I've used the solution within the healthcare system in the past. At this time, I use it for mortgages.
I use the solution to automate any digital processes that have specific rules and steps to follow and can potentially save the company a lot of time and money.
The Studio is extremely user-friendly. All of their products are user-friendly. I use the Orchestrator a lot as it's so simple.
My assessment of the ease of building automation using the product is positive. The UI of the application itself is very easy to use and navigate. It's very easy to debug. The fact that they're constantly listening to the feedback from the customers and the developers in the developer community is great. They're constantly pushing updates to fix things or add new features based on that feedback. They are really a company that listens to their users.
I have done automations for good causes. It was for responsibly disposing of medications. I didn't stick around to see the positive impact. I implemented it and then left. This was for a Fortune Top-Four company. There were a lot of people who ultimately received the notifications that came out thanks to this robot that let them know how to dispose of medications and the requirements. It also went as far as to locate the two nearest facilities based on their physical address within the closest driving distance. Hopefully, it caused a lot of people to be able to easily know where they could take those medications to dispose of them.
The solution enables us to implement end-to-end automation. It's extremely important. If you're going to automate something, you need to go all in. It's not necessarily black and white. There are exceptions to that rule. However, if it can be automated and it makes sense to automate it, then it should be automated. There shouldn't be human intervention if it's not absolutely necessary. Otherwise, it defeats the purpose of automating.
The user community is great. I see several people who are very trustworthy in their responses. It's very, very active. Everybody's helping each other out as far as giving them solutions to their issues, so it's something that I turned to quite a bit.
We've seen large time and money savings. As you start doing more and more processes, other people talk to other people, and then you get other people coming to you saying they have processes that should be automated. It's simply a matter of knocking down those walls and getting people to understand that we have this tool at our fingertips. And once they understand that then the opportunities are limitless.
I've seen some minimization in the on-premises footprint thanks to UiPath. In some companies that I've worked at, yes. In others, no. Where I'm at right now, they're still on-prem there, however, they are planning to go to the cloud next year.
Whether it is essential or not for customers to go to the cloud to reduce this on-premise footprint depends on the customer. Some customers, especially in the healthcare space, are afraid of the cloud for security reasons even though there is a lot of documentation to prove otherwise that it is very secure. The healthcare industry is always behind when it comes to that stuff. It takes a lot of building up of trust. The same is true with the government. However, there are others that embrace leading-edge technologies, and those are the ones that are using the cloud.
I've used the Academy courses. I was able to get my advanced RPA developer certification. It allows me to stay current on all of the updates that are being done across all of the products. It's very easy to filter and find the course that you want to watch depending on the product or your level of expertise. The actual format of the courses is very well done. The person who speaks is very clearly spoken, and easily understood. They do a combination of reading, videos, and hands-on in all the courses. It is a little bit for every type of learning style, and I've gotten a lot out of it.
I do not use the solution's AI functionality in our automation program much. I have used document understanding, which is one of their AI products. It opens up a whole new world of possibilities. There's already so much that can be done very easily and there is nothing that's too difficult to implement. Once you do understand how to build processes that use AI, it opens up many other possibilities that could get even bigger in terms of the value that it brings to a company. I gained a lot of knowledge and new skills from going through the process of building out a document understanding process and understanding how to learn all those new tools. It also integrates with the action center and a couple of the other UI top products as well. It's a really good learning experience.
It has enabled me to automate more processes. It can contribute to the end-to-end automation that we implement. It just depends on where the company is at and their automation journey if they have processes that would be very high returns in terms of value and require more AI integration.
The product can help speed up digital transformation and reduce the cost of the digital transformation. Having these tools in your toolbox allows you to do a lot more so long as you have the digital input.
We no longer require any expense, complex application upgrades, or IT application support. It's very easy, especially with the cloud. I did have some difficulties recently at a company that goes through a proxy on their VMs, which made it a little bit more difficult to install the machines and get them working. However, overall, when you have to install what is needed to build and run the automation and you're on the cloud version, it's simply an executable that you download. You click through a couple of screens that are very self-explanatory and well-explained. And that's it. There's nothing special to do as everything else is hosted in the cloud. As long as you have the wherewithal to set up a VM with the basic requirements that are needed, it's extremely easy.
I've seen a reduction in human errors while using UiPath. A robot is programmed to do what you tell it to do. It's not going to make the same type of mistakes that a human would make. It would make mistakes only due to the way that you program it. Therefore, it absolutely should and does reduce the errors that you would see otherwise from a human.
The solution has freed up employee time. The most recent report that I got from some automation that has been done in the past shows that, over the past five or six months of automation, that I have built there have been two full-time employees at 60 hours a week who were let go, and then there were at least two other people that were are now spending at least half their time doing manual inputs. Now, they are doing other things. There's a direct impact that I've seen just from recent automation.
The money saved from manual labor is a clear cost savings. Other times, it's more about cost avoidance. Sometimes there is some additional value that it brings that's almost unable to be calculated - such as customer satisfaction, customer retention, or customer acquisition. Those things are a little bit harder to calculate. For the most part, it offers a clear time equals-money type of cost-benefit.
Unfortunately, I used to be a lover of their Slack channel and people don't seem so responsive there anymore. Unfortunately, I've gotten away from using their Slack channel. That would have been a really good way for me to get some help from the community, yet I don't find it helpful anymore.
They're working on integrating their version of a chat. They're starting with Studio Xpress or StudioWeb. I don't use StudioWeb and I don't use StudioX, however, I would love to have that type of feature in Studio. I could use it across the board, not just in Studio, but in Assist.
Their error messaging could use some improvement. More times than not an error that you receive is accurate or not clear.
In terms of missing features, I can't think of any. They are always ten steps ahead.
I've used the solution since 2018.
The solution is stable and reliable.
The solution is 100% scalable.
It's very easy to open an issue with support. I've learned over the years that you don't need to necessarily say that you have a high-priority issue in order to get a quick response. They are very responsive. They are very clear in the steps they need you to take to give you what they need in order to fix your problem. If they're unable to fix it by requesting that information. They get on a call with you to troubleshoot. They follow up with you after. They give you a survey to make sure they did well. Every part of their support process is great. I have no complaints at all.
I have only scratched the surface of RPA. With Blue Prism and Automation Anywhere, I've only worked with them enough to see where they are in comparison to UiPath. I also fully trust the reports that Gartner puts out, and UiPath has been on top for so long now and always is and always keeps that spot. I don't want to waste my time on anything else. I want to stay in this lane with a product and a company that I know and love - one that has done an amazing job - and be an expert in that rather than go around and only know a little bit about a lot of things.
It's very easy to implement the solution and I've done it multiple times. I'm not somebody who typically installs software. I'm not a hardware person. I'm not even good with other types of software necessarily, and yet I find the installation process to be very simple.
I didn't need a lot of staff to handle the deployment process. There are companies that I've been at that have to follow certain protocols for auditing purposes and have to have somebody that's designated DevOps in order to do the deployment. In which case, it requires a little bit more hand-holding or documentation to explain how to do that to somebody who's not in the position like I am who knows how to do it, and you have to explain it to them. I don't think that it's needed or necessary, and it actually hinders the process, especially when we deploy something to production. It doesn't work quite the same in production as it just did in development, and you need to make changes, and it really hinders that process when you have another set of hands to go through.
Maintenance has the potential to be a little bit difficult. That said, I've done big upgrades twice now. For the most part, things have been backward compatible. I haven't had an issue. I didn't need to go back and fix any previous processes that were deployed. I just started using the newer versions of things on new processes going forward and the old ones still ran with no issue whatsoever, it very clearly states things that have been deprecated or things that will be deprecated by a certain date.
With the cloud version, there is not much maintenance required. However, they did just do an upgrade on the cloud. I was not aware that it was coming, and it would have been nice to at least see something on the site to catch your eye, some type of scrolling banner or flashing to tell you, "Hey, this is updated. Click this link to see what the updates are." In the cloud, if you're not using the automation suite, it will just update without you knowing about it, which I'm not a fan of. I understand that's how that works. If you don't have an automation suite, however, I would like to know. Don't make me go search for it. I'm on Orchestrator every day. I'd prefer if they put something there, or put something in Studio so that I know it's coming since the changes did affect us. They had some role and permission changes that affected my developers, and they weren't able to publish anymore, and I had to figure that out. Ultimately, you do have to make sure that you're staying up to date with your studio and assistant.
The pricing is very fair. They have adjusted their pricing model so that several variables and volume base could be one of them. I'm not too sure. A lot of times I'm cut out from those conversations. The company itself has to sign off on contracts or make the decision on that. That said, it's my understanding the pricing is very fair for what they give you. You see your benefit and the return from it quickly.
I'm a developer and an architect.
The ease of usability and implementation for UiPath as well as the wide array of products that they have to support their automation journey make it a great product. The amazing support they have is great. The community that they have is bigger than all the other options, so you're going to find more resources when it comes to needing help with any type of issue. I'd advise those considering the product to look at the ratings and pertinent reports to get an overview of who's the best.
I'd rate the solution ten out of ten.
