-house. 

We have not yet experienced ROI using this solution as we have only been using it for a year and a half. We don't have control over the domain to see the metrics and KPIs at the moment. We are hoping that once some of our core applications are in operation, we will be able to assess the ROI. 

UiPath has reduced our manual effort and improved the overall efficiency of our team. 

We considered Microsoft's Power Platform which does offer very similar functionality to UiPath including a Desktop AI Builder. However, this solution had limitations that UiPath does not. UiPath is focused on automation and offers a lot of support in this regard whereas Microsoft focuses on so many different areas. 

I would advise others to hang in there for the first six to eight months as the initial learning curve can be frustrating. Once you get a hang of it, you will clearly see the benefit of using this solution. 

I would rate this solution an eight out of ten. Our test automations need to be improved for migration purposes and overall performance could be improved. If those two were resolved, I would give it a ten out of ten. 

Our company uses the solution to automate used to be a completely manual set of processes. 

The solution has cut down the amount of time needed to process certain transactions. We went from fifteen hours to three hours of processing time. 

The solution has freed up human resources to work on other things. This has created a better work-life balance because staff are not stressed when working on a particular process. 

There is much enthusiasm around using the solution and we plan to take advantage of courses offered through its Academy. 

The solution is easy to use, has a good user interface, and processes transactions quickly. 

Initial deployment is very complex and some integrators need better training. 

I have been using the solution for one year. 

The solution is stable. 

The solution is scalable.

Customer service is good and I rate it an eight out of ten. 

Positive

The solution is the only one we have used. 

The initial setup was complex because our vendor was not as qualified as we thought and created code that did not work. The process to correct that was hard.

We implemented through a vendor but had many coding issues to correct. 

Our vendor experience was a four out of ten. 

The solution has gotten pricier. 

We did not evaluate other options. 

So far, we are happy with the solution. It seems very stable and scalable with many different uses. We are still in the early stages of using the solution, but things look promising. We are not yet using the solution's AI function. 

I rate the solution a nine out of ten. 

We do a lot of manual work on a routine basis. We brought in UiPath to reduce a lot of routine work and mundane tasks that we do. An example would be that we have developed internal tools in our company. We need to back up the logs for these tools. Earlier, we used to log into a system, copy the logs, and then store them at another place, such as Amazon S3. With the introduction of UiPath, we are able to achieve this completely in an automated way. We have set up a UiPath automation to log into a system automatically, take all the logs, and then put them in S3 so that we have a backup for all those logs. This was one of the major use cases that we had, and UiPath helped us to achieve that at scale.

We are using the cloud version. We have more of a hybrid model. We have a pipeline through which we deploy everything related to UiPath. We have a beta endpoint and a production endpoint. Everything goes through the pipeline. Once everything is deployed in beta, we do our testing, and when we know that everything is safe in the beta endpoint, we push everything to the production endpoint. It is basically a pipeline system that we manage.

Our overall efficiency has improved. Previously, the manual tasks that we had to do consumed a lot of time, and they were also prone to human errors because they were manual. With the introduction of UiPath, we were able to reduce the time by half, and we were also able to reduce resources with these automations.

We don't use drag-and-drop APIs, but there are components that we drag and drop to build a UI that can connect to the backend robots. It has increased the effectiveness of how we implement apps. We can create the UI that we want visually, easily, and immediately. Through code, it would take us more time. UiPath's drag-and-drop functionality has drastically reduced the time because everything is visual. We are able to quickly build the app that we desire.

One of the features that I find most valuable is the Apps feature. We can easily create an app, or a web app, that can connect to the robots that we created with UiPath. It is just a drag-and-drop functionality, and we can implement an app with minimal code. Once we have the app ready, we can easily and quickly share it with other stakeholders so that they start using it. The apps are also pretty professional to be used at an enterprise level. That's the main feature I love in UiPath.

UiPath's community is great. It is a place where developers like us post questions and get answers from our fellow developers. We've been using that. Their community is very active. Some of the communities out there in the market don't seem to be as active as UiPath's community. Whenever I post a question, I get a detailed response within 5 to 10 hours, which is very good. My peers have also told me the same thing. We get support in the community, and we can also contact community members for help, and they are glad to help us with any problems.

UiPath is good in a lot of areas, but as an end user, I feel one thing that can be improved is UiPath Studio. It is an application that we can download to our system and then start building the use cases that we want. Sometimes, it takes a little bit of time to launch, and when we are building a complex application involving a lot of sequential flows, it tends to lag a bit. 

As a developer, initially, UiPath is a little bit difficult to understand because it has a lot of features and components available with it. Understanding each one takes a little bit of time. After we get into the solution, they can provide more out-of-the-box hands-on. It took some time for us to grasp the concepts and features of UiPath and then implement them. If that time could be reduced, it would be really good.

In terms of features, I'm happy with the features that UiPath offers.

It has been around one and a half years since I've been using UiPath in our company.

Its stability has been great. I've never seen it break or crash. It has been very reliable.

For production workflow, it is able to scale at high volume. It is able to take in a lot of transactions per second, which is really good for us because we have a huge customer base, and more customers are starting to onboard. The more RPA is used in the back end, the better it is. It is scalable as we expected it to be. It is able to cater to all the requirements that we have. 

One good feature of UiPath is that whenever I do a Google search, I get a lot of answers. The community of UiPath is very active, and they're great. Whatever question I post, I get a reply to it. 

They also provide professional service. We have the enterprise version, and they provide professional service and support. Anytime that we have raised a ticket with them, we typically get a response within 24 hours. That has been really good. I would rate them a nine out of ten.

Positive

We haven't used any other similar solution. We had in-house solutions, but they were not scalable. They couldn’t operate when the user base was increasing on a day-to-day basis. We saw UiPath and immediately went through the documents. Once we knew that UiPath could solve all our use cases, we just onboarded it and migrated all our in-house solutions to it, and since then, we haven't had any problems. It has been great.

I was not a part of the deployment team.

We were able to reduce the resources. Previously, if we used five resources, then after we introduced UiPath, the number went down from five to three. We need two less resources with the automation that UiPath provides. There is about a 25% increase in efficiency with the help of the automation that UiPath provides.

I'm not aware of the pricing because I'm on the development team. The pricing mostly comes from our marketing team. They handle the pricing with UiPath and give us access to the UiPath licenses as a company. 

We didn't evaluate other solutions. This was the first one that we encountered. 

We have not used UiPath's artificial intelligence and machine learning capabilities, but we are doing research on that. We haven't yet implemented anything in production.

I haven't yet explored UiPath Academy, but I have heard about it.

I would rate UiPath a nine out of ten.

We use it for the automation of internal HR processes in our company.

It helps with the ease of implementing new logic from business requirements, which very rapidly change.

UiPath has also helped because fewer people are engaged in the processes we automate, and they can do more important things. It saves our staff time, on the order of 80 percent. In terms of employee satisfaction, I don't really know how they feel, because they are not in my department, but I believe that when you don't have to do such routine, repetitive work, you can have a coffee and come up with ideas on how to improve the automations. That is, by far, better than clicking and typing thousands of forms.

Also, there is less chance of a person making a mistake. If a given operation would take one person, for example, two days to do, the automation can do it in one hour, or even 30 minutes. It is very useful. We saw benefits with the first automation that was implemented, because it started to work and free people from routine work, within the first second of the automation working.

We have a lot of automations that involve filling forms on the internet and creating events in a calendar. There are a lot of fields to fill out. When creating these meetings, you have to add a description and pick the actual time. All this stuff should be done precisely, because if there is a mistake, somebody will not come to this meeting, or the information will not be applicable. Now the number of errors is zero because robots don't make mistakes.

We also don't need to involve the IT department, and we now have 15 automations. The group of people who implement it do the maintenance as well. We don't need IT and, actually, everything works fine without any maintenance. The problems come when there are updates, but the time needed for maintenance is very small.

Because we don't need to create virtual machines to install the solution on-premises, the cost is as little as it can be. Of course, we have to create several virtual machines for actual clicking, because the robot works the way a human does. But it has definitely helped with our on-prem footprint because we don't have to install the core of the system on-premises. I know, from my experience, that those kinds of core components take a lot of hardware resources. They would not require just one virtual machine; it would be a bunch of virtual machines. It is definitely very efficient to use the cloud solution from UiPath.

UiPath reduces costs because it reduces the time it takes to create automations. You don't have to write the actual code. You just build automations with higher levels of abstraction and you don't have to worry about what is done behind the curtains.

The best part is the way UiPath provides the ability to automate everything, including the architecture and Orchestrator. The interfaces are very user-friendly and intuitive. It's very easy to build automations. Someone who is not very technical can understand quite a lot and start to automate.

All automations are built starting with process analysis, then robot building, and monitoring. One person can gather the requirements, build the automation, and monitor it. This end-to-end coverage is very important. I can't even imagine how it would work if not in this way. This is the essential part of the automation: the idea, the implementation, and the maintenance.

UiPath's approach allows adding new workers, new agents, or robots to perform quicker and in parallel. For example, if you create two extra virtual machines with two extra robots, a whole bunch of operations will be performed three times faster. This kind of implementation is very convenient. And, we can change the way automations are deployed in Orchestrator and make it more efficient as well. We can do all these kinds of things really easily and quickly, like in minutes or less than an hour. That helps to scale things. You can change something in an automation in several minutes and deploy it or publish it in Orchestrator, and it already works. The challenge of implementing innovation can be addressed very quickly and very efficiently. The challenge is that we have to change our automations because other applications change with time. They have new user interfaces. But we don't need to upgrade anything to automate.

Several of our team members are studying the UiPath Academy courses at this moment. It has definitely helped because they get to know about new features that make automations more mature. One of my colleagues said, "As I read and study more in this course, I begin thinking more creatively and in more interesting ways." That means their understanding is growing and that it is changing their perceptions of what they can do with UiPath.

The information in the Academy is structured, starting with simpler concepts and moving to more advanced levels of knowledge, gradually. Also, you really learn about things you haven't used before. Thirdly, it leads you to the certification exam and getting the certificate on passing this exam. That makes you a good candidate for better jobs.

UiPath also has a very nice community of developers. When I face problems that I can't resolve by myself after several hours, I Google it in the UiPath Community and almost every problem can be solved by searching their resources. I work with different vendors and not all of them have such a big and open community. This is a real advantage. I'm not very familiar with other communities in RPA, but I can say that this community is, by far, more useful and more open than any other vendor's community I have seen.

I faced a problem when a new version of UiPath Studio didn't work with an older version of the packages that were part of our project. The problem is that when I have to change something just a bit, I actually have to rebuild the automation with new versions of these libraries. There is no backward compatibility. 

This question was addressed to an engineer from UiPath in the Community but I haven't gotten an answer. This is quite a hard question. So, I just create new automations with new approaches, which takes some time.

I have been using UiPath for about eight months.

The solution is very stable compared to other enterprise tools. Even if there is an error, if you handle it properly, everything works perfectly. From the point of view of UiPath developers, everything is done on a very high level.

It is scalable. However, to see the scalability you have to use the Enterprise Edition, because the Community Edition doesn't allow you to use more than one robot. But the mathematics are very easy: The more robots you have, the faster everything happens.

The number of automations will grow in our company.

I haven't used their technical support.

The initial setup was easy. It took a few hours.

We are using the Community Edition. The cost is only that of the virtual machines.

The pricing of the Enterprise Edition is a bit high. It's several thousand dollars a month. That's too much, because not every enterprise or organization can build such useful robots that will make it worthwhile for them to pay this much. Maybe the cost of the program could depend on the number of automations, or the complexity of the automations.

The solution is cloud-based, but you have to have some components deployed on the local computers. That is the architecture of UiPath, but the base of the infrastructure is in the cloud.

My advice is to just implement and begin automating. You don't have to even learn something before it, because everything is very intuitive.

We use it mainly for automating customer management processes and to speed up team collaboration. We use many different kinds of software, ranging from cloud services to legacy. We need our team to work between those applications and sometimes data has to be actioned. We were doing those processes manually and, as we grew our business, we realized robotic processes could intervene. We heard of UiPath, we tried it, and we were able to automate our process of working with the legacy system and other software.

We have a mix of attended and unattended processes. We are able to run some of our processes end-to-end, but some processes need moderation. We need someone to attend those processes to complete them.

Our invoicing system is a very old system but we cannot replace it right now. At the same time, we also have the latest cloud application for data analytics and manipulation. It is not possible for the legacy system to export data from that system. We use UiPath to extract and copy data from that old system and use it in our new system.

We have been able to automate the contracts portion of our business processes. Automating has saved us a lot of hours and given our team more freedom to be more creative and more productive. Overall, it has improved our business efficiency. It has increased our production capability. It has helped our business a lot.

It has saved our employees nearly 35 percent of their time so that they can work on other tasks. They have that much more time.

Attended automation is mostly used in our QA department and by certain parts of our marketing department. They include moderation by our supervisors and that has helped a lot. We are able to work efficiently with those processes.

We have been able to transform 25 percent of our processes to automation. That has created a lot of efficiency in our business. It has transformed our business to become more productive. That transformation did not require the purchase of expensive upgrades or IT support. We did not require any other software licenses.

And we have definitely seen cost savings because we are more efficient and we have more time to do more things. 

We have also been able to provide more reliable services because we have eliminated most of the human error that we used to have. Almost 90 percent of our errors have been eliminated.

It's quite easy to build Automations. They have plenty of resources. Furthermore, they have this new AI feature for process mining and task mining. It can record our manual processes and then it can suggest automations for them. Because of that feature, it's also relatively easy to implement UiPath for automation.

Some processes are very complex and very long, and sometimes it is very hard for a human to implement them manually. AI has enabled us to automatically solve those processes that would not have been doable by a human. It has given more meaningful information to our business and services.

When we have difficulty knowing what features are most applicable and how to apply features to particular processes, or how to solve specific problems regarding automation, we find answers thanks to a lot of the senior people in the UiPath community. They are really supportive when we are implementing automation in our business. 

Some of our employees also use MacBook devices for their daily work, mostly for high-graphic projects. UiPath doesn't have a complex set of features for OS X systems. If they could add more complex features for MacBooks, that would be good.

Also, it is quite slow sometimes when running very heavy and complex processes. It would help if they could improve their base speed.

I have been using UiPath for a little over two years now.

So far it has been very stable.

The support is good, very active and reliable. No problems so far.

Positive

We have been using UiPath for two years. When we see our financial results for the last five years, we have not seen that much increase in our business because there are other factors involved.

But we were able to automate our processes and be more productive in those last two years. We have many applications and projects going on. I think we will also see a financial increase in a couple of more years.

The pricing is transparent, and the best part is that they have the Community version, so there isn't anything to hide. You can try the cloud version. They offer plenty of time, two months, for a trial. There are other pricing models that are good. We have not used all of their services, but we have UiPath Studio and that has good, fair pricing.

We were considering Automation Anywhere and software from IBM, but we found that UiPath fits our needs better.

It was really fast and easy to get started with the UiPath. They had a Community version that I could just sign up for, download, and start using. There were plenty of resources online, on YouTube, to learn and implement it. Also, the community was active. The other RPA software was not like that. You had to phone, request a demo, and the way they worked was quite hard. We found it very flexible to use UIPath.

We are using UiPath as our RPA solution for finance, supply chain, revenue cycle, HR, and IT. At the moment, we're using it mainly for unattended automations of big jobs.

In the healthcare field, where systems often don't talk to each other, UiPath helps data to be shared between systems. My colleagues have been talking about that and there has been an improvement. That's important because it helps us to keep in line with one another.

Also, security and compliance are a big deal in our organization, especially because we are in healthcare, and we keep it as secure as possible. UiPath assists us with that in terms of credentialing and separation of duties. We don't take security lightly.

The tenant concept, where you can have everyone working in their own space, is valuable.

We're just starting to implement UiPath on a larger scale. We've been using it for about nine months maybe, so we're new to it.

We really have not had a lot of hiccups or anything that's been difficult. The stability has been good. On a scale of one to 10, I would give it an eight right now and that's only because we haven't really tested the boundaries.

The scalability is good. It's easy to do. It will get pushed a little bit more as we get more mature with the product, but so far so good.

We had a different solution prior to UiPath, and what we've really liked so far with UiPath is the way that they interact with us in terms of customer support and satisfaction. They're very in tune with what we need. They have a lot of experience in the RPA world.

Our TAM is Micah de Boer and our sales engineer is Mick Taylor. Our account manager, Garet Wright, has been outstanding.

Positive

We previously used Automation Anywhere. One of the reasons we switched was that it didn't seem to be as mature as UiPath. Another was that it does not have a citizen developer program or even the concept of a citizen developer. In addition, it didn't seem to be as stable. We had a lot of issues with the system going offline or having problems. And when it came to customer service, they were not responsive to our needs. It would take days for them to get back to us on questions or issues that we submitted.

Right now we are an on-prem model, but we are switching to a SaaS-based model in the cloud.

From what I have heard from my team, the deployment of UiPath has been much easier than the deployment of Automation Anywhere. It is much more straightforward, clearer, and easier.

The team that supports the platform is a team of just two people. Both are senior analyst programmers and they are responsible for the deployment and the infrastructure set up of everything related to the UiPath product. We have two other individuals on my team who are the RPA developers, the ones writing the bots.

The deployment has been pretty lightweight so far in comparison to what we had to deal with when we used Automation Anywhere.

We did it ourselves.

It's returning hours back to employees so that they can do more tasks that involve thinking, and not have to do so much mundane, repetitive work. That gives us a good return on investment because something that might have taken an individual an hour to do can be done by a robot in five minutes. It's definitely freeing up some actual work time for people.

We've saved the equivalent of five or six FTEs, and that's in the short amount of time that we've been using UiPath.

It has also improved our employees' joy at work because they aren't having to do some of the mundane activities that they had to do in the past.

Licensing allocations are easy. We also have the ability to have a robot license be fully utilized, meaning it can do more than one thing. If it's idle, we're able to use that robot for some other automation, rather than having a one-to-one relationship between automations and robots.

We just moved to their Enterprise licensing model and it seems fair at this point. It will be interesting to see where we are over the next three years and if we're able to show a return on that hefty investment.

One area that is challenging for me is tracking licenses. It would help to have a license dashboard so that we would know how many licenses have been allocated, who they're allocated to, and when they were last used. Right now, to gather that information, I have to go to four different screens in UiPath and then consolidate all that. A licensing module that we could look at from administrative and management perspectives, would be awesome. That's the main thing I have been hearing from my staff.

When we first chose our initial vendor, Automation Anywhere, we had done an RFP process and had gone through pilots. It was close in terms of which was number one and which was number two. When we discovered that Automation Anywhere wasn't meeting our needs, we contacted other folks who had used Automation Anywhere and had switched to UiPath and asked them for feedback and what their experience had been. We did some benchmarking with others around us to see what they were doing.

Comparing UiPath to what we had before, it has been a cakewalk. Be sure that you work with your leadership and with your IT areas to pick the best deployment solution for your company.

We haven't had an opportunity to use all the features and functions, but in terms of the robustness of the product and the communication we've received from our teams at UiPath, we've had an outstanding experience with them, and we really look forward to keeping that going in the future as we build out this program.

We work as a center of excellence and we develop automations centrally for other departments. All our deployments are unattended bots that are deployed and managed by us, centrally. They are all running on a virtual machine. Nothing is running on client computers or laptops. We do not have any attended use cases. The process owners are interacting with the bots.

We use the bots for a lot of reporting, including monthly and weekly reports. We are a construction company and we have a lot of reports for all kinds of things, such as construction projects, different construction sites, and various subsidiaries for regional departments. A region like Bavaria, for example, needs its reports. And there are plenty of controlling departments in all of the subsidiaries.

We also have some ticketing use cases. One of them is for IT services, meaning internal ticketing. That bot regularly checks our ticket software and automatically processes some of the tickets. For example, when an employee needs rights to a specific system, the bot checks whether they fulfill the requirements and approves or declines the ticket.

Another type of ticketing use case is more about processing customer tickets. As a construction company, we also do facility management, and that means there are a lot of external customers with their own systems in which they record tickets. The tickets are not visible in our local systems so someone has to go to the external systems, export the tickets, filter them, and then tell everyone what they're supposed to do to their buildings as a result. The tickets might be about small repair jobs, for example. We run this daily and, in the morning, everyone receives an email with all the tickets that have to be done within one day, three days, one week, et cetera.

Both of the ticketing use cases are connected with SLAs. If you miss a certain time frame before processing a ticket for external customers, you have to pay a penalty fee. For the internal tickets there are SLAs for internal tracking purposes. Because those tickets have to be processed within two hours, that bot runs every two hours and checks for new tickets.

Another IT services use case is for getting access rights to local drives.

We also have many recurring processes. For example, in HR they have to go to the system and confirm a process. It’s a necessary evil which is probably due to the legacy systems we have. Someone defined this process a long time ago and it still has to be done.

We also have use cases in finance and treasury. They are not tickets, but they process requests from employees. For example, they can request cash on a specific card and the bot will check the emails and then basically transfer data from an email, or from a PDF form attached to an email, and enter it into the finance system.

One last type of use case is where the bot works as an interface between systems. Data has to be exported from one system and imported to another system and there is no existing API. The bot exports and imports the data. We have one bot that exports PDF documents and sends them to an email interface. It defines a specific subject and then attaches the file. That file will automatically be uploaded to another system. Or the bot may log in to a system and upload the document. These use cases are due to the fact that there is no interface between two systems and they're either not big enough to develop an API or they may involve an external customer system and the customer has no interest in providing an API.

UiPath has freed up our employees' time and that's its main purpose. We don't have huge use cases, but for our bigger use cases it could be saving us 35 to 40 hours per month. With the smaller processes, people save about two hours a month. We have 23 use cases that are live at the moment and the total time saved by them is about seven or eight person-days a week. The big processes account for 50 to 60 percent of all the savings.

Employees have more time for more important things, but there are no direct cost savings from our automations. What we do have are a lot of efficiency gains and some time savings. Any cost savings are on the lower end of the scale.

The solution also definitely reduces human error. We have some processes that involve penalty fees if there is human error, so the reduction in errors has probably affected the business on a very small scale.

In terms of the cost of automations, before UiPath the whole automation process was much more complex. There might have been software providers involved in that process, charging us and providing APIs. And the whole process took way longer. Now that we have a UiPath license, the cost of implementing any automation is zero, other than our salaries, which would be paid anyway. The automation creation process is definitely a lot faster. It's also cheaper because there is no involvement of an external software developer, which is probably the most expensive part.

I like the REFramework. It's one of the unique selling points of UiPath because it gives you a framework within the software to structure your processes. It's perfect in terms of error handling and it provides a lot of functionalities for processing multiple transactions. It makes the whole solution more robust.

I tested the Process Mining at my previous company and I don't think it's suitable for RPA processes. It operates at a way higher level and, using it, you may find an area in which you can optimize a process, but it doesn't just give you a defined process for automation. It doesn't necessarily help you to identify the processes.

The Task Capture component offers the ability to record a process and it will give you process documentation. It tells you how many clicks are being made, and it will create screenshots. It tells you the basic activities that are being done in the process. When we tested it, the quality of these documents was very low. It took more time to take the output and make it useful than it would have taken to analyze and document the process ourselves. 

We are not using any of that. Together with the customer, we are manually defining and documenting processes. We are doing the actual automation, of course, with UiPath. In terms of monitoring it afterward, it's 50/50. Standard Orchestrator definitely offers you some ways to monitor your processes. It tells you how many processes failed and why they failed. You could also define a process that sends you an email when it fails.

UiPath also offers some BI components, but that requires a separate license and costs. We are not using them. The whole BI reporting functionality of standard UiPath is not that great. We use external dashboards in Power BI.

We also have a calendar application because, with standard Orchestrator, there's no overview about when you have bots running and when you have free slots. So it's also not great for planning license usage. The whole visualization piece, out-of-the-box, is not so nice. UiPath is mainly the automation tool for us, and it's definitely great for that. But in terms of analysis and monitoring, there's definitely still potential for the software.

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

Their tech support replies quite quickly. But when we had technical problems, most of the time, we had to have multiple calls. It's not that great. They definitely provided us with all the experts, but they just didn't immediately find solutions, most of the time.

It often took two to three days to fix our issues. We would have to explain the issue one or two times and then they say, "Okay, we need to do a call." After the call we would try out the solution but it wouldn't work and there would be another call. Support is another potential area for improvement.

Also, we bought our licenses from a UiPath partner. We are actually supposed to talk to them for support, but they charge for their consulting services. They are the reason we didn't have constant communication with UiPath. From my experience at my previous job, where we worked with UiPath, we were in close communication with the UiPath success manager. There was way better communication and support because we always had a channel that we could talk to regularly. And they already knew what our issues had been. If you are working directly with UiPath, the tech support is good, although not great.

Neutral

We did not have a previous solution.

I started in RPA with my previous company. My boss just told me to get into this topic. I started with the UiPath Academy before we were even using the software, but I could follow all the courses. It's all video training, so it's easy to follow. The Microsoft training often consists of long sets of text and it says "expected reading time is 23 minutes," but it's 23 minutes just to read the text. Now, UiPath even offers training exercises. 

And because they offer the Community version, you can download the full-featured software without actually having a license, for personal use and for training purposes. That way you can try out whatever you learn. That makes the learning very practical. And the Community version is not limited to 30 days like test versions of some other solutions. It's a version that you can use for testing forever and you can use all the functionalities. That definitely helped me when I did the training. That's how I got from knowing nothing about RPA to knowing a lot about RPA, before working with it.

If you have a basic understanding of the software, the most important thing is to develop with it, because that gives you practical experience.

They also have very specific, deep-dive courses, for working with Orchestrator, among other things. They're easy to find. You can invest two hours and learn the most important aspects of the UI and look for what you need.

With the Advanced RPA Developer certification, there is an exam. That is where I got the most practical experience. It's not just quizzes, it's also practical projects.

Overall, the Academy is great. It has training paths as well as very specific courses. 

UiPath is quite expensive and whatever additional components you want to use will have additional costs. We are not using the Document Understanding feature because of the cost. For Document Understanding, the cost may be per transaction.

Compared to Power Automate, UiPath is quite expensive to set up. What we are trying to do, and likely everybody tries to do this, is fully occupy one unattended-bot license before getting another one. So it's not just a matter of buying a few licenses, because they are quite expensive. That definitely also affects the return on investment, especially if you automate smaller processes.

Also, we are currently working with centralized automation development, but we are planning to decentralize it with citizen developers as well, for smaller processes. For that, we intend to use Power Automate Desktop because in that scenario the pricing disqualified UiPath. If you give a UiPath Studio license to many people—to fulfill the vision of a bot for every person—or even to one person per department, they would have to work quite hard to see a positive return on investment. 

For UiPath, you need Orchestrator, which is already quite expensive, although you can use just one to start with. But if you have multiple unattended-bot licenses and multiple Studio licenses, it gets expensive quite fast. 

Also, the whole pricing structure is very unclear. You can't find out anything about prices before talking with UiPath or with a partner. At that point, you're still not sure what kind of price you're getting. Of course, they offer savings when you order many licenses, but there's no fixed reference point if you haven't talked to UiPath before. There is no real information about what you actually need and how much you can expect it to cost. 

With the Microsoft platform, you can directly see the kinds of packages they have and whether they're charging per process or per transaction. You see the price. It's very transparent.

When I compare UiPath with other providers' solutions, UiPath offers a very structured development interface. It is more structured than the interface of Microsoft Power Automate, for example. It offers a very visually appealing way of structuring the processes in flow charts as well as in sequences. It makes it easy to see an overview of a process. I definitely like UiPath's development interface.

UiPath Orchestrator is definitely great, and better than what competitors offer because it enables you to use queues very easily, which again helps to create robust automations.

In addition, the UiPath community is the best among all the software communities that I've seen. There's a great forum. Whatever question you have will either be answered by other developers or even UiPath employees who participate in the forum. Also, there is already a huge stock of questions and answers about automation. Usually, you will get an answer to any question within hours or even minutes. Together with the training platform, the whole ecosystem around the community is much better than that of any other software I've ever seen.

In my previous company, we evaluated the big ones at that time: Automation Anywhere, Blue Prism, and UiPath. 

In my current company, we mainly evaluated two solutions. The first was UiPath, because it's probably the most powerful solution. The second was Microsoft Power Automate, which is now becoming more mature. Power Automate is probably also the easiest to implement because we are Office 365 users. We could just provide a Power Automate desktop license to any of our employees. It's definitely much easier to acquire Power Automate licenses and provide them to the users. It's directly integrated. There's no need for IT involvement.

In my opinion, UiPath is easy to use. Once you have been using it for a while, it's pretty easy. If you're using it as a citizen developer, meaning that you want to automate your own processes, it's probably a bit complex. It offers a lot of functionality and properties that can be edited per activity. You have to have a basic understanding of variables, arguments, et cetera, if you want to build a robust solution.

The macro recorder is not that nice. It's not like you can just record a process and then run it over and over again. It definitely requires some experience to create a robust process. All in all, I think it's easy to use. 

I also tried the StudioX version, just for testing purposes, and that may be a bit easier to use, but it's still not a tool that you can give to someone and they will be able to start developing on their own. In particular, they will not be able to run something unattended because that requires a lot of testing. It requires basic knowledge, which comes with experience, about the HTML selectors.

In general, UiPath is the most powerful solution there is on the market right now for RPA, mainly because of the easy structure provided by UiPath Orchestrator for larger transactional business processes.