UiPath Platform Reviews

We are partners with UiPath and Automation Anywhere. We use this solution for IT services and for the education sector.

OCR Tesseract, by default, is the good OCR search engine to extract data from a digital PDF. For any Unstructured document with a normal noise, background letters, either UiPath Document Understanding or AbbyyReader fails to extract the exact values. Very difficult to depend on Computer Vision too as a third party tool for small to mid-range business purpose. Hence, a combination of AI/ML with a good OCR Engine is required for UiPath to go forward.

UiPath Orchestrator is definitely a plus point in the product. This helps in all formats of UiPath version ranging from PoC till Product Deployment.

The OCR functionality for this solution could be improved. It should have a better capability to read unstructured documents. The next generation of OCR is ICR and UiPath does not have this. This would enable us to read and search through documents.

We have used this solution for two years. 

This is a stable solution. 

This is a scalable solution. 

The technical support is not that satisfactory. We have to find the answers by ourselves through non-community groups. 

The initial setup is straightforward and the deployment was easy. 

It was implemented in-house. 

The return on investment is really good. I would rate it a three out of five.

We're an official partner of both AA and UiPath and both of them carry the same weight with a very marginal difference but there is a difference in cost. Currently our clients are looking for cost optimization post-pandemic and UiPath comes at a high price point. 

I would rate this solution a six out of ten.

We are using UiPath for automation processes in an insurance company in the finance department.

The most valuable feature of UiPath is if you set a form and there's an interaction with the user, it's easy and fast to build than the other RPA tools. Additionally, it is simple to use the connectors.

In UiPath they should improve the input and outputs of processes. I found it very complicated.

In a future release of UiPath, they could improve the OCR engine to make it better. All the RPA tools use some OCR engine, while UiPath's is the best but it is hard to configure and set up for your projects.

I have been using UiPath for approximately six months.

The stability of UiPath is highly stable.

We have approximately four people using this solution in my organization.

I have not used the support from UiPath.

We previously used Blue Prism.

UiPath gives a return on investment, it does what it is supposed to do.

UiPath is an expensive solution but it is worth the money. You have a lot of features. 

The licenses need to be improved because when you have to use UiPath on another system, you have to set up the processes manually, and you are not able to change the process the time if you configure a process running at the system. You have to stop it and then run to the other system. It's not too easy to configure it according to the system. If you have a large deployment, for example, 10 to 20 bots, it's hard to configure.

UiPath has a lot of free training and a lot of free processes ready to go. You have to see the best practices in order to receive the best way of development. It is important to see the best practices guide.

I rate UiPath a nine out of ten.

UiPath is great because it's highly stable, it's fast to develop, and easy to configure. However, there are some improvements to be made.

We have deployed a chatbot in our system.

Designing a chatbot would usually require some language coding and it would have to be deployed with certain front-end languages. But UiPath gives us the ability to automate this functionality with drag-and-drop features. That is the very best part, where UiPath is doing an amazing job. It doesn't require any language coding or front-end coding to create the user interface.

Because it is easy to use, it saves a lot of time for the developer. When it comes to programming, UiPath has made all the manual work, such as verifying and correcting errors, and even repeating processes, less complex and less time-consuming. If you were to try to choose a coding language and use it to streamline things and design a bot for automation, it would take more time. Doing that would take 15 days to learn the language and to code with it. There would be a certain number of errors that you would have to deal with, as well. There might also be a backend required. UiPath can easily save you 10 to 15 days, automating in two to three days, maximum.

It gives you the ability to automate workflows and large processes that would take a long time to do manually. With the help of UiPath, the time it takes to get those tasks done is reduced and it reduces human error. In addition, it saves you money because you don't need to hire people for the tasks that have been automated.

There is also the benefit of not having to hire an engineer to program things. If you had to hire an engineer there would be the expectation of a payment package. There would also be the time spent on dealing with errors the engineer makes, and this person might also require mentors. UiPath decreases the spending of time, energy, and money, especially.

UiPath also saves our organization time because the automation cloud handles infrastructure, maintenance, and updates.

One of the most valuable features is that it provides you with the ability to learn the system and understand the concepts through specific demos. UiPath provides you with education, through the UiPath Academy, on the basics of how to use the software and for what purposes you can use it. It is a very good thing that they provide education with it. That makes it easy for us, as developers, to gain the knowledge we need.

Another good feature is that it comes with an embedded recording functionality. You didn't require an external screen recorder. The embedded screen recorder enables you to record things so that you can remember them over time.

In general, it is easy to build automations using UiPath. You just drag and drop according to your needs, and you can automate things in a single go.

One thing I don't like about UiPath is that it does not have a very good user interface for a newbie. It's not that the user interface itself is bad, but when I started using it, it was very difficult for me to understand the tool and how to use it. It has N functionalities and a user has to learn the particular things that these functionalities are used for.

The user interface should be a little simpler than it is right now, as it is very complex.

I have been using UiPath for more than a year.

In terms of scalability, this software can grow with the industry, especially since more companies are focusing on automation. Here in India, for example, there are many companies, like KPMG, focusing on the field of automation. Software like this can help them to scale more and more in building their automations. The software can really scale up well, as long as the user interface is improved.

Their support system is very good. If you have a problem and you reach out to their support system, they are quick to reply. Problems are solved within 24 hours of reaching out to them.

Also, you can use the UiPath user community instead of contacting support. There is value to the user community because people help each other there. Because we are concentrating on development in my company, we tend to not be as active on the community side, but whenever we do use it we get help from them.

Positive

I have only been exposed to this software. I graduated and started working in the RPA domain by using this software.

It wasn't that complicated to set up. 

The pricing and licensing are pretty decent. If you are using it as an automation developer, it comes in at under $500 a month. Still, the pricing can be reduced, but the service and functionality are solid. 

I have heard from some of my colleagues that there are many subdivisions of the pricing and some of them are between $1,500 and $2,000 a month. That is expensive. But overall, my colleagues say it is a cost-effective program in the long run.

If you are working in the RPA domain as an automation developer, you should look at UiPath because it gives you many functionalities. Also, the education aspect of UiPath is a very cool feature because you don't need to rely on other software to learn it. Thirdly, the bot-building process is very smooth. 

UiPath is a fast, time-saving, money-saving, energy-saving solution. Using UiPath has been the best experience. I would recommend it. You can choose this software without any second thoughts. It can provide a good return on investment to your business.

The solution has provided assistance with the removal of repetitive human transactional activities; document to text solutions; complex data extractions; cut and paste operations; information content management. This is either supported in promoting strategies with our business partners, or implemented at our clients, or included in products we develop for our clients. 

We use it in our own operations that have been migrated to other products or solved with coding or third-party software offering solutions to specific needs. Solutions are based on client sites and our clients pay for their own licensing.

The costs involved and the licensing model have forced us to recommend other solutions to our clients and to stop using UiPath internally due to constraints imposed on small businesses (specifically around the community edition). 

For our clients who can afford the licensing costs (Blue Chip Clients), the benefits have been to remove some repetitive activities from the target areas. 

In most cases, where there is a high-value resource impacted by these repetitions, there has been a cost-benefit in doing so, however, where the labor cost is below a certain threshold, the benefits are contained to error avoidance and reliability only with (additional) costs being migrated to support the technology and increasing overall IT OPS costs - particularly now with the increased fees and current licensing model.

The product as a whole is a valuable contributor to efficiency improvement. It integrates with ease (although some coding experience is required for higher/involved functions). We use it to streamline and support our customer operations primarily, but also to do internal acceleration on human-dependent (simple) tasks.

Simplification of complex task creation by introducing pre-coded objects is the single most attractive feature of the product. The choice between attended and unattended Bot applications with similar functionality is an advantage. 

Features are on track, however, service and cost models need to be reviewed to be market sensitive and related to the industry. Providing a great product at the wrong price without consideration to the economic conditions of the markets within which it is being offered, creates barriers and another product is sure to fill the void.

Closer integration with machine learning frameworks and matrix processing can be improved and will benefit low-cost/entry-level uptake and activation for some clients. Although pass-through options exist and have been activated, this is not sufficient to create encapsulated learning within the organizations and serves to improve third-party algorithms with added exposure to privacy (information systems security management) risks. 

I've been involved with UiPath since the launch in South Africa with Larc Technologies as the first UiPath solutions partner and reseller for the country.

No robotic solution can ever be classed as stable unless there are no change dependencies. It will always require more support than any other core technology - its the nature of the beast.

Running multiple robots in an environment requires orchestration, which is another expensive modality in the UiPath stable.

Consultations outside the normal service environments are strained, authoritative, and inflexible and there is little consideration for anything outside their immediate scope of vision and there is zero hesitance to move against initial strategic positioning and commitments. 

Neutral

We have been involved with and supported UiPath from the onset. We have also delivered enterprise solutions with BluePrism and Automation Anywhere. UiPath has proven to be capable, but costly and inflexible from a pricing and support model viewpoint.

It depends on the nature of the requirements and can be super complex or super easy. Supporting the bots are always a challenge and supervision (alerts, monitoring) is essential.

We work with excellent vendor implementation teams and have in-house competence in design and delivery. In most customer environments, there are competent implementation and maintenance resources for bot environments. Over the past 5 years, bot development, administration, and maintenance skills have improved, however, there is still a significant gap in proper orchestration and optimization within bot frameworks - which affects the overall cost and effectiveness of automation strategies.

At present, the ROI is negative for us as a company. For our clients, it varies. When all costs are considered (TCO) over a two-year period, financial breakeven is mostly attained with some negative ratios (if it's the wrong tool for the job). 

In most cases, there are intangible benefits. In all cases, IT operations cost increased and, in worst-case scenarios, the business benefit was short-lived as the technology costs escalated and the resource reduction potential was never attained.

HA and DR planning are essential when determining actual resource reduction potential.

UiPath is becoming expensive and will be outpricing themselves if they continue to enforce their current service configuration (model). Many clients have been impacted by the pandemic and instead of assisting to breach the gaps, there is a sense that UiPath is monetizing on the disaster.  

We looked at BluePrism, Automation Anywhere and we are now moving on to Open RPA - a viable option if you have the right skills to plug gaps. 

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. 

We primarily use the solution for legacy data transfer, UI automation, CRM and ITSM automation, and call centers. Specifically, in call centers, using UiPath forms and form render has been really helpful.

I love developing in Studio. For my clients, the approachability of the orchestrator is really valuable. It takes a little bit to learn the licensing structure and layout at first, however, once they get it, it's pretty smooth sailing from there. The modern folders have become a great thing for any enterprise that's looking to automate using an orchestrator as a server.

I like to automate in Studio as I'm familiar with it. I honestly just like the platform so I like automating with Studio.

I really enjoy Document Understanding. I like how it all integrates together. Some of the stuff I've seen now with just the connectors and the way you can scale implementations is really exciting. While I do like Studio, I also like how it works with the rest of the platform.

We most recently built an unintended bot that saves them about $500,000 a year worth of GS 14 labor.

UiPath saves costs for our customers’ organizations. That would just be the cost savings from RPA bots. I haven't really dug into the cost savings of the ancillary products, however. I know that one of my clients is using the test suite now after I had built a proof of concept for it, and they've fully implemented it. I'm sure there's going to be a lot of cost savings there as well.

In terms of ease of building automation, it depends on the process. For anything that's ultra-low or a low-level complexity, it's very simple. Once you start getting sprawled out into larger automation that very much becomes object-oriented programming and is basically making a workflow. That's when you really need to take hold of programmatic concepts. You need to be a strong scriptor to be able to make the best RPA bots.

Our clients have reduced human error. That's one of the things that I tend to talk about the most. The bots can get work done faster, however, the reduction of human error is probably more valuable in some cases than just speeding up work.

In terms of UiPath Academy, everybody's used it. I've used it myself. My entire team has used it. All of our engineers are some sort of Pearson VUE certified now. Most of us have the Advanced Developer. A few of our younger junior developers have the associate, the RPA associate, however, they're working on getting the Advanced Developer and they lean on the Academy pretty heavily.

The biggest value in the Academy is the videos, which are pretty helpful. Sometimes you have to slow it down, however, for the most part, the way it goes through concepts, especially for somebody that doesn't have much programming experience, the videos tend to go through some of the more elementary things like variables arguments. That can get a little bit boring for programmers since they've been through that 100 different times. That said, that’s really where the strength lies as it does target a large group of different employees. As an engineer, I might pass by some of the boring stuff, however, I will still find things later on in the training where I'm like, wow, I actually never knew that.

The license model changing every year can be a little bit frustrating. It's hard sometimes when things go from being robot-based to being runtime-based.

Some federal users are still on the 2019 orchestrator or even a 2018 orchestrator. However, by being on them, they can't take advantage of modern folders. This issue is, once they get upgraded to 2020, and they start using modern folders, essentially you shouldn't really be using plastic folders anymore. Some of their frustrations aren't really long-term frustrations. Orchestrators have gotten really popular over the last few years. There are certain things that have made it so much better. That said, we're still in that transition where clients have been using classic folders and then they upgrade and they're going to have to change everything. Hopefully, they don't have to do it more than when they upgrade past 2020.

One of my clients upgraded their production environment from the 2019 orchestrator to the 2020 and everything was in plastic folders and I advised them to switch to modern folders and it was a pain. Once it was taken care of, it was great. It's just that it took a lot of convincing to tell them why it was better.

I've been using the solution for three years. 

It's pretty stable. The biggest issue is just that more companies need to really adopt a change management system, whether that's through Service Now or is built-in change management, those alerts need to be going to the RPA center of excellence. 

There are things that will change or break the UiPath bot sometimes. They're very stable and they've become more stable if there's a change management system. Automated testing can make it so you can catch things that have changed with applications with RPA testing before they've occurred and then you can fix things quickly.

The scalability was tough a few years ago, however, now it's exponentially easier with modern folders and the orchestrator.

I've worked with UiPath support. I would put them at a seven out of ten as they need to be a little bit more timely. There have been issues with a client where support has taken a really long time to get back to us or they haven't updated our support ticket, even though we've advanced. Maybe it was an isolated incident. I have worked with support before where that hasn't happened. I felt like I got in a bad run of working with the support folks and the client was definitely not pleased.

I actually don't have experience with other RPA solutions. I came from a web development background and I went straight into UiPath and now the way that it's scaled out and now that I work in the federal government, UiPath has such a large piece of the market share. I've never really seen a need to learn any other automation solutions. I may learn Power Automate at some point, however, I would really prefer to stick with UiPath.

The solution is pretty straightforward. I've run through complex issues, mostly the NuGet package and it's different with every customer. As far as the UiPath platform goes, it's pretty straightforward to deploy bots. It all depends on how an agency has its group policies set up for security and sometimes that causes issues. It's just about learning new ways to solve different problems that may be unique to an agency or may not be.

In the government, deployment takes a little longer. I would like to think development usually doesn't take that long, however, it's like going through ATO, especially if it's an unintended bot. Sometimes it can take like a few months. It just depends if they've got a center of excellence stood up or not. For example, if they've got an CI/CD pipeline or just a standard development life cycle, a lot of people don't have that set up and then it ends up taking longer as they have to go through ATO. It’s variable. Unfortunately, it's just a lot slower to get them deployed than in the private sector I think.

That’s no fault of UiPath. It's usually group policy security systems and things like that. I've had to talk to a lot of security folks and help walk them through things that need to be changed.

We've been implementing our UiPath as well.

I don't really have too much to offer about the pricing part of it. I don't really work on that side of the business. I would say my only gripe about the pricing would be something like a Studio Pro license being more expensive than a Studio license, just to essentially get something that links Test Manager. Some people might've found that a little bit hard to swallow. From what I've heard, Studio Pro is going away and Test Manager is just going to come into Studio. That would be the only thing I've noticed that I thought was a little silly. Everything else is typically not really my side of the business.

We have everything on-prem in our demo environment and the customers I work with typically have the on-prem offerings as well.

I have used UI path apps in our demo environment. I do not have any clients that are using it.

We have an AI center in our demo environment, however, I don't have any clients that are using it. I do have a client that's actually in the process of installing it right now and getting it through their governance model. That's as close as it would've come for our customers using the AI center.

To those considering UiPath, I would say, just go ahead and do it. RPA is pretty awesome. It's easy to get solutions out. There still needs to be a good bit of work done on the Citizen Developer Model, however, at the same time, as far as getting a team of engineers in there to automate things, if you get good RPA developers, you can get things automated really quickly. People can help you with your standard development life cycle. You just need to jump in.

I would rate UiPath solutions at a nine out of ten. The only reason I wouldn't give it a 10 is that, in terms of the installation of the product, sometimes the documentation leaves a lot to be desired. Sometimes it's tough to work through installation issues without actually contacting support. I do wish that was a little bit more streamlined.

I work at a financial firm where we do trade settlement activity. We are using UiPath for cleaning up data, doing reconciliation, and finding where the trade breaks and trade files are. It helps us lay the groundwork for the value add work, which comes later.

It allows us to grow our business. The use case that we have is a huge time saver because we do not have a lot of volume right now. We are looking to sell part of the business and get more clients onto it. The only way we could do that or even open that door for possibility is to automate and go through a lot more volume. 

Our teams are under huge pressure because trade volume has gone up over the past year. UiPath is just getting us back to the status quo and then also opening the pipeline for more volume to go through. We have a very strong program that encourages people to get trained up on tools. 

StudioX is going to be a big game changer for us. We found with the other tools that we use that as soon as we put UiPath in the hands of everyday users and ops users, they will be able to quickly learn it. This will make a big impact because we will get big volumes and projects coming through.

UiPath has done a good job coming up with the broadest use cases. However, I would like to see them dive into more industry-specific use cases. For example, checked OCR and brokerage statements are common. Anything unique to the financial industry would be useful for us.

We have using UiPath since February when it got brought into our team. We just had our first box go live about two weeks ago. We have had three go live so far; one using StudioX and two using Studio.

So far, I haven't heard any issues. We are always going to expect issues, but so far so good and I hope the stability is good. Alteryx had issues at times, which created some pretty big problems. Hopefully, UiPath will not do that as much, because we are expecting to lean on it.

I have not used them directly. 

It was not so much a switch for us. We are still using Alteryx. UiPath is a much better automation tool than what we were using before because it was self-service. We didn't have to have our COE build it and related solutions for us. We have similar functionality with Alteryx. Anyone can learn it and start building and go through our governance process. Doing so, they can have a huge impact on their team.

We are a large company and the initial setup took our COE quite a few months. However, I believe their experience was positive overall. A lot of the issues we had were internal and concerned how we were going to do our governance. We were very strict about that. 

Getting people access was easy and so was learning to build. Everything on the UiPath side went smoothly.

We're a mature automation team. Over the past four years, we've delivered well over 150 FTE. We're always looking for new tools and to pick up some of that automation that we couldn't do before. 

UiPath has helped with data scraping and plugging into websites and combining that with Alteryx. We can attack 90% of our use cases now. We can not deal with the other 10% for internal governance reasons and not so much capability.

The three use cases we have implemented with UiPath have saved about half an FTE. 

I know that the reason we went with UiPath is because it is a lot cheaper than the other vendor we were using. It is of a better quality as well, but it is less expensive to run on an ongoing basis. 

I'm not sure if we evaluated other options. My team does not look into the suite of options. We have a separate COE that sets everything up for us. We are tasked with implementation. 

My advice is to first build a good team that you can trust. Because great tools are useless if you don't have any builders or people that know how to use the tools. That is what we have been focused on. Also, have very specific support for your team.

We have multiple accounts sellable, accounts payable, corporate finance, and supply chain use cases. We have started some use cases at the factory floor automation as well.

There are so many benefits to using UiPath, but getting the buy-in is very important from the end users. We are seeing many hours saved with respect to automation. Automation should be on every project's agenda. 

Scaling at pace with regards to the industry has been the most valuable UiPath feature for us. I would also add that there are so many features in RPA. 

We are leveraging the UiPath Academy for our citizen developer program. We are asking them to train at their own pace. The courses are straightforward.

The adoption rate for this program is low, however. Out of the 150 citizen developers that started, only 10 decided to continue the process.

One way to improve the UiPath Academy, I think, would be to add some real-life use cases and take the students through the automation process. These would be good for citizen developers to start with.

We started our UiPath journey early last year. It has been a year and six months. 

UiPath is stable. The automations we have in place right now are stable. 

Over the past two years, I've reached out to them maybe twice. 

The initial setup was straightforward. When we started this automation journey, instead of going with complex use cases, we picked three simple ones. We started with the accounts receivable processes. 

Deployment took us six weeks. 

As of now, we have automated 160 processes using UiPath and saved many hours. We have saved around 60,000 hours. Although we are not directly reducing costs, we are avoiding the cost of hiring new people.

The solution is very expensive. It's getting harder for me to convince my management about licensing costs. 

Yes, we considered Blue Prism and Automation Anywhere. We created an automation using both of these and UiPath and ultimately decided on the latter. UiPath is more compatible with the other applications we were already using. Oracle's JD Edwards EnterpriseOne is our ERP and they partner with UiPath, so that was a major plus for us. Also, UiPath has very straightforward coding courses.

It is usually not easy to build a complex automation. The whole process takes about four to six weeks for a complex automation. Most of the time is spent on gathering the requirements. The development itself does not take much time.

We used it to orchestrate the transfer of data across authorized systems of record, such as Salesforce and we use it to authorize systems or artifacts like Google Sheets and Spreadsheets. We also use it to have a dashboard view and to automate manual user behavior to cut down the time it takes to process specific transactions.

UiPath has reduced human error. With the very manual nature of formulas in Google Sheets and Excel that now can be performed using UiPath and so Spreadsheet controls have been tightened.

The automation cloud offering helps to decrease the solution's total cost of ownership by taking care of things such as infrastructure maintenance and updates.

We were able to significantly cut down time and hours on some of the key processes which then frees up people to focus on their day jobs as opposed to manual routines with predictable processes. We see 75% time savings. 

The use cases revolve around polling data from multiple systems, but when that has been automated using a bot then that takes that time away. You spend less time gathering the data points and more time doing exception management and reviewing the data.

Those manual hours translate to cost savings and that definitely can help us scale and grow. We were able to see at least one full-time employee equivalent savings.

Saving employees' time has allowed for employees to focus on higher-value work. Rather than spend 80% of their time looking for data, they are now spending 80% of their time really addressing the nature of the data, like what went wrong and trying to gain actionable insights as opposed to trying to figure out whether the data was complete, to begin with.

This has impacted employee satisfaction. One of the key challenges with remote, work from home has been the higher probability of employee turnover and burnout. Also, as part of job satisfaction, working on the right things at the right time and marrying professional and personal endeavors and aspirations, from that respect, UiPath has freed up a lot of employee hours spent on manual routine tasks. That really gave them a human element in everyday work, which revolves around getting value as opposed to merely collecting data.

AI helps to automate processes that are more complex. Part of it is that it is very precise with attended versus unattended elements and it also really understands that the key is not to give everything away to the bots, but it's almost always trading off and achieving a balancing act. Where human intervention is still needed by only at the right time and looking at a small sample as opposed to the entire population.

The AI functionality enabled us to automate more processes overall. We've been able to venture from beyond regular G&A processes to more HR processes. From applicant to hire, it elevates the employee experience and does not just look at scaling.

I'm a big fan of the Academy because it has let me self-serve in a way that I was quite accustomed to.

The point-and-click approach is a great sell. I'm not proficient with Studio but I found it easy to spin up a concept, prototype a demo with stakeholders, and be able to demonstrate value add right away.

Venturing more outside of our Windows environment and more towards OS will help. 

It should be less focused on the howtos and more on demonstrating business value add. A business outcome should be that I was able to approve something in however many days or hours compared to my peers when I benchmark across my peers. That would be a business outcome as opposed to a technical outcome, which is all about how many hours did you save? What were the exceptions you saw? Were you able to shut the bot down? They're very different paradigms. UiPath needs to flush out that business element because a lot of us make decisions on ROI. It's hard to convince executives and management if we only focus on the technical.

It's a hard place to balance because there are people who are business savvy, who are looking for ROI, and then there are other people who are just getting into these programs and these solutions. I need to understand the technical aspect of it.

The other part of it is understanding how UiPath plays out in the ecosystem of available cloud applications and other enterprise software used. A lot of the software out there in the market, such as Workday, has native automation, point and click customization, and automation, potential, and capability. UiPath may want to think about how it plays with these other products as opposed to in place of. We have built teams that have developers who are really proficient, including me in NetSuite and other products. Every day we want to make sure we're using UiPath the right way so that we're not squandering or wasting resources because the same time spent on UiPath could be spent redirecting UiPath elsewhere. That application is inherently not sophisticated enough to handle customization. 

We've been using UiPath for one and a half years.

The initial setup was fairly straightforward for us. We actually worked with a partner. We ultimately put it on AWS just for continuity and it was pretty straightforward for us. We don't really have too many bots going anyway.

The actual deployment didn't take a lot of time. A lot of work was spent only because a lot of work was already invested in building out the prototype which mirrored all of the manual processes. We recorded the manual processes and attempted to replicate as much as we could. We did the proof of concept demo without key stakeholders. So by the time we came to building out the actual work in production, it was just replicating what we already had in the prototype.

We are fine with licensing and pricing. We just need to see where we are in our adoption. I don't have enough of a sense of what the different levels of usage could be.

We evaluated other solutions. Back then the community platform was easy to download and it had a couple of ways of gaining access to software from having access credentials to tokens which is a lot more secure for us. There were also managed packages in UiPath that were readily available that spoke to NetSuite, Salesforce, and Excel. It was a no-brainer.

We only have two developers on it, they support it. We don't have citizen developers. The plan is to continue to see if we can get value add and go beyond the processes that we've addressed and maybe put out a team.

My advice would be to be open; it doesn't have to be all or nothing. I've seen users get tripped up over the fact that every time they think that providing value add through manual intervention, through exceptions, they almost always think it's 100% unattended.

At the end of the day, we are not taking away anyone's jobs. Almost always, there will be an attended piece. It's like driving the car on a freeway. You have the ability to put it on cruise control and the ability to put your foot on the brakes. That's what most users forget. They ask about audit internal controls and on our end, UiPath recently attained SOC 2 type two certification in June of this year, which is great. The reality is there's always a manual human compensating review element, so there shouldn't be a risk if it's built right.

I would rate UiPath a seven out of ten. 

Our primary use cases are for any financial business process. Primarily for myself, I was with an organization that did a lot of back-end middle office, and front office automation for many midsize banks and credit unions.

We saw anywhere from three to five times ROI, based on the business processes that we were able to automate, and its ability to enable the organization to do more with less.

It increases operational capacity. We noticed that it even helped a lot of the C-levels with employee morale and to keep their retention as well. If you enable your FTEs with the tools that they need to do their day-to-day operations, that's naturally going to create growth.

Our clients have absolutely seen a reduction in human error and time savings. As long as the accuracy of your data is there, the bot can learn the business process, based on how you develop it. It's emulating human behavior within graphical user interface automation. We've definitely seen an incredible amount of ROI on that.

The most valuable features are the ease of use and the amount of resources and community that are out there for UiPath. They have all of the information that you would generally pay for with other providers. It's a very easy-to-learn solution as long as you put time and effort into it.

UiPath has a low-code and no-code approach; the user interface is intuitive. It's something that can generally be used by either a business user or anyone that has a high-level understanding of IT.

We use UiPath's Apps feature. Depending on the applications that we're looking to build and connect users with, or any of the existing connectors or apps that exist with the UiPath, we definitely utilize this.

The Academy is a huge catalyst for allowing your business users or your IT users to learn the solution at their pace. It's a very intuitive Academy that's provided free of charge. It's something that really enables the organization to help them develop citizen developers. Enabling users is the biggest hurdle that a lot of RPA users or anyone that's looking to implement RPA is going to be facing. UiPath has a tremendous amount of training and information that's out there through their Academy. It's definitely attracting a lot of organizations to lean towards UiPath.

The biggest value we've seen from the Academy is the amount of operational capacity that it allows for organizations to do more with less. Anytime you look into or embark on an automation journey, you're really looking to drive efficiency through automation. That is something that's really needed as you start to go into 2022 and post-pandemic.

There should be a little bit of a longer trial version. I know that their existing trial version is around 30 days. I think it would be very beneficial to make that a 60 day trial for active POCs.

We have been using UiPath for three and a half years,

The stability of the solution is really improving itself from where the organization really started to embark on automation. Year over year, they've added new features, and really what made automation more of an omnichannel approach.

It's not just another tool to develop bots, but it's a tool that has process mining and tax task capturing. It's something that only comes in with an end-to-end approach, rather than other RPA tools in the market that only have point solutions just for development and really don't have an end-to-end solution.

Scalability is something that is quite remarkable at this point with their cloud solution. Growing your RPA footprint doesn't really propose a tremendous amount of a challenge anymore. Their cloud approach is going to definitely help them move forward in 2022 with a good amount of growth.

I found the initial setup to be fairly easy. If there were any complexities, I know that they have great support, resources there internally to again guide you through that automation journey.

The form of engineers that they have, as far as the level of understanding and so forth, is quite remarkable. That is where they're really leading the market.

They should provide a clearer and more of a definite approach for any organization that wants to sign beyond a one-year, two-year, or three-year contract.

A little more visibility and more clarity would help, even for the partners. There should be more visibility into the price measure.

Compared to Blue Prism and Automation Anywhere, in terms of the pros, UiPath has built a great community around the solution. The amount of training provided by their Academy is something that is really helping them scale the organization. That's where Blue Prism and Automation Anywhere can take some notes from UiPath, as far as what they're able to provide to the market.

Ease of use is something that is definitely moving the business users into adapting UiPath at a much greater scale. Simply because it requires less technical knowledge.

Someone without an actual IT background can come in and start developing their own bots to help them from a day-to-day basis. Those are the pros. Obviously, the cons are that those other organizations can start providing a little bit more information to their prospects. Even as a partner, sometimes it becomes challenging.

The number one piece of advice that I can give anyone that's embarking on automation is that automation is something that's been proven. It comes down to why wait and automate today, and whether it's going to be a low, medium, or high complexity bot. That's something that organizations need to embark on it now, instead of waiting. 

I would rate UiPath a nine out of ten. To make it that 10 they should provide a little more clarity on their subscription and pricing market.