UiPath Platform Reviews

My domain and expertise are in life sciences. In life sciences there is a process called pharmacovigilance, which involves monitoring the effects of medical drugs after they have been licensed for use. I create end-to-end automations, for case processing and full data entry. The customer will store details in an Oracle-based pharmacovigilance platform called Argus, where clinical data from the client and the product are stored. The UiPath bot has to capture the cases from Argus. Once a case has been input into UiPath, a mandatory status check, duplicate search, and case processing have to be done.

It then needs to perform full data entry in Argus. The full data entry consists of more details like patient information, product information, event information, and so on. The bot needs to validate and input those details into Argus and save the case. 

Some days there will be 1k records and on other days, there will be 2k records. On average the bot will process 12k to 13k records.

Pharmacovigilance is a big process. It would take almost 45 minutes for a human to complete a single case. By implementing UiPath robots in the customer's environment, the case processing time has been drastically reduced. The bot processes cases, end-to-end, within 20 to 25 minutes, depending on the case complexity, so that the customer is saving 20 minutes per case. The savings are equivalent to nine or 10 FTEs, which is huge. As a result of those savings, they have requested us to build more bots for them, for other processes.

The most valuable feature in UiPath is the UI interaction with UI Explorer. I have worked with other automation tools and UI Explorer is the standout feature of UiPath. For web-based applications, we can interact with every HTML element, from head to tail. UI Explorer is a valuable addition to UiPath for creating complex, web-based automation.

The AI Computer Vision and Orchestrator are also outstanding features. They make it very easy for developers.

In addition, the introduction of drag-and-drop APIs to UiPath enhances the development processes and decreases the time it takes, as well as the processing time. For example, if you wanted to read an email from Microsoft Outlook using UiPath two years ago, it would take about five steps or activities. Now, with the Graph API within UiPath, you can read an email message from Outlook within a span of five to six seconds, maximum. This API functionality is pretty easy for us to handle.

Along with this, UiPath also introduced Orchestrator access via API. It's not mandatory to log in to Orchestrator to create an asset manually in UiPath. Rather, you can use the Orchestrator API to call a bot process and the assets. This API functionality helps developers to develop components effectively, as well as reduces bot processing time drastically.

I have been into RPA for almost six years and I have worked in the three major tools: UiPath, Automation Anywhere, and Blue Prism. I have been using UiPath for four to five years. I'm an RPA developer and do development for my clients. That includes designing and deploying bots in the clients' environments, and making sure the bots are running well.

It is stable. We are using the 2019 version. The versions are continually upgraded with the latest being the 2021 version. There are frequent updates but the version we are using is stable. We don't have any errors or bot crashes or other unexpected system exceptions during development. The stability is good across all versions.

It's pretty scalable. It can be used across all major providers. If you want to automate Windows, web-based or PDF-based interactions, or do email or Excel automation, you can. We can also do terminal automation, mainframe automation, and Citrix automation. It covers almost every possible scenario for real-time data handling. 

We only have a couple of challenges, when a customer says we need to do this or that and UiPath doesn't have built-in functionality for that. We need to think differently and add some additional .NET components, for example. 

But UiPath is pretty scalable, and we can use it across all technologies for automation.

If you don't find a solution in the Community Forum, you can raise a technical support ticket with UiPath. The support team works 24 hours a day, and we can get a resolution immediately. Both the Community Forum and the technical support play a major role and both help developers.

UiPath also has partners. Cognizant is a high-priority partner and they have their own SLAs for everything. If I raise a ticket regarding UiPath, if something is not working, the response time is very quick and the resolutions they provide are pretty standard. We haven't faced any difficulties in raising a ticket. Everything has met our expectations with respect to the technical support.

The main thing that could be improved is the cost. I have worked with other tools and the licensing cost of UiPath is slightly higher than the others.

Also, UiPath has a built-in functionality called Computer Vision to extract values from a PDF. If we want to use Computer Vision, UiPath has one drawback. The cost is based on how many documents we are using Computer Vision on. That makes it difficult to estimate ROI. Computer Vision has a dynamic cost. To propose a project to a client, a project that includes Computer Vision, we need to have some kind of standard cost so that they can calculate the ROI effectively. Computer Vision should not be based on usage.

This is one of the main drawbacks that I have seen in real-life situations, when quoting a price for a client. If UiPath improved in this area, they might have many more customers who want to automate PDF interactions based on Computer Vision, because it has huge scope.

The advantage of using UiPath over Automation Anywhere is the UI interaction. Automation Anywhere doesn't have a specialized feature like UI Explorer, or any other options to click on an image or interact with UI elements. Automation Anywhere has a Capture command and we have to work with that one command to interact with all the UI-based elements. But it's completely different in UiPath. UI Explorer enables multiple clicks and interactive activities. You can mimic the HTML per your project's needs. You can't work in the same way in Automation Anywhere. With respect to web-based automation, UiPath stands tall. AA has limited functionality.

The disadvantage of UiPath is in the PDF interaction. Automation Anywhere has a bot called IQ Bot, which is included in the licensing of Automation Anywhere. It's pretty easy to train it for a PDF document within the span of a few seconds. UiPath's Computer Vision has the same functionality as IQ Bot, but Computer Vision is pretty costly.

Other than that, Automation Anywhere is cloud-hosted and it has multiple ways for a developer to code. If you want to code RPA, or you want to code in a flow-based manner, you can do so with Automation Anywhere. But UiPath has only one mode, a flow-based automation. UiPath doesn't have code-based automation.

From the developer's point of view, if you have a code-based structure then what AA offers is as good as UiPath. 

A major advantage of UiPath is that since it is a .NET-based application, you can use all the methods and the properties that are available in .NET. You don't have that functionality in Automation Anywhere. If you want to read or manipulate a string, you need to use separate activities in Automation Anywhere, but with UiPath you can use the built-in .NET methods to read a string in a single line. The complexity of the code is smaller in UiPath.  

Because I have worked in all the major RPA tools, I can say confidently that UiPath is very developer-friendly. If you are coming from a non-technical background, or you don't know coding, they have a separate portal for you to develop in, called StudioX. It's a low-code platform, a "citizen-developer" platform. Anyone who wants to use UiPath can use it without any background.

From the development, design, and testing points of view, I rate UiPath higher than other RPA tools for automation. Go directly to UiPath, rather than trying all the other tools. UiPath is number-one for development and testing.

It is mandatory in our company to use the UiPath Academy to do RPA certification. Almost everyone has completed advanced professional certification in UiPath. The Academy covers every topic extensively, as far as what developers need. I don't come from an IT background but I learned it. UiPath teaches everything from scratch. With a little bit of coding knowledge, it's very easy to learn development using the Academy portal. The major advantage is that, since it is a video-based series, you get a clear idea of the modern-day functionality. They explain everything with an example and they give you use cases for practice. 

If you want to be an architect, they have a course for that. If you want a developer diploma, they have a course for that. And if you want to learn a specific topic, like deployment or testing, they have courses for them.

For anyone with experience in another technology who wants to learn UiPath, or wants to do RPA projects, it's a matter of 10 to 15 days to go through all the videos and you can start working. That's a big advantage of UiPath. The Academy makes learning easy.

They also have a Community Forum. If we have any doubt, we can interact with other developers around the globe. It's very interactive and we can learn what things are intended to do. About 90 percent of the time, you can find a solution using the forum.

Other than the Computer Vision cost model, the features of UiPath are pretty awesome to use. As a developer, there aren't any drawbacks or difficulties when using UiPath.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Positive

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The interface is intuitive and very user-friendly.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

I would rate this solution a nine out of ten.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

I've been using the solution for four years.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

We are customers and end-users.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Overall, the solution has saved costs for our clients.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

We did not previously use a different RPA solution.

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

The initial setup is straightforward.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

I've been using this solution for three years.

The stability has been good so far. 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

I've been using UiPath for five years now.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

I've implemented UiPath from scratch many times. 

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

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

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

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

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

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

We handle the deployments for our clients. 

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

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

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

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

Orchestrator is around $20,000.

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

The company I work for is a UiPath partner.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

I am an RPA developer and I work with UiPath in that capacity.

Our current use case involves the automation of a process involving healthcare-related data. This is confidential data that is received from the customer and inserted into Oracle forms. Reports are then generated from it and these reports are then used by the organization, which is in the healthcare domain, for their analysis.

The data being analyzed includes medical and treatment history. For example, with the current pandemic going on, there are all sorts of healthcare data that is related to it, including various types of treatments. When somebody walks into any clinic or hospital, all of the treatment is entered into a database and we get an extract of it. The analysis is used to get more details.

Another interesting use case, prior to this one, involved the documenting of invoices. We were working with approximately 250 different samples of purchase invoices, many in different formats. One might be a native PDF file, whereas another could be a scanned PDF, and yet another might be a simple handwritten invoice that was converted into a PDF based on a picture that was taken from a mobile device. We were receiving these invoices from our client and they wanted to extract data from them. It was accomplished by using the Document Understanding features in UiPath.

The other notable use case had to do with issuing refunds for purchases that were made on an e-commerce site. When a customer made an order and there was a problem that resulted in them wanting a refund, there were multiple ways that the client could request one. A refund application could be received by the customer care department in the form of a simple call, which was a verbal request, or as an email written by the customer, or as an automatically-generated email that was created based on filling out a form on the website.

Regardless of which of the three input methods is used, the refund request is gathered and sent to a mainframe application. At that point, the information is extracted from the mainframe and the refund is issued using another application.

The automation of these tasks using features such as artificial intelligence and document understanding has reduced our costs. For example, with the invoice processing use case, there was a team of between 20 and 25 agents who were doing it manually. Obviously, a team of that size has a large cost associated with it. Also, the volume was very high, which meant that the team was not able to deliver on all of the work. There are approximately 250 vendors sending invoices to our customer to process the data, which translates to about 1,000 documents being sent on a daily basis, to be processed by only 25 people. It was a huge task. With this level of volume, people tend to get frustrated. 

We implemented the automation and the team size has now been reduced to only five or six people, and that is only required to monitor the bots. For example, they check to make sure that the data being fetched using document understanding is at par. We have set the minimum confidence of the documents being scanned at 90% and each day, a report is generated and sent to the customer. Overall, it was a very cost-saving implementation.

When it comes to building automations, it's pretty simple. UiPath has a lot of features, starting with Process Mining. For example, when a business person wants to start from scratch, they don't necessarily know which process to automate. They can use the Process Mining feature available in UiPath to get an answer as to whether a particular process is worth automating or not. Features like this are available to shorten the processes. Once a process is identified, we can go ahead and implement and develop the automation. Overall, it is very easy to develop automations because of the inbuilt features.

UiPath provides us with features to implement end-to-end automation, and it begins with the initial steps. They have Process Mining or task mining features to help companies that have an appetite for automation but don't know what they want to automate. Once a process analysis is completed, it can determine whether a process can be automated or not. At that point, we can proceed to the bot development.

Once the bot has been developed, there are different options, including third-party support, for deploying them. After a bot has been deployed, they have the hypercare facility to monitor and maintain bots that are in production. Taken together, all of these features facilitate end-to-end automation. This is very important to our work. 

Consider that UiPath did not always have the Process Mining feature. In those days, in order to do process analysis, companies had to hire Subject Matter Experts (SMEs) for different domains at the beginning of a project to determine which processes could be automated. For example, if there were a requirement for a healthcare process then the company had to hire a healthcare SME. The SME would assist in process analysis and in the determination of whether it was something that could be automated. Nowadays, with the help of the Process Mining features, we no longer have to worry about who is doing the analysis.

From our standpoint, we have to do the recording and supply the inputs. With this, a report will be generated and it will tell us whether the process can be automated. If so, then the developers or an architect will come in and do the development. Following this, the DevOps team will come in for the deployment. Finally, the production support and monitoring are taken care of by the developers.

Using the cloud-based deployment helps reduce our on-premises footprint because we no longer have to take care of servers and local databases. There was a separate team taking care of the networking aspect, and another team taking care of the databases. For on-premises deployments, there are different teams that come into play, whereas with a cloud-based solution, we don't have to worry about anything. UiPath takes care of deployment and the databases, and everything is automatically handled. I can't estimate an exact percentage of how much our on-premises footprint has been reduced, but it has really made a significant impact in terms of substituting or replacing the on-premises facilities.

Attended automation has helped to scale our RPA benefits and in fact, in my almost five years of experience, I have not come across a scenario where the automation could be purely unattended. In the use case with the invoices where we used document understanding, there was still a minimally-sized team of five people in place after the implementation. They monitor the processes and if the criteria of 90% are not met then the invoice will be rejected and sent back to the vendor. In this case, attended automation is really helpful.

The Automation Cloud saves our IT department time because we don't have to worry about hiring different teams for different tasks. The infrastructure maintenance is handled by the vendor and all we have to do is pay for our licenses, then everything is ready.

Automation Cloud has helped to decrease our time to value. You don't have to worry about how the installation is to be done, you just have to pay the license fees and the team will do everything. They have packages, and you just have to give them the numbers according to what you need. Based on that, they will propose a solution and propose an infrastructure for you. Once that is agreed, they will do the installation within a very short time. After that is complete, your developers can start doing the development and within no time, you will start seeing the ROI.

The Automation Cloud has indeed decreased our overall costs.

It is really helpful for an organization to use the Automation Cloud when they do not have sufficient resources available themselves. In situations like this, the UiPath Automation Cloud plays a very important role. You just have to give them the number and they propose the solution including the infrastructure. You just need a few developers and everything else is taken care of by the Automation Cloud team.

We have a lot of clients who are looking at digital transformation, but they don't know what tool to use. There are a lot of vendors available in the market who provide products that are similar to UiPath, but UiPath has a lot of very strong marketing, a strong sales team, and at the same time, the product is very good. UiPath helps in doing quick installations, quicker deployments, and quicker turnarounds. Ultimately, it really helps with digital transformation for any organization.

Digital transformation requires an upgrade, but it is not very complex and not very costly. A company may have to be 25 to 30 million dollars to upgrade, which is a significant cost, but if it saves 100 million then in the end, the organization is saving money.

UiPath has helped to reduce human error to a great extent. When humans perform the same task over and over again, we tend to get bored and frustrated. Our excitement goes down day by day. However, when it comes to machines or bots, they don't get bored and they don't get frustrated having to do repetitive work. This leads to fewer errors, which has a positive impact on the business. There are fewer escalations and the customer is happier.

Our automations have helped to free up employees' time by reducing how long it takes them to complete their tasks. It leaves them time for learning or performing other jobs, and in general, it helps to reduce work hours. I estimate that percentage-wise, it saves my team between 30% and 35%. The total time saved is approximately 250 hours per month.

One of the ways that our employees benefited from having time freed through the use of automation is upgrading. A lot of people, in particular our technical staff, upgraded by learning new technologies. This ultimately led to helping the organization because they are able to work on different jobs.

Automation also leads to an improvement in employee happiness. If you ask them to do the same thing over and over again, on a daily basis, they get bored. When 30% of the time is saved by using automation, it frees up perhaps two hours a day for them to do different work or even recreational activities. 

UiPath contains a lot of very useful features.

The artificial intelligence and document understanding features are very good and have been helpful when it comes to processing handwritten or unstructured, especially when there is a high volume and it is repetitive. 

Using the artificial intelligence and machine learning features had a drastic impact on our use case. In the scenario where we used document understanding, we were able to successfully automate the use case without artificial intelligence. However, there was not a sufficient improvement. The success rate was between 78% and 80%. We did not use these features originally because they come at an extra cost and we did not have approval. When we were given approval and acquired the licenses, we re-implemented the automation and included the inbuilt AI and ML models. Our success rate went up to between 92% and 93%, which is significant.

The Orchestrator is in drastic need of improvement. Three or four years ago, the Orchestrator UI was very simple and comfortable to use but now, they have added so many features that it is difficult for new users to quickly understand it. The latest implementation that we did was so complicated that nobody was able to understand it, aside from the developers. Generally speaking, UiPath needs to improve the interface, and the overall user assistance should be boosted.

The developers are the core users of the product and it's important to make the product easy for them to use. The easier it is, the more people start using the tool. Then, as there are more developers available, more organizations start to hear about RPA tools and Uipath.

I have been working with UiPath for approximately four and a half years, across three different companies.

I have found that one or two times out of ten, UiPath Studio hangs and needs to be restarted. These types of technical glitches do happen but not often.

In the organizations that I have worked in so far, the UiPath features and the licensing available meant that we didn't have to worry about the infrastructure setup or scaling. You can start with a small number of licenses and robots, with little infrastructure requirements, and gradually, as you need more robots and more powerful infrastructure, you can scale up. It has great scalability. 

Even if somebody is using the community edition, we are able to build a PoC for them. In fact, using this approach gives us a pretty good idea of how the automation will proceed. Based on this, we get an idea of what the infrastructure will look like. Then, if everything fits into the customer's budget or request, we will go with the enterprise edition and implement the solution. Throughout the process, scalability is not an issue.

In my department, we have between 70 and 80 people working with UiPath. Out of these, 80% are developers, perhaps between 10% and 15% are business analysts, and the remaining people are solution architects or tech leads.

We use UiPath extensively because it helps with quick implementation and a short turnaround time. Deployments are very quick and easy to do. Given the current pandemic situation, I don't see the demand for UiPath or any other RPA tool going down.

I have been in contact with technical support many times and they are very good.

The issues that we typically face are related to Studio and sometimes licensing. The support has a fast turnaround time and if the organization is large, with a lot of licenses, then they have dedicated support for them. It is not necessary to deal with customer care, for example. Instead, dedicated technical support is available and they are really good.

The companies I have been with did not use another RPA tool prior to UiPath.

As a developer, I have not been directly involved in a UiPath installation or implementation. It's generally the responsibility of the implementation team that every organization has, and developers don't have the authority to simply download and install or implement UiPath. That said, I have given my input in the past.

Every company has a QA team and once they identify and finalize which automation software they want to install, the implementation team takes care of it. In my experience, the developers are given an instance of it to use after this.

It used to be a very simple installation, although, as I have seen UiPath change over time, it has become very complex. They have now Studio versus Studio X. They also have the Automation Cloud, which is different from an on-premises deployment. Somebody who is new to UiPath will not be able to do anything.

In terms of how long it takes for deployment, it depends on what process you want to automate. A very simple process can be automated, end-to-end from process analysis to deployment, in about a week. Complex automations have been taking us between six and eight months to complete. It all depends on what kind of automation you are doing.

In general, the implementation strategy is simple. Again, it depends on what kind of process we are automating. If the process is very complex and it involves a very high volume of data to be processed and stored, then it will require greater network bandwidth and more database storage. It may also need a fast server, with regards to processing speed. 

All of the implementations that I have seen have involved an in-house team. There are different departments involved, such as the networking team, the database team, or the IT department. Also, for the latest implementation that we did, involving Automation Cloud, the UiPath team helped us.

UiPath has reduced our overall costs. For example, if you are replacing 25 to 30 humans, where instead you only have to pay for licenses, the expenses are much less.

The company and our clients see a return on investment through savings in time and costs.

There are different licenses available, including variations for an on-premises versus a cloud-based deployment. For example, an on-premises installation is very easy and not very costly, and is suitable for a client with a simple optimization that does not have cloud-based requirements. Generally, companies do not have to worry about infrastructure because of the different options that are available.

Different licenses are used to activate features that the organization wants to use. For example, they offer licenses for UiPath Studio X, attended automation, unattended automation, document understanding, and so forth. They also have customized licensing and packages available. For example, if a customer requires 50 attended and 150 unattended licenses, but it does not fit into an existing package, then UiPath will create one for them.

They have an on-demand, floating license available for companies to save on costs. In this case, if a company wants 40 licenses and is only using 10 at a time then they only have to pay for the ones that they are using, with the remaining 40 triggered only when requested.

There are other automation tools on the market, such as Automation Anywhere and Blue Prism. Of these, UiPath is very strong and this is because of the UiPath academy for training, the UiPath certifications, and other things that impact the RPA developers.

The company that I am with did not evaluate other products before choosing UiPath.

Over the time that I have used it, the number of resources available in UiPath has grown to a very high level. For example, with the advent of Automation Cloud, the organization no longer has to worry about protecting against on-premises failures.

I have used the UiPath Apps feature but have not yet put it into production. I have completed a PoC and done some self-learning, but I haven't yet come across a scenario or process where we have to implement it.

We completed a proof of concept where our client was looking for customized input forms for their client. In that case, if I had to write the code for this customer's input form, I would need to hire additional resources at an extra cost. It might be, for example, code that has to be written in Java. In UiPath Apps, we were able to create a customized form for our client within a span of two to three days. It would be able to handle their various survey-related inputs. This feature is very helpful because it is much quicker than writing customized code for the client.

The Apps feature did not affect my IT department's workload but it did reduce the work required by my team. This was important because our client was not originally seeking to use UiPath for this part of their project. Instead, they had confidence in us and asked how it could be done, and whether Uipath could accomplish it. When we completed the input form using Apps, it definitely helped in reducing my organization's workload and in turn, reduced the overall cost to the client.

In summary, the features are very good and there are plenty of tricks and tips available, depending on what it is that you're trying to do.

I would rate this solution a nine out of ten.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

I would rate UiPath a nine out of 10.

Most of the time, we work with financial services to automate financial transaction monitoring systems. We go through multiple CRM and financial systems, then query the transactions based on the KYC information. We use OCR operations, using UiPath Robot, to fetch information, such as, identification number, passport number, and their tax information. We extract this information, then validate with our financial data or transactions data to ensure that there is no fraud nor anomalies in the system. If there are any suspicious transactions or potential fraud, we do manual investigations. Those manual investigations are redirected from the robot to a human agent, then the human agent verifies the information. If there are any cost validation requests from other systems, such as Salesforce and PeopleSoft, then another bot will be triggered using UiPath Orchestrator. After that, we do the remaining processing. At the end of the processing, we use the UiPath analytics service. That analytics service uses UiPath logs, which helps us to understand how the bot is performing and how many transactions we have validated. From that, we look at how many were successfully processed and how many were manually handled, i.e., exceptions. We identify business exceptions for any transactions during the initial pre-validation stage, such as the user identification number is not valid or input data validation errors. For example, passport information must be an alphanumeric eight digit. If the bot identifies that the value is not eight digits, but four or five digits, then it is an invalid record straightaway. We can see this from the reporting and performance graphs.

We do automation for our HR processes, such as onboarding processes. On any day, there are five or six people who need to be onboarded. This is one of our standard business cases. We have a UiPath robot design using UiPath Studio and then it deploys in Orchestrator. This robot is being used by the HR admin. They can fill in the key information of the user, e.g., name, level, and their package. So, they import all this information, which includes my identity information, mobile number, email, and IDs on an Excel file, possibly along with a few other associates joining tomorrow. Once those entries are made in the Excel file, then the user can trigger a robot. They also need to keep the file in a designated folder. The robot will read the file from the designated folder. Then, one by one, it will read the records or line items from Excel and open an SAP portal. After logging through the SAP Portal, it inputs the required employee information. After that, it will go to Microsoft Azure Active Directory to QA the user, email, and ID. It will then go to PeopleSoft to create an HR record for the salary information, leave information, and the level at which the associate is joining. At the end of this process, it will update the status to, "The associate has been registered successfully." It will then send the updated final report to HR, saying, "The processing has been completed." The bot triggers information with their newly created email ID. They can then access or receive the onboarding information. This is how it works.

Depending on the client's requirements, we use UiPath AI Center and UiPath Apps for custom requirements. Most of the time, we don't need them. There are some times that we do based on the client's requirements.

I am using UiPath Studio, UiPath Orchestrator, and UiPath Robot.

Initially, I used the on-premises deployment model. For the last two years, we have also been using the cloud deployment option, UiPath Cloud, along with the on-premises. This is based on a client's requirements.

We can use the Process Mining tool to identify opportunities. We can then design the robot using UiPath Studio. After designing it, we can deploy it, using UiPath Studio, to Orchestrator. From Orchestrator, we can manage, monitor, and upgrade all the new patches within the UiPath platform.

If we have one place where we can see the end-to-end journey of our automations, then I do not need to manage multiple licenses. I do not need to spend money and expertise hiring multiple people and training them on multiple platforms. Also, when upgrading the systems, if I have a one place where I can manage all my automations at the same time, including UI and background automations, then we can build low-code apps using UiPath Apps. Therefore, I can manage everything within one platform, which is either a UiPath Intelligent Automation platform or UiPath Cloud. This is very important. Because if I have multiple systems, then I need multiple stakeholders to manage, upgrade, and maintain them. So, we do not need to think about all the things that I am using. There is one place where I can manage everything.

It has enabled us to automate more processes overall. In the initial days, we easily automated the low hanging fruit. As our automation journey matured, we needed to automate processes using more complex methods, like AI, machine learning, and advanced OCR functionalities. 

The UiPath package available on UiPath Studio is useful. Compared to other RPA tools, like Automation Anywhere and Blue Prism, we found that this package gives us the opportunity to automate tasks in the shortest amount of time. There are multiple templates available on UiPath Studio. For example, if I need to do multi-setting processing, which means we are going to process multiple records simultaneously, we can use a UiPath Background Process as a template. Using the template, I can run multiple robots on the same system, which will not interact with other systems. It will work in the background. We have found that really valuable. This is not available with other RPA products, such as Automation Anywhere and Blue Prism. This is one of the valuable things that we have found in UiPath.

We use the UiPath recorder. For the latest, modern experience, we have a recorder called App Integrations. Using that particular recorder, I can automate tasks with multiple systems without thinking about having manual integrations between multiple browsers by identifying multiple sessions. Sessions can be used by the same recorder during the entire automation cycle. For example, I have two screens, one called PeopleSoft and another one is SAP. I can do a keystroke, mouse click, and then hit the submit button within PeopleSoft. Then, at the same time, I have another window open being used by the robot. I don't want to think about separating two windows, so the recorder takes care of this.

The UiPath recorder has multiple ways of identifying. For example, it uses UI elements, fuzzy logic, and image recognition at the same time. These three methods are used by only one recorder. Whereas, with other platforms, like Blue Prism and Automation Anywhere, I can use only one method at a time, so one command is one method for selecting or identifying objects. Whereas, with the app recorders, I can use three methods using one command. So, if one fails, another one will back up the scenario. Then, if another one also fails, the third one will help us automate. That is the ease of automation, which is a valuable feature that helps us ensure that automation works flawlessly, without having to look at if one of the methods failed.

One of the 2018 projects was built using version 18.2. We then got a report from users that it was not working. Most of the time, it failed on multiple use cases. When we took the process from the owner to repair and troubleshoot, we found that many packages were not being recognized by the new version, which is 2020. So, we had to upgrade to the latest package, then do a repair. It took a good amount of time for us to repair the package. We had to go back to the UAT environment, then do testing and get approval from the UAT. We then had to sign-off and deploy pre-production and post-production Hypercare. So, the automation cycle being repeated by almost 40% is quite costly to the business, but this is rare.

The vendor had already noticed these things were a big pain for us. With the recent versions, 2019 and onwards, the compatibility between the activity and packages is there. Prior to that, there were some issues. The UI automation package was the one that was mostly affected. Many people who were early adopters of UiPath observed or experienced these kinds of issues.

Sometimes, when we are using Remote Desktop automations, we may need to use a different approach along with the AI functionalities. For example, if I need to recognize the object on the screen, which I cannot do using native methods, then along with the AI functionality, I may need to have a backup method, such as the OCL methods along with AI Computer Visions. This ensures that it works robustly and my solutions deliver 100% results without any manual intervention. In such complex scenarios, we are using AI features along with multiple methods for the backing up of the AI features. We have to ensure that if something goes wrong with the AI features then we have another method which will ensure, if A fails, then B will back up our solution's process as expected.

I have been using it for the past six years.

We use UiPath AI Center, UiPath AI Computer Vision functionalities, and Document Understanding. These AI features came into the picture from 2019 onwards. First, we received updates using UiPath Computer Vision functionalities. Then, we received AI Center, which was not stable in its initial days. However, during the first quarter of 2020, we received version 2, which seems to be more stable. From there, we received general availability versions with integrations on UiPath Studio and UiPath StudioX. These work much better, as compared to the initial versions. So far, all the components of UiPath Computer Vision, Document Understanding, and UiPath AI Center work well. 

I appreciate other benefits, such as UiPath community support and UiPath enterprise product support, because if anything goes wrong, we search in Google or the UiPath Forum where we can find the answer. Even if the answer is not available, and I post a question, I am quite certain that within one day that I will get someone to respond to the question. It may be someone from the forum or UiPath. Most of the time, the answers are readily available on the UiPath Forums.

UiPath Forum is the one place where we reach out to research problems, do troubleshooting, or get some help. If we need some help regarding the installations or licensing, we can create a ticket. Typically, we get a response, email notifications, or support calls within four to six hours.

We hire fresh, new graduates that we are going to train. UiPath Academies offers numerous training tutorials and certifications, which helps us to train our newly hired resources who are completely new to RPA and UiPath. So, the training is really useful in terms of video tutorial practice and configuring our multilingual environment. UiPath Academy does support English, Chinese, Malay, and German. So, our associates from multiple offices, who are already working on the global initiative, can learn the same things at the same time. Or, they can get someone from an English background.

I started RPA using UiPath.

Using the tool for the last six years, the initial setup is like having breakfast every day; it is very simple. I can do it much faster than someone new who started two years back or the new guy. I know what to do and how to do it.

Because it is software as a service, the setup and configuration time are very quick. Within an hour or two, we can set up the infrastructure deployment for a starter package. Configurations can be done smoothly. The infrastructure deployment, which typically takes a week's time, can be minimized to an hour. This saves us a lot of time and money for multiple components.

In the initial days of 2016 or 2015, our automation journey was center of excellence (COE) based most of the time. Nowadays, we changed our strategy, and it is more employee involved. So, an employee can go into UiPath Automation Hub and submit their idea. If they have time and are interested, we give them the training to use UiPath StudioX features for automation. If a process is complex based on our assessment, we pick that process and do the automation so the COE and employ-driven automation work hand in hand. 

With a simple process, then the employee can automate it and do the PoC. If they need help, we are more than happy to help them. However, we found when the processes are medium to highly complex, this is something professional developers should be working on. If they are interested, they can contribute and learn, but it's less likely that a business user would be involved in a complex automation process.

UiPath has absolutely reduced human error. Infrastructure setup and maintenance are taken care of by the product owner or vendor. So, there is 100% assurance that nothing wrong will happen in the system because they are the people who built and deployed the product. Whenever we deploy, there may be a chance that something might go wrong or configurations went wrong. For example, I need to configure the Internet information services port. If I incorrectly configured the port or use a different method, there is a high chance that I might need to redirect the port to some other router or native firewall. If I use UiPath Cloud, everything is taken care of by UiPath. I just log into assistance, then allocate the license and configure our users.

For small to medium clients, those clients have an investment of about $100,000. We see around six to eight months in, they get something around 40% to 60% ROI being returned to them. Then, within a year to 18 months, they get a 100% to 120% ROI realized.

When we implement a robotics process automation solution using UiPath, and if the client's budget is limited, we mostly encourage the automation journey to be done using UiPath Cloud. UiPath ensures that it works fluidly, performs all upgrade security patches, and has 99.9% uptime.

In the initial days, UiPath was more competitive in terms of the license pricing as compared to Blue Prism and Automation Anywhere; it was much less. Currently, the pricing is quite standard compared to the other two vendors. 

We can use UiPath Cloud, which helps us to save a lot of money and infrastructure costs, if the automation journey or project is for a small to medium-sized company. However, if it is a big company, then on-premises is preferred. 

I have also used Automation Anywhere and Blue Prism as well as open-source automation platforms, such as TagUI and Selenium.

The main pros to using UiPath are its user interface, user-friendliness, learning platform, and support.

We have been using the UiPath Apps feature for the last four or five months, so it is relatively new for us. Most of our technical people are experimenting with UiPath Apps. We have planned training sessions for business users to upskill them.

If you are starting or in your initial days, I advise you to use the UiPath community version. Try first to do a PoC with the community version, trying out the automation in UiPath Cloud for free. Once you realize that this is something good as well as understand the value of it, then you can start with the initial package. If you think that you can start big from the beginning, then go for on-premises and start a large-scale transformation. However, I would advise doing a PoC first with proper guidance from UiPath and selecting a proper implementation consulting partner who has good experience or a solid past track record of doing automation, RPA, the RPA automation journey, and the transformation journey, as a whole. Not just UiPath automations or building robots, but also transforming their project and processes as well as doing Lean Six Sigma, which is a crucial part of the transformation journey. So, you should consider all these factors for a successful automation journey.

Compared to the top three tools, I rate this solution 10 out of 10.