UiPath Platform Reviews

We have a web application, and we also have iOS and Android applications. We are automating the regression testing part for these applications. Mainly, we are navigating and interacting with UI elements, and we are verifying certain buttons. We are also verifying certain data with RDBMS outputs.

UiPath enables us to implement end-to-end automation, starting with process analysis, then robot building, and finally monitoring of automations. UiPath has been doing well in terms of Orchestrator and how we can see the execution and the reports and results of our test cases. It is doing well in these aspects, which is very important for us. We are doing end-to-end automation and monitoring using Orchestrator, and it is quite useful. This is something that we were looking for while deciding on the automation tool that we would like to go with, and that's why we decided to go with UiPath.

It has been helpful for regression testing. We are developing a big web application, and we are expecting changes every quarter. The development and deployment have been going on every quarter for the past two years. Previously, we had a team of seven or eight people who were doing the manual testing. By automating the testing, we have reduced the team's size to half. The remaining team members are not just analyzing the executions that we are doing with UiPath; they are also providing support. It has increased employee satisfaction because they don't have to do repetitive work again and again. It has been quite good.

It has been useful for unattended automation, and it has also reduced human errors in our organization. Reduction in human errors is the best benefit that we have got from the UiPath implementation.

Automation is most valuable. When it comes to web automation, data scraping and UI-related activities, such as the Find Element activity, are quite useful.

UiPath Academy courses have also been very useful. Whenever we have to work on something new, I go to UiPath Academy and browse all the resources that they have provided. When I started working with OCR about two or three months back, I used UiPath Academy courses. They are very helpful, especially for new people who join the team. New associates need exposure to the tools that we are using, and the content that is present in UiPath Academy is quite good. It gives them an idea about the tool and the things that they can do with it. UiPath Academy has been quite helpful in training new associates.

UiPath is developing day by day, and there are certain products, such as AI Fabric, that UiPath has launched lately. These products are quite new to most of us in the RPA industry. Because there are courses available for these products in UiPath Academy, we are able to get an idea about a tool, its capabilities, and how to use it.

There is a big room for improvement when it comes to mobile automation. The Find Element activity is not present in mobile automation. There are activities to extract data, but we don't have data scraping in mobile automation. These activities are available for UI automation of web applications, but they are not available for mobile automation, which is a drawback when working on mobile automation with UiPath.

There are also so many bugs in mobile automation. I've been working with mobile automation for the past six months, and in the past six months, I have found so many bugs. We have reported them to UiPath. Some of them are posted on the forum, and I haven't seen any positive feedback in terms of whether a bug has been created or they are working on improvement. So far, there is nothing like that. 

There is also a bug related to the Pick Branch activity, and we can't really work with the UI elements in this particular activity. This issue was first reported by someone in 2019, and this post is available in the forum. It has been more than two years, and this bug has not been fixed. 

For mobile automation, there is a tool provided by UiPath called Mobile Device Management (MDM). We do the automation using that tool. In our project, we are using cloud APM services. UiPath Studio communicates with MDM, and MDM communicates with Sauce Labs, which is the cloud APM service provider for us. There is a huge gap in the synchronization of both of them. I have observed a visible difference. When I execute an app activity, it gets executed at Sauce Labs very fast. The final output that we should be getting first comes to MDM and then UiPath takes that output from the MDM, but there is a synchronization gap. There is a visible difference, and UiPath is lacking in this part. So, mobile automation is the part where UiPath can improve a lot.

I've been working with UiPath for almost two years. I'm into development, and I have worked on Excel automation, mobile automation, and web automation.

I don't have any opinion on its scalability at this time. In terms of its usage, we have to create 2,000 automations for our client, and we have already implemented more than 1,000. We don't run those automations every day. We run them as per the requirements, so there would be 200 to 400 processes once a week.

In my project, there are five people who are working with UiPath, but in my company, there are many more people. One of them is the manager, and four of them are working on development. 

There have been some bugs for which we connected with UiPath support. It was a mixed experience. There were some technical support experts with whom we connected, and they tried to get to the root of the trouble. They did their best to provide us with the best solution possible. We have also had other scenarios where there was no answer or explanation for the issue. We didn't get any positive feedback from them.

I had posted a few queries related to mobile automation on the UiPath community, but there was no instant solution. I was expecting a reply within one or two days, but there was no reply. Because this is a niche field, there are not many people working in this domain, but I got replies from the UiPath team on some of the queries. So, overall, the experience was good. I would rate them a six out of 10.

I was not involved in its setup.

It reduces the cost of digital transformation in a way. When it comes to the scenario of our automation, UiPath isn't so fast, and there is the speed issue that UiPath can fix, but because a bot has the capability of working 24/7, there is a reduction in the cost of digital transformation.

We evaluated Blue Prism. We didn't explore Automation Anywhere. After comparing it with Blue Prism, we decided to go with UiPath. As per our client's requirement, there were three applications to be automated, and because UiPath supported web automation and mobile automation for iOS and Android, we went for UiPath. We just had to buy the license for one, and we could automate all three applications.

Rather than implementing RPA on a big scale, I would advise starting at a small scale and doing good process task mining. It is very important to identify the right process to automate.

UiPath is quite an impressive tool. It was the first tool that I started learning when I got into RPA. Recently, I got familiarized with Automation Anywhere. I used to think that Automation Anywhere is better because it is on the cloud, but now that I know that UiPath also has a cloud option, I'm going to explore that option. It is a good solution, and UiPath is doing well when it comes to the improvement of the product. My experience is good overall.

We have not used AI-enhanced Document Understanding in our automation program. We are planning to implement it, but it may take a while.

I would rate it an eight out of 10.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

We've been using UiPath for about three years.

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

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

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

Positive

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Positive

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

We do plan to increase usage.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

We started using UiPath in November of 2018.

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

We haven't seen any issues with scalability. 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

We didn't use any other RPA solution previously.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

We are on-prem within the insurance industry. Our use cases are in auto reports and micro use cases within that.

The biggest benefit we see from UiPath is the overall platform. It's not only the functionalities. As we started tying that all together in the platform view, with the orchestration forms and the workflow function, it'll be key, because it's been around in the industry for 20 years, but hasn't been tied to everything. 

It saves us costs but that's only one part of it. We are looking at it in terms of employee centricity, customer centricity, reducing the risk, and improving the accuracy. There's a multitude of factors that we are looking at.

We have seen a reduction in human error using UiPath. We are an audit firm at heart. We do a lot of audit and tax work, which is all related. Within use cases in those spaces, we see a change in terms of accuracy. It eliminates manual errors. Instead of just looking at 20% or 30% of the big picture, you can look at 100 of it because it's automated. 

The most valuable feature is the fluidity of the products. When I want to use RPA, I can use RPA. When I want to do process mining, I can do process mining. Those are the two top that I typically use it for. 

Building automations is easy. It's drag and drop. If you are a developer and want the full functionality, you can actually dive into it at a little bit more of an API level.

We use the Academy. I am the training and certification lead for our UI group of 200 practitioners. It's probably the only group in your partner community that's 100% certified. We are tied in into your training and certification piece and we are using and reusing the licenses to make sure that we are pushing out the updates from the platform through the training store.

Our training and certification programs are still gaining maturity. We recently signed the USN Certification with UiPath, which gives us access to brochures and AP credits. It makes it a little bit more formal because the process was there, but it was very informal. We were exchanging emails, but now it's tied together with the workflow. It's getting there. 

The breadth of the courses is the most valuable aspect of the Academy. This is my third year doing this. There has been an increase in courses being offered. 

The path forward is probably to tie this all together in a platform and look at the workflow automation. At this point, we are doing snapshot automation, point solution, and staff automations. The term RPA itself is a misnomer, it never was a robotic process, it was robotic task automation. We are automating tasks and the way to get away from that is to look at process level automation end-to-end. That won't be done with RPA tools, it has to be with the workflow tools. How do we tie in and how do we tie into, either the orchestration function or decisioning functions? They will tie into a broader transformation initiative. It'll be dual-edged.

I have been using UiPath for two years. 

The stability has improved in the last two years. As they push more functionality on that and go more cloud-centric, I think it will be much more stable. We just got through an issue yesterday, but it was resolved quickly. We knew what to do. We could figure out the root cause. 

Scalability has come a long way. UiPath is probably the leader in this, but as we look at broader solutions and a process-centric automation suite, we also have a long way to go forward. We are at a midpoint in the journey. It's on UiPath and the department of community to try to hook that together.

UiPath is our biggest alliance in the automation side for my company and the plan is to increase the usage. There's a commitment from the very top on both sides. We have stepped away from past automation and stepped into the broader use of it and the transformation journey. There have been micro transformation journeys in all sectors, whether it's financial services or outside of that and commercial, national accounts, and the public sector. That's how we're looking to scale and become even bigger in the next few years.

We use Automation Anywhere, Blue Prism, and Pega Robotic Process. Some of it is just down to the differences between what the tools offer. I've used all four of them.

Each solution has its pros, but in terms of speed to market, and improving the quality, the partner network, the product suite, and the product roadmap itself, UiPath is a few years ahead of the rest. That's reflected in the analyst reports.

UiPath is something that people can dive into. My advice would be to take a few courses, everything is available online. It really comes down to people's aptitude and whether they want to get into this. I don't think it's very difficult.

I would rate it a seven out of ten. Purely because there is always room for improvement, but it's on the right track. Product roadmaps and positioning are in the right space.