UiPath Platform Reviews

We've used it to automate most of our processes. Our organization is completely technology-driven and we have been able to automate a lot of our processes with UiPath. The main thing that we are using it for is document creation with multiple fields and approval processes.

We're using it to automate daily tasks, using small bots for multiple processes. In the long-run, they're actually connected together. A lot of people have left our organization in the past couple of years and, instead of hiring new employees, we actually try to build a bot for whatever the work those employees were doing.

By not replacing employees who have left, we have been able to achieve our aim of running a lean company. We are able to save a lot of money on HR costs as well as on the costs of hiring new employees.

In addition, our document-processing time has been reduced for every customer that we are catering to, and that has resulted in great ROI as well as customer satisfaction.

We have compared the performance of humans with the bots who replaced them as they left the organization. The humans were making a lot of errors compared to the bots. The bots are not perfect and they do make their share of errors, but they are quite different from human errors. Everything is logic-based, and everything happens with triggers, so the possibility of an error is minimalistic when something is being handled by a bot. That is especially true for a bot that is created with UiPath because it's so mature. Overall, there are hardly any errors that come out of the bots made with UiPath.

Another benefit comes from the UiPath Academy courses. It saves us on training costs because we don't have to develop the content for training new employees. We're not product experts when it comes to UiPath and the Academy delivers training in a fashion that is easy to understand. There's a lot of support provided with the training courses as well. Not only does the Academy help in terms of training-development costs, but it has minimized the duration of training for each employee who starts to use UiPath. The results are great savings for the organization, both monetary, through automation, and non-monetary when it comes to training.

The AI and machine learning that are built into these bots really help us to make bots at a mature level where they're able to track with real-world customers. They also help with employee engagement and business productivity and take them to a whole new level. Obviously, we cannot develop such technology from scratch. We used built-in processes and automations in the past, but once we found, first when we were using Automation Anywhere, and now while using UiPath, this type of technology, it really took over the technology suite that our organization had been using previously and replaced it completely. UiPath is a complete suite that can handle most of our needs by itself.

Document creation is one of the most important features for us. As a healthcare company, we have a lot of documents with complex fields. For example, if a treatment is booked by a customer in another country, a lot of paperwork has to be completed. That paperwork first goes to the healthcare provider and, once accepted there, it comes to the company to be approved by the management. Then it goes back to the customer.

In addition, the process has been integrated into mobile apps. That way, a senior manager gets a request on the mobile app and to approve the transaction they just have to press the "Accept" button and everything else happens on its own. All of that happens in a matter of seconds.

Also, the UiPath Academy courses are very user-friendly and enable us to achieve a lot more. Those courses have taught us a lot, especially for our new automation employees. Once the basic courses are completed by any new employee, we actually recommend that they complete the certifications that are available via UiPath, and some of them are actually free of cost. Only after completing certification do we allow them to work on the floor. We have found the Academy content to be really amazing in terms of design as well as its functionality. We have made use of all of the courses there are.

The UiPath community has grown quite a bit, but it's still not on par with the kind of support that you would find with Automation Anywhere. That is still missing because UiPath is a relatively new entrant in the market. The community support is growing, but that is definitely one of the areas that can be improved.

Also, sometimes there are failures in the cloud during migration. Say you're migrating it from one instance to another instance. There are failures and there's not much support for such cases in the UiPath documentation. While it is a rare instance that we need to migrate, whenever we do have to migrate, we generally face some issues. I feel that there are bugs in that area.

We've been using UiPath for about three years.

The platform is really stable. There's never been a point when it's been unstable or has had runtime issues. There have been really minute server crashes, unexpectedly. But I don't think that is due to the platform. It is more due to the server environment and the hosting environment not being configured properly. There are no problems whatsoever in terms of the stability as well as the performance of the product.

The product is very scalable. It is meant for scalability. It is specifically meant for a situation where there are a lot of tasks that have to be completed by and it automates everything. Even if large volumes of data and tasks have to be completed with lightning speed, that is exactly where UiPath fits in. It does the job beautifully. That is the reason it was able to replace the whole technology suite that we were using, a suite that consisted of different products.

The technical support has been great. The only issue that we've had is that there aren't enough specialized support people who can help with the server issues. Configuring Google Cloud Platform with UiPath can be challenging. There were some errors that we were not able to figure out on our own. There are two support teams that we could reach out to, either the server support or the UiPath support. Sometimes both of them were confused about what was causing the issue. And sometimes, it takes more than the anticipated time to resolve the issue. But overall, UiPath provides great support.

At first, we were using a completely in-house technology system. After that, we used Automation Anywhere for a couple of years. But once we started using UiPath, we were able to replace that completely.

The initial setup was fairly easy. We've been using the Google Cloud Platform to host the entire automation platform and there isn't much documentation for deploying it on GCP. There are a lot of settings and configurations that are location-specific and that relate to the load and the number of bots that you are going to make with UiPath. There are a lot of things that come into the picture and the documentation is not up to the mark.

To sum it up, it is a little difficult, but not impossible to deploy it initially.

It only takes a few days but it depends on the complexity of the kinds of bots that you plan to run with the platform. Certain bots could take time. For that situation, there are consulting services. Also, there are certain bots that are already there as a template and you can customize them. But if there are processes that require a custom bot to be built from scratch, that could definitely take time. That could take from months to a year if it's a very complex bot and you're creating it with an in-house team.

Our implementation strategy was to take one step at a time. We had designed a complete project deployment roadmap, in which we had certain milestones that we planned to achieve within a few months. There were then more milestones that we planned to reach within a year. We did have to take on some consulting services from UiPath partners for the customized bots, but that resulted in the development costs being reduced, as it went a lot faster than it would have gone without the consulting support. It has gone pretty smoothly.

Apart from the consultants for the customized bots, the initial deployment was completely handled by our in-house team. There was a fair bit of documentation provided with the system itself and we found it sufficient to take care of the initial deployment.

The ROI has been really excellent. We're able to save a lot of costs that were previously paid for subscriptions to multiple suites of software. We were able to save all of that and invest it into one product, UiPath, as well as into development of the bots.

The ROI has been very positive for us. The main issue is that there is an initial investment that you have to make. Once you do that, the ROI keeps on growing year-on-year. For us, it has only been three years. If we compare our costs and ROI over a longer period, I'm sure we'll see a lot better ROI.

The costs are related to infrastructure and development and, of course, at a later stage, include monitoring and maintenance. If you compare all of that over a longer period of time, you'll see savings of anywhere between two and 15 times compared to an equivalent system, over a period of about five to seven years.

Another area with room for improvement is the pricing. Initially, the pricing was a lot more affordable. Now, it seems a bit excessive.

Get an estimate of the cost from UiPath sales representatives. Don't just include the UiPath cost, but also the consulting costs that you might have to pay, and the number of licenses that you might need as an organization. The third thing to consider is the development cost of the bots. All of that has to be considered well in advance.

I don't think there is anything that UiPath bots aren't able to do. But be aware that the budget could become excessive by using UiPath because there are so many different costs that come into the picture. You could require trained employees, people who have previous experience with UiPath, to develop bots that are a custom fit for your organization.

Cost would be one of the things that I would recommend that other organizations consider in advance to see if it suits their budgets. They should also consider whether they have the resources that can deploy and design bots that are able to automate the tasks and the processes that they want to automate.

Apart from UiPath, we also used Automation Anywhere. The reason we use UiPath far more than Automation Anywhere is because we have been using it for some time and we have some resources who are quite well-trained on it. It suits us pretty well. It has automated most of our processes and really kept our system moving. Whatever issues we have had with the product have been very well resolved by the customer support team in a very timely manner, and that is another reason we prefer UiPath over Automation Anywhere.

You need to have resources who are trained in UiPath. You could take the initiative of training employees, but you need some senior resources who have prior experience with UiPath who can be project managers and guide the development and analyst teams on how to reach the goals that the organization is trying to achieve.

UiPath was a fairly new product when we started using it. They were giving a 60-day free trial and were also providing free certifications for that initial period. That is how we started with it. Over the years, we've seen that the UiPath community has grown quite a bit. From being a new entry in the automation market, it has grown into a very mature product and it has now taken over as the main system that our company is using. We rely on technology to support our backend processes and we need a system that is very reliable in terms of delivery. UiPath has turned out to be a system that works out very well for us. The UiPath community really helps whenever there are bugs or glitches that our company is facing. You can reach out to the community where there are very senior developers as well as analysts and you can get a lot of help there, apart from the customer support.

It runs in its own private cloud in the Google Cloud Platform. We have some projects that are run on UiPath that are given to independent contractors to work on. We give a contractor a license for the system and they have to install UiPath on their computer and complete whatever work they have to complete on that. But for our internal organization and employees, we have a private cloud over which UiPath is running.

The biggest lesson would be to just take one step at a time. Make use of the partner support at the beginning. Initially, we tried to build everything ourselves and that cost a lot more than it would have if we had used consultants. There are companies that provide consulting support and there are companies that will actually build your bots exactly to your requirements. That way, you can just deploy them from day one. They also provide maintenance and support for the bots they have developed for you.

The first use case is related to our email process. We need to download multiple attachments in the form of PDF and Excel files from emails. We only accept the PDF files into a specific folder, while the Excel files go into another. We split them based on the file extension.

The second use case is related to the retail domain, in which we need to update an application with data that we get from a client. We process a few Excel operations and then update all of the invoice records in the application and generate a PDF invoice form with the client's details from Excel. That PDF is then emailed to the client.

With UiPath automations, work has been made easier for our employees. Previously, people were working on those processes manually. Now, they can concentrate on other work and on improving their skills in other areas. They have also improved their knowledge of RPA technology. There are time savings and we are more profitable. For just one of our processes, we have saved approximately 20 hours per week.

We are also able to deliver the output to our client easily. When things were processed manually, there might have been errors, but with the automation, they have been reduced as much as possible. Bots don't think about other topics while they're working.

In addition, while I haven't used the AI functionality of UiPath very much myself, my colleagues do use it, and it has enabled them to automate more processes overall.

But the main thing, when it comes to our business side, is that the solution helps to reduce the cost of digital transformation. In terms of ROI, it is helping the profitability of the organization. It has helped to reduce the employee count, has sped up the delivery of solutions, and it has helped us obtain more clients. We can generate more output, good results, in less time, enabling us to improve the overall expectations of our clients. Our cost savings have been greater than expected and the business team is more than happy with the results.

There is also the issue of employee satisfaction. Using myself, as an example, I feel very happy about developing and monitoring the results. It is satisfying to see that a process is working as expected, and that the results are more accurate compared to the previous manual work.

UiPath has enabled us to implement end-to-end processes. That's important because we don't want to depend on third-party tools. With UI Path, all the resources are within the application for generating an end-to-end process, so we don't have to struggle to develop such a process.

In addition, the solution doesn't require much infrastructure. We can easily install and operate the tool in a Windows environment.

I also did the Advanced RPA Developer course in the UiPath Academy. I learned how to create end-to-end implementations using the UiPath tools. The course helped me to develop my skills. In the course within the Academy, you learn about every command in UiPath. It is easy to learn the information very quickly, when compared to other learning resources. The Academy has all the resources for regular, advanced, and master developers.

When it comes to document processing, they could work on more accurately identifying objects from PDF files.

I have been using RPA tools, such as UiPath, for the past four years. We are using the Enterprise version.

With the help of all the dynamic options in UiPath, the stability of the bots has been very good.

We have deployed automation solutions for a lot of our clients in their environments, and they are happy with the results as well. There are more than 100 users.

The technical support has been very responsive. They provide very accurate answers to our inquiries.

Positive

Our business side has been happy with the ROI, compared to other vendors.

Our business team looked at other tools, including Blue Prism and Automation Anywhere, before selecting this tool. They were much happier with the results generated with UiPath than with the others.

The main differences are that UiPath provides a more efficient implementation and it's easier to monitor the results. It's also more efficient when it comes to analyzing a process. Compared to other vendors, implementation takes less time with UiPath.

I can recommend UiPath to others. It will make their work easier. It's very easy to learn and to run the tools compared to other automation options.

We have two use cases.

One is for our claim accessing process, for which I have developed a process for logging into the client's application. It includes launching the browser and getting logged into the application by entering the username and password and handling two-step verification. Handling that requires some logic. Once logged in, it navigates to the claim status feed and selects the organization's and payer's details. It then enters the required details of the patients. These details are given by the client in an Excel document that the process reads. It searches for the values, one-by-one. If there is no record for the patient whose details are entered, it will throw an error stating that there are no claims present. It captures such exceptions and records them in a separate Excel file.

If that person's claim is present, it fetches 25 to 35 key details from that record and they are written to an Excel document. Once the process is done, the Excels will be sent as email attachments to the client.

The second process that I am currently developing is one where I need to get the data from Google Sheets. This process involves four or five practice management systems. It has to log into each practice management system and, for each one, it needs to schedule appointments based on the data present in the Google Sheet. The process involves navigating to the respective screens, filtering the details, and entering them in a CSV file. Based on that file, we have all the data related to patients' records. The process checks the patients' payment records. There are exception-handling routines and any errors are noted in an Excel sheet. Once all the patients' records have been completed, it closes the application and sends the data to the respective clients. It produces a log file in Excel as an attachment, as well.

Automation has definitely saved us time and money. For example, for data entry, if a person takes around eight hours per day to complete and upload about 200 sets of data, a bot can easily upload around 3,000 to 4,000 sets per day. It reduces the amount of time to get data uploaded. If a person uploads one record in three minutes, the bot can upload the same data in about 30 to 40 seconds. The bot provides much greater time- and cost-efficiency. It speeds up digital transformation.

It has also reduced human error. Among those 200 records that a person can upload per day, mistakes may happen in 10 to 15 records. Bots don't do things incorrectly at any point in time. Values are entered correctly in each field.

As a result, it frees up employee time. If a bot runs for eight hours, a person only has to look at it for a little while, because a bot will definitely do the process perfectly. That means we don't need a human to dedicate much time watching something run end-to-end. If the bot does the process properly for four records, it will definitely do the next 4000 records correctly as well. So there is not much time required of a human to watch the bot.

On the basis of costs in India, where I work, if a person earns 30,000 per month, the cost of the process they work on is 360,000 per year. A bot for the same process may cost 150,000 or 200,000 only. Automating is more cost-efficient than hiring a person to work on the process.

Among the most valuable features is the ability to read Excel and Word documents with API calls.

In the Google platform, I need to generate security-related things like an API key and an API secure code. That enables me to get the data into UiPath. The product is built such that only if all the security requirements are properly done am I able to get the required data.

UiPath is also the best tool for a beginner or someone who has no knowledge of programming. It is easy to learn quickly and to understand. You can get working in it much more quickly than if you had to acquire a programming background.

I would rate the ease of building an automation at 3.8 out of five, as I have only been working in UiPath for the past 11 months. I am now able to understand everything and can design the kinds of processes I need to build. There are many courses available on their website in the UiPath Academy where they completely show you how to do things. Within a short period of time—I spent the first three months in the UiPath Academy—I was able to understand things clearly, including descriptions of the Properties panels and every field. I understand the uses of these Properties.

Also, many of the Activities are pre-built, but if any activities or logical processes are not available, I can get them through third-party packages that are in the UiPath Marketplace. I am able to build automations quickly. In the worst-case scenario, if it's a large project, I can develop that project within two months.

I have used the AI functionality for PDF automations. In these processes, the bot is able to capture the data properly about 70 to 80 percent of the time. But if a document is not proper or it isn't handled the right way, the bot struggles to get the required data. UiPath has to work on this aspect so that the bot will be able to completely capture the data.

There is also room for improvement in the area of third-party integrations. In the last week I have gone through a video for an integration service, but it did not show things end-to-end. Rather, they just explained the connection details only. After performing the steps they showed, I was not able to get things working properly in my process.

I have been using UiPath for around 11 months.

The stability of UiPath is quite good. In some particular areas, the bot struggles a bit and we have to implement Human in the Loop. Those cases are where the bot can't do certain validations. But overall, the solution is stable and accurate in the results.

The scalability is a four out of five. 

At a certain point, we needed support from UiPath. The solution can be integrated with ABBYY. Getting an AABBYY license doesn't happen just like that. You need to get a trial license and it's a long process. We needed support from the UiPath team to get it done.

You can try to get a solution from the UiPath forum or from the documentation sections, but the UiPath support is the best. I have raised three or four support tickets over the year and they have helped me through each issue, completely, to the end. They respond within 24 hours. When you explain your issue to them, they create a step-by-step process to sort it out. And once I solved the issues, they inspected what I had done.

Positive

I used Microsoft Power Automate. I switched because Power Automate is not very user-friendly when compared with UiPath. And when it comes to integrations in the Microsoft product, most of the connectors are still in the preview state. In UiPath, all the integrations are active and enable you to get the desired result. Also, the Microsoft community does not have many active people handling it. With the UiPath community, you get an immediate response for any issue you have posted.

I use the UiPath forums if I have an issue and I'm unable to find a solution or develop my process. If I post it on the forum, in a maximum of two minutes I'll get an email response from other UiPath users, as well as from senior users who may have two or three years' experience. They politely answer my issues. I have also provided solutions to questions in the forum over the past two months. UiPath's user community is absolutely the best one.

The initial setup is completely easy and straightforward. It is just like installing software in a system by clicking "next, next, next." At the end of it, you have Studio in your system. 

If you need to allocate a particular system to Orchestrator, even that is a very simple process and there are videos available on the internet that show you how to set up the process quickly.

Instead of giving a monthly salary to a person, you can get a bot on a yearly basis. It is cost-efficient and will save you money. You'll also get a more accurate and stable result than if you had a human work on it.

Pricing is based on your process. If your process is fairly simple, it will not cost much.

UiPath has enabled me to build automations much more quickly when compared to other tools. If you go with Blue Prism or Automation Anywhere, you need to have some programming language skills to implement things. But UiPath is completely drag-and-drop.

I looked online at which is the best tool. I looked at many details, what each product provides, and decided that UiPath is a better solution as an automation tool.

Overall, UiPath has the best user community and the best, detailed videos. It is easy to understand, there is no coding at all, and even a beginner can create a process in a short period of time. It is also easily integratable. These are the points where it stands out against any other tools.

For us, in some use cases, end-to-end automation means a need for Human in the Loop. There are certain points where the bot is not able to validate things and a human is needed to verify whether the bot has done things properly or not. But bots are able to process 90 percent of an end-to-end process. For monitoring, UiPath has Orchestrator. If any error occurs, the data is immediately updated in Orchestrator and you can easily see the error and the cause, and you can easily resolve it.

In the UiPath Academy, UiPath offers the best content for each module and, after each video, there is a quiz so that we can show we have understood what we have learned from the video. There are also activities and a practice session where we can implement the use cases by practicing them in Studio. If we are stuck at any point after the practice, they have a solution area where they explain the steps you need to implement in Studio to get the desired results. They give sample workflows as well. I don't think any other software tool does this. They even provide detailed, step-by-step videos for third-party integrations.

We're doing mortgage loan processing. When people are applying for a new loan, we're using it to gather all loan documents and validate the property ownership and do a title search. We then put the loan documents in a package.

We are using its latest version.

It used to take two hours to take all these documents and load them in, and now, it takes 15 minutes. So, we went from two hours to 15 minutes. We're able to process a significantly larger number of documents in a much shorter time.

It had pre-built integration with the scanning solution that we use called Kodak Alaris. They use our current scanners to scan in the documents, and then they have the software that allows you to load those documents right into UiPath Orchestrator. That gave us the ability to automate those processes.

It took quite a bit of time to understand some of the document types. Some of the documents were already pre-built, but some of the documents were new, and it took us quite a bit of time to get it to train on those documents. If there was any variation, we had to re-train it. It took longer than expected.

I have been using this solution for about four years.

Its stability is very good. 

It is enterprise-ready. So far, we are very happy with everything that we have been working with. It is designed for enterprises. 

We're going to continue to use it for the next five years. It is automating the roles. It has to do more with validation than anything else. The users like it a lot, and we're very happy with it so far. 

We have a third party for support, and they are very good. They are very quick to support.

All in all, it was pretty straightforward. We had to bring in third-party consultants to get it going. We were expecting that, but the costs were a little bit more than what we were thinking at the time.

From beginning to end, it probably took about four months. It included everything that we were trying to do. We got started right away, but the actual deployment took a little bit longer than what we thought it was going to take.

We've moved from different versions over time, and we were able to do it pretty seamlessly. We had another product called Automation Anywhere, and that took a lot more effort to do the migration. So, we were happy with the implementation time that UiPath took.

We took the help of a third party. Our experience with them was good. It was more expensive than we thought it was going to be, but overall, it was good.

For its deployment and maintenance, we have a team of four people in the house, and then we have five people outside who are actually continuing to do maintenance in terms of upgrades and new forms as they come up.

We have probably saved about $6 million using the product. We were going to have to hire about 600 people to be able to process the loans, but we only had to hire 150 people. We didn't have to hire 450 people, which was pretty significant.

We did pay more than what we thought we were going to have to pay upfront. We had a third party for implementation, and the cost turned out to be about twice of what we thought it was going to be upfront. So, instead of one month, it took us three months for an ROI, but we got significant returns. 

The hardware requirements to manage this was also a little bit more than we thought it was going to be, but our ROI was so high that in a way we earned it back. So, even though the costs were more than what we were expecting, the return was much better than we were expecting. We were supposed to go from two hours to one hour. That was the goal, and we went from two hours to 15 minutes. The benefit was more than what we were expecting.

Its actual cost turned out to be about two times more than what we thought it was going to be upfront. There were hardware costs that we were not expecting. Some of the server costs and things of that nature were higher than what we were expecting but based upon the return, it was a net.

We looked at Blue Prism, Datamatics, and Signavio. We just looked at the market and how many references they had that were in our market space. We were able to talk to a significant number of companies that were already using these products for the same thing, and that's what we based our decision on.

I would advise doing the homework upfront and seeing what the full impact is going to be. You should not just look at task automation; you should also look at the full process. That's because when you make a change in one area, you need to consider how that's going to affect another area in your organization. You may get a big benefit in one area, and then all of a sudden, you have to change the way you're doing business to take advantage of that. If you correct a bottleneck in one area, you might still have another area that's a bottleneck, so you need to look at the full process. This is something that we learned in general from our experience. As we were fixing different things and automating different things, there was another bottleneck down the road. We went from doing 10 a minute to 100 a minute, but when we went to the next process, we could only do 10 a minute. It didn't really make a difference unless we fixed that one too. That's why you have to look at the full end-to-end process.

I would like them to work on the process mining solution that they have to give us a better picture of the full end-to-end process. That was what was really missing. They do have a process mining solution that you can run up front, but it wasn't very good. We ended up running into things thinking why didn't we know that. If we had a better tool upfront to give us the bigger picture, it would've saved us a lot of time and effort down the road.

I would rate it an eight out of 10.

My experience in using UiPath, in general, is in developing traditional bots, assisted bots. There are the typical mundane applications that we're trying to remove in order to add value to customers. 

The solution is used for extracting information from documents and consolidating data, maybe from various Excel sheets. I've used applications, such as PDF, Tableau, and a number of different entities as well. It varies.

I haven't really followed up so much in-depth, however, I know that a lot of the end-users that I've worked with and talked to, that have removed some of the processes, think it’s great. I've got many more strategic types of tasks to do. The one thing users look forward to when they come to work is when something’s been removed from their plate, one piece at a time.

Collectively, I find the UiPath features really complement each other. If you have one tool or another resource available, you're really able to get it into a solution.

They've implemented their stuff very well, considering how fast they've come up with new tools. Usually, it’s a messy situation, however, with UiPath, I've not found that to be the case. It's pretty impressive, the rate at which new tools are released and how well they're thought out, and how usable they are.

From an employee morale perspective, the company is getting positive feedback.

We’ve seen some reduction in human errors and time savings. Depending on what it is, your time savings could be two to three to ten times more in terms of time saved. It’s easy, too. Error reduction is absolutely almost down to nothing.

In terms of cost savings, some of this was done pretty casually, so the numbers are maybe not official. We’ve got 20 data samples, and we're timing it exactly. However, when it comes to time savings, there's always been a very significant amount.

When it comes to ease of use, some of the tools they're providing are in discovery or task capture. You can go out and send this off to somebody and it's pretty self-explanatory in a half hour. Prior to that, people might be using different steps with built-in Windows pieces, which is horrible for capturing automation. If all you have is a hammer, everything looks like a nail. Therefore, adding in this ability to annotate the screenshots with ease, that alone in the development process helps significantly. I'm really liking the discovery tools that complement the product.

All these discovery tools are making building automation easier, from an analyst perspective. It removes the wheat from the chaff and narrows things down, and you begin to see what you need. By clicking on different elements, you can see where they can annotate. It saves a lot of back and forth and time. Not only does the subject matter expert not have to spend time away from their work, you're also not going back and forth and trying to clarify items any longer. It makes things more compact and it’s easier to get to the end goal.

I completely trained on my own as a developer with the UiPath Academy. I was able to do it for free. It's the only onboarding I received. I had nobody else to go to, except for the videos and the forums.

The greatest value of UiPath Academy is that it is free. Now, it’s completely about motivation, and not cost-prohibitive. You just need to be motivated to learn and you can jump in. You don’t have to spend something like $800 and have maybe a company sponsoring you to get started.

People, in their careers, can become relevant again. If they are in a dying industry or disrupted industry, they can get into something that's growing rapidly. If you have a computer, and a decent internet connection, you can have a new career in a fairly short amount of time.

The forum's a great place, however, for a new person, it was better some years ago. It's grown too fast, and it's not that nimble. Previously, if you asked questions, the response time was quicker.

Since I've learned UiPath, there's so many more people rushing and getting into it. With the demand for RPA jobs, the ratio of expertise to novices is very, very low. Before you had a small community and you had a lot of experts and just a few new people trickling in at a time. The influx of new people, it's just growing factor by factor. Where previously there was one person that only had a few questions to answer, now maybe that ratio is now 20 or 30 people. You're not going to get the answers that you need as fast. Luckily, the quality of the Academy is so good, if you look around, you can eventually figure things out.

The issue is that, with so many people, a lot of questions are getting asked before anyone even looks to see if an answer is already there. It tends to make it harder to find relevant, real questions that need to be answered. There are people who are not doing the due diligence and looking at the tags and spending a little extra time before throwing the question out. It makes that part hard to manage.

With people that have already been up-skilled, or already been skilled in the past, UiPath needs to find a way to send some sort of notification to them when items update or change. They need to send out a message to experienced developers to say: “Hey, look at this and push it out."

If you're not going to the Academy and looking for something new, there needs to be some sort of way to say: “Hey, you've been certified. You haven't been in this course. You should look at these things.” I started looking at the Academy and found new elements. When I mentioned something, like, "What's that?" the new guys were aware due to the fact that it was in the Academy from when they started and was not there when I finished.

Basically, just having some sort of mechanism for spreading awareness to existing developers, or pushing something out to them, maybe even through the interface, would be helpful. Whether it’s a little highlight or a little icon to alert users to “hey, here’s something new, something pushed out.” And it’s not just something where you have to go in and read some boring five or six pages of notes, to know that this thing is there. It needs to be visual.

I started using UiPath, which started with training, in the fourth quarter of 2018.

It's a very stable product. I haven't had any issues. If I found or thought something was unstable or something, it usually ended up being me, or an operator error.

I've seen UiPath scaled. Personally, I haven't had issues one way or the other, however, I've heard good things. That said, I can't speak too much on it from the perspective of personal experience.

I have had some interaction. They had a pretty good SLA, in terms of response time. Of course, that has nothing to do with actual solution time. That said, what I remember with everything was that nothing stood out. Usually, you remember some anger or something. I didn't have anything like that.

I'm certified in Automation Anywhere as well. Right now, Automation Anywhere always has two products out, in the sense of getting ready to move into their A360 with the newer product. They're just trying to get that product to maturity. Right now, we have different deployments. Automation Anywhere is cloud-native. 

While they're both RPA, they each have I think a different niche, depending on what the customer needs. 

As a developer, the learning curve in version 11, the prior version, had an easier learning curve compared to UiPath. Automation Anywhere has an edge, in terms of ease of learning for business users and citizen developers.

360 has made the learning curve harder. It's going to add more features, more flexibility. And with that comes a learning curve. Still, the learning curve might be a little easier. 

My deployment experience was not just through UiPath. If anything, I'm pretty agnostic to any platform. I was an analyst, and I was involved with, in general, putting items into production, and going back and forth with developers, and seeing if there were any issues or problems.

I've talked to other developers, and I haven't heard of any particular issues or problems, with UiPath, or anything that was more than just human error or an oversight.

If you're smart about it, you understand what your needs are, you can get an ROI out of it without having to go get the full-blown solution. You don't want to drop $20,000 on an orchestrator unnecessarily. You can ease into it, into adoption, without dropping a lot of money. Maybe some attendant bots, and an unattended locally on a large scale, in a small area.

If you do that and start easy, you'll get a return on investment. Eventually, when we start scaling, we'll pay for the orchestrator. You'll need that when you start getting a lot of bots, and it becomes like herding cats. It gets crazy. That's what you need an orchestrator for. While you can avoid a cost at a certain point, you're probably getting diminishing returns, and then it's going to be more costly to manage something all over the place. It's best to start small and then add on. 

We haven’t been using an orchestrator. It’s a bit like having your hands tied behind your back, as you're not using some of the features that are available with that. However, it still provides these workarounds. You are able to still do some really robust work. It's been great.

We are using, more or less, the more recent versions of the solution.

Before starting with UiPath, a company needs an understanding of the culture at their company. You need to ask if your employees are resistant to change. Certain companies where people are entrenched in their ways, or scared of bots taking their job will be worried. A company needs to lean in and give them an understanding of expectations and pay attention to them before starting. Just pushing it might throw people off.

The personalities of people are the biggest factor. I used to come from a lean Six Sigma background. When companies bring in these Six Sigma programs, it's the same thing - resistance. People say “oh, you're the job cutter.”

People throw that out as automation, and I say, "Hey, people have been automating since steam engines. It's been consistent. It's just the face has changed a little bit. It finally hopped back onto computers. However, automation has been nonstop." 

You just have to realign and adjust yourself. You can’t be resistant to change. Change could be a good thing. Not all things are, however, workers need to be rational and think about it. If your company doesn't move faster, adapt quicker, then your company's going to go away, and everyone will be gone. It’s competitive. That's sports. That's business.

Overall, from what I've used, and what I've touched, and some of the things I've seen without actually putting my hands on it, I'd give UiPath a nine out of ten.

I'm just not the type to give out tens so freely. I haven't gone deep and wide enough to touch everything. From what I've seen before, if you span that out overall, I'd probably put them up in the nine range, personally.

Our use cases have evolved over time. We have use cases for screening and onboarding candidates, feeding new hires into the payroll system, and timekeeping. Right now, we are working on a document understanding use case. It is going to help us read supplier insurance forms.  

UiPath has enabled us as an organization to perform an array of tasks with more proficiency and efficiency. Automation is very important to our organization now and UiPath has played an immense role.

UiPath makes building automations incredibly easy. The platform is very robust and it is scalable. UiPath also has a strong community, which has helped democratize RPA in a true sense. The community and expertise can be leveraged quickly to meet a common goal.

The UiPath Academy has helped us move forward more efficiently. It is a great source of information and knowledge for both new users and those taking the advanced courses. I see the UiPath Academy evolving in the future.

One of the features I've found valuable is UiPath Studio. We have a huge development team of about eight to ten people and they are currently working with it. We also have a citizen developer program that is leveraging StudioX. 

Orchestrator is important for us as well. 

These features are valuable because they allow different groups of people to complete their tasks. UiPath is a robust platform. It helps us cater to different audiences. 

The licensing model is sometimes very confusing and could be simplified for customers. That would help us understand, gauge the offer, and work it into our existing infrastructure. 

We started using UiPath in 2017. We have had a great journey with it. UiPath has helped us scale faster, especially with RPA implementations. It also helped us evolve through our automation journey. 

My impression of the stability is that it's like any other software. We have never had a problem with UiPath and the platform has been stable enough to enable us to scale a lot. 

We have been happy with UiPath's scalability so far. I would give it a nine out of 10. We are currently deploying about 95% of our automations through UiPath. We are very into it and plan to expand from there. 

Yes, we did use a different solution but I cannot disclose which. However, I can say this much: we decided to switch because of the community UiPath has built. Also, the platform and product are packaged correctly. Everything is laid out well and it seems like UiPath understands what businesses need. 

The initial setup was straightforward and easy. UiPath has an incredible team in place. They help us every now and then. It did not take us much time to go through the initial setup and get the solution deployed. 

We have realized savings in the millions of dollars overall.

The pricing structure is very complicated. Someone from the organization has to sit down and set aside some time to fully understand it. 

Yes, we did evaluate other options but I cannot disclose which. 

Start your journey with UiPath. Engage someone from UiPath and have them go through the journey with you. 

We primarily use the solution for our clients. 

One interesting use case we've seen is that the product team leveraged UiPath to expose an API for their customers to then fulfill a service request.

It was part of their deal that, for them to sign this large contract with one of their clients, they needed this functionality. The product team has a huge backlog, and it wasn't going to make it based on everything else they had to deliver, so they actually leveraged UiPath to expose this and give them a service they just didn't have before.

When comparing it to, for example, Blue Prism, one of the key value points is, other than the full platform in general, the ability to trigger automation on demand. Basically, when the work gets loaded into the queue, the work can then be started without having to run things on a schedule.

The solution has improved the way an organization functions. For example, in general, in the context of RPAs, it's really about the focus of picking those tasks out of people's daily efforts so they can spend more time with the customers. What you get off the back of that is dollar for dollar savings. You invest in this tool, and you get back dollars by hours, however, beyond that, there are these peripheral benefits that you get that are a little harder to measure. You’ve got to have good guys out there to capture this.

In terms of endpoint satisfaction, customer satisfaction, you have to look at it within the business and their measurements before and after you've done something to actually see what is happening and attribute it to what you've done with UiPath.

We haven't done anything that hasn't saved money yet.

At the beginning of a journey, we were looking to get maybe 1X our money back in that first year. We try to get that at least. Depending on the size of the organization and complexity, it’s possible. As you go into year two, year three, you're almost looking at a multiplier reflecting that year. For example, a four-year-old program might get a company around 4X, if not more, in return. Of course, that also depends on how far you've implemented this product. You need to put money in to get money out, in a sense.

If you've got a pipeline of X and you only have three developers, you can only chew through that pipeline at a certain current rate. You want to look at the value and say, "Well, what if we doubled our staff?"

I have a calculator that shows, for example, if you have $10 million of savings sitting on the table through 20 things in the pipeline. If I put one developer on that, it will take me three years to go through that and build that out. At the end of that $10 million of value, imagine if instead, you had everything all automated on day one. That's a total max value, and you would get somewhere around 23% to 30% of that value returned.

If you double that or if you put a staff of three developers on that same pipeline, you finish earlier and you get about 75% of the total value. If you go to four developers or five, you get closer to 83%. Now, if you put 20 developers on there, you're only going to increment it to 95%, however, then you’ve just increased your total cost as you have to try managing 25 at the same time. The main idea being, based upon your pipeline and the size of your team, you can potentially increase your total return value within a fixed time.

The ease of the use of creating the building automation is actually improving year over year. For example, there are some training programs for UiPath, and it generally takes about a week to get through it. That’s on UiPath Academy.

If you actually use it with modern design, modern objects, and all the new things that have been released recently, you actually save time on training. If that shaves 20% of your training, you can also shave 20% off of your building capability or the requirements. BY using UiPath Academy, you save time on your projects.

It's fairly easy to learn, as a solution. However, it’s not that easy where you're just going to throw non-developers into it. Your first three days of UiPath training are actually doing .net. That's the one thing the market puts out there incorrectly is that your operations team can just jump on this. You still need a developer mentality as you're still dealing with exceptions and things that aren't the way humans think.

That said, in terms of usability, it's highly useful.

UiPath Academy helps streamline and keeps employees up to speed in the solution.

The biggest value of the Academy is that it's free. That's a major piece. It's fairly well organized, and they put things into channels based upon what your role is within your RPA program or your business, and that helps you stay focused in terms of what you need to learn.

The solution needs resource locking. This kind of leads toward scaling which is one challenge. It's not major. However, it is when you have multiple bots running the same process and they need to access the same piece of information to read and write. There's not a strong capability to manage the lock and have the capability to say "I have ownership of this file. No one else can touch it" and then release it, allowing the next one to pick it up. That's a key differentiator that I see between them and Blue Prism. That one feature is lacking.

The studio design is a little different. If you go from one tool to the next, you might be a little shocked at how things are organized. I don't see them changing that any time soon. However, the design could be improved upon.

I've used the solution for about four years. 

The solution seems to be stable. I haven't had any issues yet.

The solution is very scalable. I haven't pushed it to 100 plus or anything like that. However, based upon scheduling and triggers and SLA management, it's much easier to scale.

We did work with other RPA solutions in the past. The differentiation comes from the triggers, and the attended automation. The platform now is a big part of this. 

For example, Blue Prism is one of the tools that we work with as well. If you want new functions, new features, say, process mining, you have to go to Celonis or someone else, whereas UiPath is providing this platform with new capabilities almost daily.

It also depends on what kind of COE you want to build. Looking at Blue Prism, they have a nice UI as well. It's very business-focused. With UiPath, you need to have some developer capacity. There's .net in there, and some people just might not get that. However, at the end of the day, if they don't get that, should they be building processors? There's a bit of a challenge there.

The initial setup is not that complex. It's more about the client's setup. For example, the domain, entries, things like that, would add to the complexity you face.

If everything goes well, you can get things set up probably in a few weeks. I would say a month or so is needed for deployment and implementors should set expectations. For example, security depends on how much the organization is ready to take it on as well. If you don't get their buy-in right away, then you're just going to get delays.

Most of the companies see a good ROI from the solution.

The pricing and licensing get a little complex. There are so many different options that you can choose from, and practice adds to the time to figure these things out. Whereas, with, for example, Blue Prism. It's a pretty standard basic model. UiPath gets a little hectic at times.

The customers that use the on-premises version tend to use the latest version of the solution. 

While those using the cloud version of the UiPath apps feature are in the UK, the US users are not using that functionality. Mainly most of our focus has always been on RPA and then expansion. From what I've seen, we've mainly been using UiPath. At least on the North American side, it's been relatively new. That's why they aren't using apps yet.

We don’t have any clients that are using the solution's AI functionality in their automation program yet. I’ve only played around with it myself.

From a road mapping perspective, I'd advise potential new users that your key is the business case. If there's no business case, then this solution doesn't make sense for you to get involved or do anything else. The first part is to really understand the business case. Just to substantiate getting it into the company. Once you have that, that's basically your low-hanging fruit. 

That said, the key is not to hang everything on one process, not to sit there and bank it, as the concept is a program approach. Over time, it is going to sustain itself. Companies need to be ready to look at a process and think if it's a good idea first. And as you move through the steps, you're basically doing additional checks. As you learn about the process, you're also learning what it's like behind each process and what the value add is. At each stage, users need to ensure that it makes sense to continue. 

I'd rate the solution at a nine out of ten. While there's always room for improvement, market-wise they are at the top of their game. 

Our primary use cases are within the financing and HR teams right now. But of course, there's a lot of opportunities in the clinical space and with MB services. We have use cases in all of those departments throughout the organization, but right now we are engaged primarily with the HR and finance team.

We have two automations in production right now. We just started our COE and it's been exciting so far. We are building things and have identified quite big end-to-end opportunities. 

I'm not new to the automation world. I've been in this field since late 2015 and I've seen the ROI you can get with it. Some things you can quantify and others you can't. However, we are very new to UiPath so I can not comment on improvements just yet. We will know within a year. 

We have seen savings in time. One of the automations that we have in place with our finance team is a monthly reconciliation process. The first three to five days of the month are critical in finance. So, if you're able to save as little as half an hour every day in those five days, that adds up to a full day of work. This automation has helped our accountants and the finance team do their closing and be on time and have extra time to analyze things. They're not fighting fires anymore.

The partnerships that UiPath has with other vendors are excellent. Some of the applications that we rely on heavily, like DocuSign for Workday, already have built-in integrations with UiPath. This will help us scale and go to market quickly. 

I am happy that they are always listening to us and doing as much as they can to include more features. 

UiPath could work towards more engagement on the community practice side. Some of our people are having a hard time understanding how to make sense of the data that UiPath puts out. 

There could be some guidance as well on how to calculate ROI. ROI is how much money you have spent and how much you are getting back. But, how can I know how much money I've spent? Do I calculate the cost of infrastructure? Do I calculate the cost of the team I have? Where do I begin? What is the right way to look at ROI? What are some of the analytics I should be looking at?  

Utilization, the success rate, business value, and ROI have to go hand-in-hand. You cannot tell a whole story with just ROI. 

I have been using UiPath since March of this year. 

My impression of UiPath's stability is good. Compared to some other automation vendors that I've used, I would say that UiPath is more stable and better. 

We do not have a lot of experience with them but whenever we reached out to them they helped and directed us. 

The initial setup was straightforward. It was on-premise and run-of-the-mill. Our team is very knowledgeable and had already done similar implementations. 

We had four people engaged in the implementation from our side. We partnered with EmiTech for the deployment and they brought in their expert and helped guide us through the installation process. 

I do not fully understand our pricing model yet, but I would say that it is fair. I cannot tell at the moment how it is going to affect us. Right now we have only six unattended bots and maybe two attended ones, so we will see how it goes as we grow. 

The ease of building the automations depends on the process, but overall I would say that UiPath is intuitive. If you understand some basic functions of logical expressions or loop functions, UiPath is intuitive enough to help you build some impressive automations. It is easy to pick up.

We have a few people who have completed UiPath Academy courses and are now going for advanced certification. I'm not planning on building any bots on an enterprise scale myself, but I am going through the training as well. 

UiPath Academy is excellent because it is intuitive. Of course, you have to have some development or SDLC knowledge, but it helps tremendously. You get so much insight on the features. You also get to build a small automation. I dedicated 30 to 40 hours to the trainings and was able to get some knowledge from it. 

The trainings are even easier for people from accounting, for example. They are used to macros, automations, and file transfers. Conceptually, they are already there and with a tool like UiPath Academy, they can start using the solution. It's important to just stick with it.

Our use cases for UiPath are all across the board. We started primarily in the finance and accounting sectors and moved to our integration center, which is made up of individuals working with our field operations folks to schedule and conduct work.

We have also moved into HR and found a lot of hours there, as well. We have also done automations for our IT and supply chain sectors. We probably touched about 15 different business units within our organizations with UiPath automations.  

We have seen a reduction in human error. A perfect example of that is an automation that takes a report from our bank and identifies all of our customers who have changed their routing or checking account information from the previous day. It then goes into the system and figures out which of these customers are check-free and updates their routing account number information. This process used to take four people four hours each day. It now takes the bot less than 15 minutes a day. There was a lot of room for human error in this process that has been eliminated. It has been automated, improving the data quality instantaneously.

The UiPath Academy was one of the biggest reasons why we chose this solution over other products. What was important for us was the availability of the free online training that we could do. 

The other vendors we were considering at the time were offering training but for a fee. We would have to pay some $2,000 per session and our upfront investment to get the team off the ground would have increased exponentially as a result.

Also, with those classes, you don't always know which quality you're going to get. Sometimes they're phenomenal and other times not so much. 

We've leveraged the UiPath Academy with our college recruits/interns. We have been able to say, "OK, we're going to hire you, but here's your commitment. You need to go through these training classes before you start your job." This would help them hit the ground running, which is phenomenal. 

The UiPath Academy expedites onboarding, which is probably its biggest value.

There is more that we could be doing with the platform. At the moment, we're just leveraging RPA right out of the box. We're just doing what I would call plain Jane automations. We're not doing a great job of leveraging the process discovery tools, which is a huge pain point for us. A lot of businesses are dealing with people shortages right now, which is taxing. And the people that are there are doing too much work so they don't have time to sit down and document their processes. Having those process discovery tools will elevate our game and allow us to be able to help them more quickly. That's a huge win for us. 

The other piece of the pie is that as we roll out automation to our organization, we're finding nuances with the process. Using some of UiPath's process mining tools, we can identify discrepancies between, for example, processes in Ohio versus Pennsylvania or Virginia or Kentucky. This would be huge for us because we spend a lot of time addressing these nuances for the automations.

The pricing could be more transparent. Overall, I think the pricing is fine, but they keep changing it. It should be more structured. They don't have to tell us what their pricing is, but they should publish how the product is broken down. 

Also, as a customer, one of my frustration points is that I'm not sure the customer success team is engaged at the right level with the customers. There's too much focus on selling more product versus helping to evolve the COE. 

There are many partners out there that have kind of learned over the last two years like this is what we need to get it off the ground. There are so many customers out there that I've talked to that have bought UiPath and it's just sitting on the shelf. If they can help them get it off the ground and get it going, then they can increase the community. 

Another issue that we run into that is not necessarily a reflection of the solution is the fact that our IT operations team does not want us running automations during business hours. This is because they don't have a good understanding of what the true impact of automation is on the source system. It would be great to have UiPath help us educate other members of the organization that automation is no different than human interaction. This could help people like me communicate with stakeholders and increase our ability to run even more automations. 

We started using UiPath in November of 2018.

I haven't seen any issues with UiPath's stability. 

We haven't seen any issues with scalability. 

We have had a mixed bag with UiPath's tech support. We have upgraded to premium support now because we need more help. The reason why we went with premium support is because we were not getting what we needed from the customer success team.

The setting up of the infrastructure and getting off the ground from a technology standpoint was the easy part. The complex part was setting up the governance model and setting up the COE model. 

I think it's probably gotten better since 2018. When we started, I didn't feel like UiPath or the partners had their heads wrapped around governance and the infrastructure set up.

At the time, I felt like I was on my own when it came to security aspects and things like setting service-level accounts for bots, setting up bots on virtual machines, and governance aspects like setting up a steering committee or the structure around the intake, tracking, or ROI processes. 

The service providers and UiPath did not help me. It was difficult in that sense in the beginning. I even ran into some trouble with my superiors because the whole process was taking longer than expected. 

We are running around 20 bots and have 105 automations in production today. One of our automations saved 25,000 hours. Overall, I'll say we have more than 250,000 hours saved for the organization.

I think we take a fee of $50 per hour, so that's well over $10 million saved that went back to the organization. 

UiPath's pricing can be confusing. They are changing it all the time. It would be nice if it was a bit more transparent. 

Before settling on UiPath, we looked into Automation Anywhere and Blue Prism. This was back in 2018 and the product has come far since then. 

To be honest, the best product offering at that time was Automation Anywhere. However, we understood UiPath's vision and saw where it was going. We liked the training that was available and there were a couple of use cases that we needed that Automation Anywhere would not be good for. 

Cost was another factor. At that time, UiPath had aggressive pricing that helped them get their foot in the door and enabled us to get off and go. 

My first bit of advice is to ask questions of customers. It is helpful to build a community around you of individuals that you can call upon and just ask questions. In Columbus, we started an intelligent automation user group that brought together customers. It wasn't necessarily UiPath-specific. We talked about different topics and challenges that we are having. 

For me, that was helpful, especially in terms of governance because I got a lot of good ideas from different people in regard to how I should set up my governance or how to handle certain security issues. I highly recommend connecting with other customers and leveraging the experience and knowledge that they have rather than trying to figure it out on your own.

We love UiPath Studio and we have done a little bit with StudioX. We have not had a high level of success with them because our business has been taxed. Trying to find business resources to put towards those efforts has been our biggest hurdle to getting a citizen developer program off the ground.

Currently, we're doing digital transformation in finance. We expect to expand that out to operations based on our test case of five robotic implementations and to get those in the center of excellence and understanding, and then go further. In fact, in our naming conventions, we're trying to make sure that we leave room for HR, Operations, IT, et cetera. Right now, we're just in finance.

One of the best benefits is that it just gets people to think beyond what they're doing and how other things impact them. Instead of just their single task.

For instance, with PO distribution, we can ask larger questions, such as: Where are our suppliers lists? What do the people do out in the field? I've never been as exposed to that as I am now due to the fact that I’m trying to automate it. What you find is the challenges aren't just in the robot. It's what you do before you get to the robot that is critical. If it forces us to fix other exterior items, we've been a success. However, if you can add to the task, what the robot does and then pull it through, that's where things get interesting. My job is just going to expand and I foresee I’ll be so busy with so many ideas.

We do use the UI apps feature. We are working with consultants. They actually know more of the technical details and they're supposed to be transferring data. I'm more of a functional person that understands the design and the processes, not the programming, coding, or details. I'm learning that as I’m in training for the RPA. I'm about 70% through training. I've been taking that through UiPath

Getting up to speed with UiPath has been tougher due to the fact that the programming that I learned in school is very different from the programming done today. The younger people, I'm sure, pick it up much faster.

It is helping our onboarding process and is useful in getting me up to speed.

The biggest value I get from the UiPath Academy is the ability to connect the software to the processes that we’re trying to automate and being able to understand the functions in terms of where you would go to get an even better understanding. I do find that their online help is very beneficial as it offers solid examples. In fact, sometimes that's better than the training itself.

There's so much out there and there's so much to learn as it's not one software package. UiPath Academy provides us with the ability to use all software packages and interconnect with them. The opportunities are amazing and also intimidating.

The automation cloud offering helps to decrease the total cost of ownership of UiPath by taking care of things such as infrastructure. We have gone and moved many more things to the cloud. We have a Hyperion solution in the cloud that we use for consolidation.

The most valuable aspect of the solution is the ability to follow what the robots are doing. Currently, I've been working on the automation hub. That's the next step. You can use the orchestrator to see how they're doing, for example.

We’ve realized some efficiencies in our current processes due to UiPath. That said, I'm a novice. We've just begun with these five processes. That's why I want to do the reporting and figure out the analysis as I want it to basically sell itself.

In terms of the ease of building automation within UiPath, that's something that I need to discover with the IT team. What I do like is that once you do something, you store it in a library. And then you have plug-and-play automation that you can add to others. You don't have to keep redoing the same work over and over again. That's going to be a huge benefit.

In terms of reducing human error, inherently, it has to improve accuracy. Now that we’re focused on it, we’re testing it, and if it's not a hundred percent accurate, it's not going to production. We absolutely anticipate a great reduction in human error.

In terms of payroll processes, HR processes, onboarding, operations, filling in maintenance on equipment, and doing the routine things out in the field will require adoption and interest. You can't get the response that you want until the people in the field decide that they want to change and adopt it. That will be the challenge. Managing the change is huge for us. It's always an obstacle. It's not that, can you automate something, it's more of a question of, internally, will they let you automate something?

I'm looking for more of the analytics to make sure that we can properly report on how they're doing. That's what's going to make management invest further into this. I actually come from a reporting background. That's what I focus on in the other financial packages that we have.

I've been using UiPath since I started training in July of 2021.

I'm not worried about the stability of the product. If others are using it in the cloud with much more complicated processes than we are automating, it's not really a concern of mine.

In terms of scalability, right now, it's way too big for me to even understand it. It's like I'm in a county and you're asking me about the universe. I'm just trying to get directions. I still need time to absorb the entire scope.

Right now, just accounting and IT use the solution. Finance is learning it as well. They're taking the same training that I'm taking. They're probably 10% to 15% the way through that journey.

I have not really had to use the support. I will, due to my training. I've gone back and forth and I've lost some of my training. I have the diplomas and different things and the degrees that I kept, however, I've lost some of that initial training. It all has to do with version release. I'm a tenant I'm just in the training phase. What I'm trying to do is be the guinea pig and learn the systems and get comfortable with everything.

We didn't use any other RPA solution previously.

The reason we adopted UiPath was due to a move from our finance leader, the controller. We had automated many financial processes with planning and reporting, et cetera. However, the accounting group was continually skipped over. We had a controller that came in and they wanted to take many of our repeated processes and really took and created an agile group to create the digital finance vector. 

There's a team of five members that went and looked at the processes that we were doing and said, which ones can we change or do better? Between the controller and the consultants, there was an analysis performed. They wanted to lead in the digital finance transformation. They looked forward five to ten years and what they were projecting looked really nice.

I didn't directly handle the implementation. I will learn that more as we go. From what I saw, the workflow was nice. The implementations that we have are being done in baby steps, and so far, the steps are relatively easy. It is intimidating to see how much it takes to do some very small processes. It helps you understand more about the decision points and whether they're objective or subjective. That will help us with the reporting. We'll be better able to understand what things are best to automate and what is easiest. That's what I'm hoping to get from these five implementations.

Our consultant assisted us with the implementation process, and they really did a sprint on the implementations.

The sprints were such that it was really a six-week turnaround time. We actually had to go backward and do the assessments from those implementations. I wasn't in this role at that time. Therefore, I'm now doing the cost benefits backward to see if we can set them up correctly and then see what we can do ourselves going forward. The key will be not how quickly they were able to do it, but how quickly we can do it ourselves. 

Also, we'll have to assess how quickly the people in the field can adopt the product and have a robot actually be their assistant. We want to figure out how quickly we can deploy citizen developers. 

The solution is pricey at the beginning, however, we'll have to see going forward with what we get for the tools. It's always expensive to buy a really nice car and then not drive it very far, very much. It's all about the utilization. If we use it fully, the cost won't be as high.

The company did evaluate other solutions, however, they liked UiPath the best due to its differentiating reputation, experience, and level and quality of tools.

UiPath has not yet saved costs for our company. However, we're just in the investment phase. That's why I want to do that reporting so that we can see the savings if any. The decisions we make now affect the next 10 to 20 years. Everyone gets too short-term-focused. We need to instead think about where we want to be five years from now and go backward. We need to ask: what are we doing today that's going to make a difference in five years? It's an investment in the future right now.

I'd advise those considering the solution to give it a try. It can't hurt. Even if they didn't go forward, the basic principles that are revealed can probably fix other things. Some people just have bad processes. Once you get your processes aligned and make them to the point that they're standardized and understood across the different units using them, it will become easier to automate.

I'd rate the solution at an eight out of ten. In order to rate it higher, I need more experience. I've got to learn, got to understand it better. Then I've got to utilize it. Like many software that I've dealt with, there are always three ways to do it, however, there's the best way. I always wish we'd just teach the best way. That said, I understand that you want to make people agile and to understand fully by exploring different ways. When you learn, learning all the different ways is very cumbersome, and yet, better in the long run.