UiPath Platform Reviews

Our primary use case is to document image processing. We're six months in, so our first case was sorting and filtering the data, extracting the image, and determining if it's a certain type of document. If it is, it starts putting it into different buckets, which ultimately we'll run something to extract and put those into our data source. 

Our second use case is for the healthcare industry. We're looking at catalog data and a customer might want to know about a product. Is this product safe? Who provides this product? Is it on a contract somewhere? We go out to multiple different web sources to look up information about that document, put it back in our database, save it for that customer, then save it for any future customer that asks the same question.

We're looking at other things like taking snapshots of the image of the product. We also want to automate other basic automation, low-hanging fruit type functions, like automating uploads of data to sites, spreadsheets, contact-center, and Salesforce.

Longer-term, we want to take what we're doing in the document image and apply it to other areas of our business. We have purchase orders, invoicing, shipping documents, compliance documents, credential documents, a lot of images in this particular space. We'll go as deep as we can in the data processing side of things.

We're going through a culture shift to get to an automation-thinking platform as opposed to a lot of our business relying on BPO humans to do the work. Making that paradigm shift is taking time because we're only a week-plus live. If we prove the value, they'll give us more opportunities to make those big changes. But it's good that the business is thinking that they need this. Now it's just getting the community aspects of it.

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. 

Although we don't use it, document understanding for our use cases is very compelling, but it was a little cost prohibitive just out the gate. We are looking at it long-term now that we have the data filtered if we can more strategically apply it to the best data to fit it. But overall, the platform is very innovative. I don't think I can call out one particular feature. The ease of use of integrating to and from Amazon components, being a cloud-native application ourselves, has been really helpful in the development and the ease of transferring documents between our internal systems and platform.

The ease of building automations using UiPath depends on the use cases. Overall, the development is really easy. Where you run into challenges is in workloads that are highly rule-based. So we abandoned one use case where it had 50,000 different decision points. It wasn't worth the time. It wasn't a product thing. It was just too time-consuming of a process, something like that.

There have been some limitations as far as how do we execute our bots, when? This new release that they just mentioned today actually addresses a lot of our concerns around the integrations component that they recently released. If we could find an email instead of waking up and checking the email inbox. That's a big improvement we're looking to, but it wasn't a limiting factor.

I have used the Academy. It was really just myself and as well the one IT guy who's supporting the platform. Our office partner came in with the knowledge, but the course was really good. We came in with no RPA experience, and it covered everything from the basics of RPAs to the processes of identifying.

They recently addressed a major problem of kick-off processes for the integration function. That addressed a lot of the community concerns around that. If you are using queues, their queue system isn't as reliable as I would like it to be. 

One of our concerns is that we were not a Microsoft shop at all before bringing this in. That was actually my limiting factor in bringing in the software. We lost it below the party lines. The ability to address other workloads, Mac, Linux, etc., is going to be a game-changer.

From a new customer, new investment perspective, there are a lot of cost-prohibitive aspects that we decided not to add to our initial investment. We weren't sure if or when we'll figure things out for use cases.

I have been using UiPath for six months.

We want to triple our capacity and triple our workflows. 

I've only had to use support once, and it was more of a documentation problem. I didn't understand what I was seeing, and they worked it out within an hour. So far, they've been good. 

The cloud was up two days after we signed. Then to get our bot infrastructure up because it's Windows and we're in a Windows environment, it took us about a month to run through that and get the IT people and security.

Cloud solutions will save you a lot of headaches and time. We broke halfway through and decided we're going to cloud, not on-prem.

Reputation was a big reason we went with UiPath, as well as the growth and the ability to integrate specifically to the cloud which was missing in other solutions. That was a big plus. The ability to use something like document understanding and the ability to interact with internal APIs were also key features. It's not just web scraping and doing things in Excel or other things like that. We wanted it to work with our internal native applications.

UiPath has not yet saved costs for my organization. We're still going live and we're anticipating about a two-year ROI.

Make sure to understand your use cases before you sign your agreement. That way you're not idle for six to nine months trying to figure out what it is you're trying to automate.

I would rate UiPath an eight out of ten. 

We use UiPath for OCR, for our subrogation department to analyze credit report organization letters that come into our company to identify whether they're identity theft, fraud, or any other type of keyword phrase within the document. It also extracts the information coming out of the CRO to properly assign it to accounts associated with our subrogation department. 

Another use case is navigating through one of our third-party clients in order for us to get documents out of their system and into our system so that we can analyze and package them.

We see benefits from the AI side of doing OCR and in order for us to do onscreen recognition of documents. It increases the efficiency of our agents in order for them to get back to working accounts, rather than reading through document after document every single day in order for them to pick out one or two words into the document and assign a smart code. The automation does all of that for them now.

UiPath has saved us costs. It's thousands of documents per day that we're OCRing and then that reduces it to around five to 10 minutes per document. It's around 50,000 minutes per agent, per day.

It has reduced human error because there would be some different document types. It's able to detect multiple types versus a user finding one document type when there could be multiple document types that are associated with a letter, while the user is browsing over it that can be missed in the second document type. But when you're looking at machine learning and at the text, it'll be able to easily pick out those keywords from a document that has multiple document types.

It has also freed up employee time. It frees up their time to do other work.

We are currently using the AI function in order for us to do Task Mining to be able to pull out of a couple of our key groups that we're trying to add additional automation to. That's what we're using AI Center for at the moment.

We have done UiPath Academy courses. I got certified in the advanced RPA Academy. I need to renew that because they expire every year. Another developer has his associates, so we use that every year where we can get some training. It helps keep people up to speed. It makes sure that you're doing the latest and recommended in the RE framework and what you have initially designed.

Building automations can be difficult at times with some of the activity packages and documentation being out of date, but we have a TAM that we work with that is very helpful in making sure that RRGs are known and that we get the results within the UiPath structure.

They need to deprecate their previous versions on their website or their documentation. It should just point to the newest version rather than when you go to Google if you're just trying to find UiPath and then it points you to a solution that was a couple of years ago. Or it points to a form that someone randomly has posted to their code. That needs to be cleaned up.

We've been using UiPath since 2013. The Orchestrator is on the cloud and the robots are on-prem.

It's pretty stable. We haven't run into any issues with operating totally different packages. There have been some things where I wish there were more restrictions in access groups that could be applied within Orchestrator, but other than that, it's pretty good.

We are still working through scalability. There are a couple of things that we've run into that were an issue with trying to use machine templates and getting them to connect properly with the robots. Another scalability issue that we have is that we have a non-static environment where some machines get deleted after they log off and get back on, they have to reconnect to it. We had issues with that, but those are for our attended robots.

We have unattended bots. We have four of them and it's a total of seven automations, but they run every 15 minutes.

We used to use OpenScan before I got hired and then eventually moved off of OpenScan because the product was too cumbersome and difficult to navigate. So we moved to UIPath.

They saw UIPath and they saw that it was going down a good road. So that's what they chose it. 

The initial setup was pretty easy for us. Getting into the Studio is pretty simple to get us set up and going. There are a couple of issues with mixed environments for DLLs. You do get packages for UFS that I've run into trying to use one of our older DLLs that hasn't been updated, but all in general, getting it working, and being able to figure it out was pretty simple.

We have seen ROI. 

The subscription models that they have out there need to be simplified.

I've talked to a couple of our partners and talked about the 49 pages of subscriptions. It needs to be more streamlined for what they offer and packages because we run into issues where we're signing up for Task Mining, but they didn't include AI Center, which is a requirement of Task Mining in one of the factories. If the subscriptions got simplified and got it down to a couple of pages, they would see tremendous growth. That way customers don't need to hire somebody to figure out what the licensing model was versus going for a third-party vendor.

My advice would be to start in the cloud. Cloud is the easiest way for us to get started versus trying to get our internal environment set up. We had on-prem orchestrator and on-prem servers, but it was easier to implement the cloud and get it up and running and scale versus our internal environment, as well as keeping the data secured within our robots on-prem. 

I would rate it an eight out of ten. 

We do product downloads, accounts, updates, maintenance, a lot of operation stuff, reading emails, responding, organizing stuff to send, etc.

It's definitely added some efficiencies. It's added the ability to do jobs without having to worry about error handling and process tasks on a daily basis without having somebody having to be responsible for it.

We see UiPath as a money-saving solution. It also saves us man-hours and human error. It affected our ability to automate processes that are more complex.

The Academy courses are good. That's usually what I start new developers with; to do those and then have them try to do courses periodically to stay up to date and especially when a new release is coming out. The hands-on training is the most valuable part of it. 

We use the solution's error functionality. 

There's a little bit of a learning curve to build automations, especially in the citizen developer world. Usually, the technical people are busy a lot of times, so it's hard to get them trained. But as far as developers, they usually come along pretty well, from my experience.

We could use a little more interaction with users, like with UiPath, the vendor, and support.

I have been using UiPath for two and a half years. 

We had a vendor that kind of offered to do a few, like bring you the UiPath and do some automations for us. We dipped our toes into that and liked what UiPath has, so we kept them.

I would rate UiPath an eight out of ten. 

We're still building up the program, but right now our primary use case is for report review. We're looking to branch that out more.

It's reviewing reports. I worked for a bank and there are reports of transactions from the previous day. UiPath was looking for anomalies for fraud and things like that.

It's still very early on but we have caught a few instances of fraud that we would not have if we weren't using UiPath. 

UiPath has reduced human error. We're very early, so it's not a big impact, but we did find a few instances of fraud that we would not have found without it. 

We see time savings for our users in the sense that they now can do more tasks that should have been done all along but weren't getting done. That's more where the gains have been this far.

I like the whole ecosystem. They're not just looking at the automation tool, they're looking at automation from end to end. 

It's pretty easy to build automations. I have a coding background so it's not particularly challenging for me to use Studio, but for a person who does not have that coding background, I think that the Visual Builder guides you through the process pretty easy.

UiPath Academy is a good training program for people without that coding background. It's good to get them into the mindset of how exactly flows works of automation.

The Academy offers us familiarization with Studio and how it functions.

The API integrations need improvement. They should build a better framework for the ability to integrate with other external APIs.

I have been using UiPath for less than a year. 

I would rate the stability an eight out of ten. 

It's pretty straightforward. It either runs or it doesn't. Occasionally it does crash and we've had to restart services and whatnot to get it going again.

We haven't been using it enough to see how it can scale. 

There are two ITs who use it in my company.

We have plans to increase usage. 

We don't really see our staff as being good candidates for citizen development. There are a few that could, but we do plan to expand out into other departments as far as gathering ideas and implementing processes for other departments.

Their support is pretty average. It's not good or bad. It's off-shored. There are always difficulties with cultural differences and language barriers. They know what they're doing but sometimes it takes a while going around in circles to get the question that you're asking across. That's pretty normal. Most companies are the same way. I would say all companies have huge room for improvement there.

The initial setup was pretty straightforward. It was easy. The installation instructions walk you through the process. We didn't run into any problems. It took less than a week. 

We also looked at AntWorks and Blue Prism. We went with UiPath because of the maturity of the product that seemed far more mature than its competitors. The product seemed more thought out.

Based on our experiences, I would say you have to have employees that are dedicated to doing this. This can't be done as a side project.

I would rate UiPath a nine out of ten. Nothing is completely perfect. The stability of it could use a little bit of improvement. The support is not great. UiPath is very good, but no one is perfect.

Our primary use case is to scrape our database to get data out, create audit files for our tax team, and then take that data and go to websites for each state and submit our taxes online.

Time-saving is the biggest area that has improved for us. We had users spending lots of time trying to get data from a system and then creating a file that was going to be used for our auditing purposes, which then gets submitted online. We definitely found some issues where an end-user was pulling data from different sources and then storing that data with lots of human touching that created issues.

UiPath created a better atmosphere of better data quality. Time management was also much better, and now the user actually has a better experience doing that process because now it's a click of a button. They can spend their time doing the actual work that they want to do.

Instead of having to go back out through those websites and make corrections when they paid for the wrong taxes. In some states, it's a lot harder to make those corrections, especially if it's one where you overpaid. Now, they're accurate and they don't have to go back and make those changes to try and get that resolved.

We have seen cost savings from the time it has saved us. We save around 40 to 50 hours a month. Over the course of a year, it's quite a bit, and it adds up.

Web trading services are the most valuable features. 

It is easy to build out automations. I have an IT degree, but I was not doing the dev work within our department. I came from a data quality background and transitioned over to this because the low code has been great and all the online resources that they've provided us have been very beneficial.

Other members of my team have used the Academy. It helps to get a jump start. Now, luckily, we have a couple of us that do it. It's much easier to train and show them what we have already built and then say, "if you have questions, you look here." It's just been great.

They have the robotic enterprise framework that I wouldn't have used if it wasn't for the Academy. When I first started automating, I wasn't utilizing that process at all. That actually made a huge difference in how I programmed and how I even looked at building my automations to start with. I feel like learning that course specifically for me, was great, was like the best benefit for me.

Since we've been with them, they've changed their licensing structure. It would be nice to have one set structure where they're not changing the structure on us because we were set with what we had, but now we are changing. I understand there's a lot of changes and reasons for it.

I have been using UiPath for a year and a half. 

I haven't had much issue with stability.

It doesn't seem to have a limit. Scalability has been great. Everything that we've run into that we've needed it to do, it's been able to do.

Even being a smaller consumer as we are, when we've submitted tickets, they've been very responsive even to the point of when we couldn't get our deployment deployed because we had an issue. They were responsive and within a couple of emails of them understanding our issue, we were on a phone call and had everything resolved over a phone call

The initial setup was straightforward. A different part of our IT department did the setup and they seemed to do okay with it. We had some hiccups with it. When I did some upgrades with that, I had a couple of hiccups, but I was able to actually work with UiPath and they were able to help us resolve our issues.

My first deployment took a couple of weeks.

When we did our original deployment, it took a couple of weeks just to research and understand exactly what we needed to do for the on-prem plus the other daily work that we had going on. It wasn't the highest priority because at the time I was using the community addition to get started.

Our very first project was the biggest return on investment.

For bigger businesses, pricing doesn't matter as much. It has the right packages. But for a smaller company, it's really tough. There could be better package options that suit smaller companies. 

A consultancy called Agility Partners came in to help us. We had the tax automation we wanted to do and they gave us some options of different things and then they pointed us in the direction of UiPath thinking it would be the best benefit for us.

As soon as you can, do it. You're not going to believe how well the automation will save you time, your company time, and even quality issues. This has been great.

I would rate it a nine out of ten. 

We've got mostly finance use cases including a lot of accounts receivable and stuff like that. Then, there is a lot of work where I do trading settlements, so a lot of settlements as well. The back office automation's there, too. We're still getting used to it and still getting started.

We've been able to expand up to citizen developers, and have been able to show them how to do various things. It's easy to pick up, so a lot of citizen developers are learning it now, and with little to no coding experience. It's been great.

The recorder has been great. Just being able to really start your automation there, and just modifying them a little bit and then getting them really in production has been helpful.

The solution has saved costs for the organization. For example, I used to do back-office stuff, and I was able to move to more of an IT role. That was definitely a savings there, and obviously, no one had to automate it after me or do it manually after me.

We have found that the solution has reduced human error as now it's a bot doing it. It's really reduced errors due to the fact that no one has to check each time to ensure the work is error-free, and, in general, there are a lot fewer errors. 

The solution has freed up employee time. For example, as I mentioned, I myself have moved off of back-office tasks and, in doing so, the company did not have to hire someone after me. We've likely saved 10,000 hours in a year. We're really happy with that result. The additional time has enabled employees to focus on higher-value work. People can now just quickly audit it and then move on to something more important.

The Academy is great to use. We've been able to learn a lot from there. That's what our citizen developers will look at as they get more familiar with the product, and as we show them how to develop items. It has positively affected the process of getting employees up to speed on the solution. A lot of them have little to no coding experience and the Academy has helped by showing them what they need to learn. The biggest value is if they have little to no coding experience, it'll really start from the basics and teach them from there. You don't have to teach them all the variables and stuff like that.

While I like the Academy a lot, it could maybe go deeper into some of the topics. The basic ones, such as Excel, which is already a decent course, could maybe go into more specifics. My issue is that, while the basics are good, getting into the weeds a little more could be very helpful. It's hard to specify exactly what is needed, however.

We've used the solution for about a year now. We're still getting used to it. 

Our stability is great. You rarely have any downtime, once you build it. There's obviously the support, however, I'd say it's pretty minimal.

We're trying to work on scalability at the moment. It's there, however, we have a lot of different departments that do a lot of different things and that's where we need to really work on scaling. It has nothing to do with UiPath. It's just about getting everybody trained up on everything on our side. That said, we can see how it is possible to scale in the future. We do plan to increase usage.

Currently, we have about ten users who are familiar with UiPath. It's not too many. They are either developers or just everyday users that support it.

In terms of technical support, from the perspective of tickets, et cetera, I would say they are pretty good. We've only done a few upgrades so far. We've only had it for a year, and so far, in that time, support seems great. They have been helping us out on everything.

We did not previously use a different RPA solution.

I can't speak to the initial setup, as we had an outside party handle pretty much everything. I actually joined after they onboarded us and everything, and therefore wasn't a part of the process at all.

We have two to three people that handle maintenance tasks, on top of the AI.

We had an outside party do the deployment. It was a consultant. They did it for us.

I don't have any insights into the licensing process. 

While I joined after UiPath was implemented, my understanding is the company did look into a couple of other options, just to see their capabilities.

I would advise potential new users to go for it. The Academy offers a great starting point. It's a great tool. I would recommend UiPath.

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

Our primary use cases are for invoice processing and some legal intake use cases.

The benefits we see from UiPath are always time savings. I've never seen another benefit. It's always that people don't have to do manual tasks anymore.

The automation cloud offering helps to decrease UiPath's total cost of ownership, by taking care of things such as infrastructure, maintenance, and updates, if security isn't a big issue. 

With the cloud offering, you don't have as much control of where the data is and how it's protected versus the on-prem. If you're dealing with very sensitive information, you could introduce a compliance risk if you're using the cloud offering. But with the customers that we partner UiPath with, that's not an issue, so we use the cloud offering.

The screen automation features are the most valuable. There are some things, in an automation process that is complicated, that UiPath isn't very good at. And there are some things that are very repetitive and UiPath is good with it. For those repetitive aspects, it's obvious why it's valuable. It's replacing the amount of time that a human being would have to spend doing it.

We have seen that our clients have freed up time for their employees.

Our clients utilize AI functionality from UiPath. UiPath is really good at simple repetitive processes, but not as much at complex processes. The more complicated it gets, it breaks down because if it's less repetitive, it's less automatable.

AI functionality enabled our clients to automate more processes overall. It helped with end-to-end automation in the way that if you automate more processes, you save more time, and save more money for the company.

It is not very easy to build on automations. That's a problem with UiPath. I don't think it's very easy to build automation on top of it. 

Accessibility needs improvement. It would be easier to build on UiPath if they would have more employee-level users as opposed to consultants. Then that would increase the value of the product and the platform.

I have been using UiPath for two years. 

The stability is good. 

It's very scalable in our organization. The hardest thing is getting in and getting someone to build their first five automations and their first five robots in the first place. After that, it's very hard to rip out. Once you've already automated something and you've done all the in-depth work to set it up, it's pretty sticky.

There are around ten users and they're almost all solutions architects.

We've used Blue Prism and Automation Anywhere, but I think UiPath is the market leader right now.

Even though UiPath is hard to use, it's easier to use than Blue Prism. And it has more features than Automation Anywhere.

The initial setup is never straightforward. There are always bugs. It doesn't matter if it's UiPath or any other company, it's always complex. It's never easy the first time.

The implementation takes around three months. 

Ideally you don't want to take someone's job, but if you free up the time that someone was spending doing something, you don't have to pay them to do that anymore, or you can reinvest their time somewhere else.

It's expensive, but it saves a lot of money too.

My advice to someone implementing UiPath would be to hire someone technical to do it. It's not as easy to use as they say it is.

I would rate UiPath an eight out of ten. To get it to a perfect ten, it would need to be easier to use. 

Currently, we are using it for reading emails. We download the attachments that we get in emails. After downloading those Excel sheets attachments, we process the data based on a few rules. The processed data is input into the SAP application. In the SAP application, based on the business rules, we process the data and commit.

It is very user-friendly in terms of building automation. We don't need to be experts in coding. We can learn it easily and build complex business tools in UiPath. We don't need prior coding experience.

It reduces the cost of digital transformation. Every day, we get 10 Excel sheets, and somebody has to sit and read the Excel sheet and load the data manually into the SAP application. Three to four employees are required for the same job, but if we automate this process, it can be done in a minute. It is easy, and we save time and cost.

It reduces the time taken for a task. If we are manually filling timesheets, we need to open the website, fill the timesheet, and submit it. It can take 10 minutes. With automation, it will take just a minute.

Orchestrator is very useful for deployment and publishing, maintaining queues, and running jobs.

In UiPath, REFramework is useful for different use cases with predefined code templates. There are well-established steps. There is a step for code marginalization. Similarly, there are separate steps for initialization and processing. For closing an application process, a step is there. So, it is very well modularized for getting the transaction data. If there is one exception or anything wrong happens with an application, it will log the exception in the orchestrator and send an email. It can also close your applications and end data processing. So, everything is well organized and separated, and we can log the exceptions separately in the queues as business exceptions or application exceptions. We can have the complete report of a particular queue.

For document understanding, there are so many features. I haven't used them practically, but to read a PDF, there are patterns and semi patterns. A wait option is also there for somebody to come and correct it. It can wait until somebody comes and corrects it, and then it will do the processing. So, all of the features are very useful in UiPath.

In exception handling, wherever exception occurs, the out arguments are not being passed. It would be good if there is a way to pass the out arguments. 

Sometimes, when an element is not there, UiPath gets stuck, and it doesn't even throw an exception. It stays stuck for hours until we go and check the logs. When this happens, we have to kill it. It happens in some cases, so an improvement is needed there.

I have been using this solution for three and a half years.

Other than the issues related to the exception handling and UiPath getting stuck, it is very stable.

It can scale well, but we don't really have a need to scale it. Currently, we are automating 15 projects. We are planning to use other functionalities of UiPath to automate extra things.

Currently, we have 1,000 people who use this solution. They are consultants, developers, and business analysts. A business analyst takes care of making design documents and solution documents. The RPA developers develop the code and test it. After that, for deployment, someone is there to take care of all technical things. After that, the support team is there to look after the deployment.

I didn't call UiPath support, but I know about them from my friend. We had called them for some issues, and they answered those very well. I would rate them a nine out of 10.

I have worked only on UiPath.

Its initial setup is straightforward. It is not that complex. We need to install UiPath Studio, and then we connect it to Orchestrator for getting logs, etc. It doesn't take more than an hour.

I took the help of my colleagues.

I'm not sure about licensing and pricing, but the pricing for their certification is a little bit more. Previously, we could do it for no price.

I would definitely recommend it to my colleagues and others. It is very user-friendly.

In terms of reducing human error, it is not up to the mark. It detects human errors, but it waits until we place the correct files for processing. For example, when comparing files, a human can detect two almost-similar addresses as the same, but a UiPath bot cannot do that. So, in some cases, it won't work as humans. It cannot decide. It works on predefined rules.

Considering its areas of improvement and the cost of certification, I would rate UiPath a nine out of 10.

There are lots of use cases. Mostly, there are many gaps in organizations that buy a lot of software and a lot of automation platforms like ERPs, however, they don't know how to actually create an end-to-end process and connect those systems. In those cases, they end up like small islands in a big organization. What I started doing was filling those gaps. After that, we use the RPA to fulfill that. For me, a lot of processing in Excel or some processes that needed multiple users to interact is what we use the solution for. We just capture those tasks and convert them to RPA bots. Basically, we've automated a lot of manual tasks.

We do not use UiPath in the contact center environment. In our case, contact centers here are really dependent on CRMs. Even using chatbots in contact centers is still very new in Iran. These foreign branches, these foreign companies that are in Iran, do not see any potential to use RPA in this scenario. 

Mostly, UiPath has improved my career. I am an RPA Developer, and without UiPath my job wouldn’t exist. UiPath changed my career. Due to UiPath (not Automation Anywhere or not Blue Prism), there’s a noticeable increase in the speed of development. I was a C# Developer and it's helped me a lot. Generally, UiPath is in the top 10 and has offered a lot of new technological shifts and people are talking about it more. When people are talking, there are great opportunities. There are now new voices that can be heard. 

UiPath is constantly listening. That's a good point for UiPath - it's always listening from its community to its top customers and interacting with comments. Due to the fact that it listens, it integrates new software, goes into end-to-end automation, and changes for the better. Someday they will have Autonomous RPA, a real Autonomous RPA that can actually decide like a true robot, not just a robot that works on a script. One day they will offer a true robot that can finally decide what to do in certain situations, not by just using something like document understanding that we call Machine Learning. UiPath is very, very good at giving true innovation to people. It’s a win-win for everyone.

RPA is actually something that can be executed, that can be used side by side with many programming technologies.

The speed of development in UiPath is very fast. For example, sometimes you want to do many frameworks and the budget is low, with the timeline being very crucial. With UiPath Studio and with the whole UiPath platform, it can be very fast to develop and deploy. That's the main advantage for me personally - that the speed of development is great.

UiPath enables us to implement end-to-end automation starting with process analysis, then robot building, and finally monitoring. They are all there. The one exception I’ve noticed is that end-to-end automation is still lagging, I have reasons for that. However, the monitoring of the robots or even using insights is there. They are the prerequisites for an RPA platform. They are great suites. They are necessities.

I like parallel processing. I like that a robot can do some parallel stuff while the user continues to do their own thing. If it needs interaction, we can just pop up a clear window or apps, for example, or through email, in order to inform the user about the robot's request.

AI Automation overall has enabled us to automate more processes. However, when we go forward and move forward, we see that we can digitalize those documents before it needs to be processed by an image machine-like OCR or even Machine Learning. For example, there are still handwritten documents. We’ve convinced many organizations to drop those handwritten documents and use digital products for us. Those are immediate time savings for the process. We are not using document processing anymore, for example, in a specific organization. For processes that still need to have handwritten or printed out documents, document understanding could be fine. I really hope, however, that they shift to AI, which is what RPA lacks. RPA lacks Autonomous Automation, that's something that everyone is waiting for. We’d like to have a robot that's actually using the computer with its own mind, not just the workflow we give it.

For end-to-end scenarios, UiPath is still growing. I'm not saying that UiPath isn’t good. There is a lot of potential. They're using UiPath Actions or Apps, for example. Dashboards ensure that end users can interact in a new way with robots or with the whole end-to-end automation. RPA is a technology that hasn't maxed out yet.

Someday, there will be no legacy software or very intelligent processes that will use APIs. It’s my understanding that UiPath bought some company that specializes in API Automation. For end-to-end automation, UiPath needs to integrate all those components, rather than task automation to process automation, real process automation. With RPA, if you read the HFS report, you see that the process version is actually not a process. It's tasks. Perhaps in their next LTS release, UiPath will actually gain to that point.

There are minor bugs. Every major software has bugs. That said, all are solvable, all are resolvable, and it's not a very bad thing.

Mostly, licensing must be improved somehow. Licensing is very expensive. Even in many industrial countries such as the USA or UK, UiPath is still very expensive. For example, Microsoft now owns its own RPA, Power Automate, and the pricing is much more reasonable than UiPath. UiPath licensing is very vague and expensive. There are some ways that they can reduce the cost to make everyone benefit from an RPA.

UiPath needs a lot of maintenance. Every RPA vendor, every RPA on-premise software, needs a lot of maintenance. The cloud version has reduced that, as far as I know. It’s resolved the maintenance issue so that users can focus more on other things. Every new feature will be first on the cloud version and eventually, we can benefit from that.

We use document understanding. For English documents, it helps, however, for Persian documents, due to the fact that the models, the Machine Learning models, that are pre-built, are based on English or other common languages. If we want to actually use Persian, we need to use AI Fabric and build our own models. It's now out of our budget to do something like that here.

It's almost been three years since I first started using UiPath.

I don't like the stability very much as it has minor bugs.

You see that processes break without any reason. When you check the system, check every log, even view robot logs or logs in the network level and you see that it has, it's only then that you realize the issue was a bug from the UiPath platform. Once that happens, you must go to the community and explain the situation to each other. The good thing is, there is a community right there and you can learn from each other. 

Scalability is great. UiPath has many capabilities. Anyone, via a simple search, can go through UiPath and even try the enterprise version and just see for themselves that there are many, many, many capabilities. You can use .NET and there are many NuGet packages that you can use or you can even design your own custom package. There are many great platforms, such as Insights, Action Center, UiPath platforms, and so many different types of robots.

In terms of technical support, I do not have the opportunity to speak with them, as we are in Iran, and, due to sanctions, we do not have a direct opportunity to speak directly to UiPath's support. Therefore, I cannot have an opinion on their services.

I'm familiar with other RPA solutions such as Automation Anywhere and Blue Prism.  

I saw a lot of people that are going to RPA. I put myself in their shoes. However, from my perspective, UiPath has a great community. The UiPath forum is very good compared to Automation Anywhere and Blue Prism. Every technology can be learned, sooner or later. That said, the first thing that any kind of technological software needs to have is a good community to facilitate that learning. Without community, you cannot spread the word, you cannot spread the knowledge. It's the first thing that UiPath has over both of these other solutions. 

And the second thing is, as a technological matter, UiPath is much better. The other two lack the connection, lack the integration. The user interfaces of both Automation Anywhere and Blue Prism are terrible. I do not like them. They're not very intuitive and they are not easy to learn. UiPath is using Workflow Hosting Foundation from Microsoft and great integrations with .NET, which is so much better than the other ways that other vendors are approaching things.

I'm typically involved in the setup. I'm involved in every phase of the process. 

The setup is straightforward. They're using .NET Core now and before that, they were using ASP.NET's Standard Framework. The company has relied on default application configuration as far as, for example, in web.config or .JSONs. Most configuration must be done in the UI itself. I don't really like to just manipulate files at the system level just to do something. I believe that's the way now, however, that can be improved. It could be just in the UI and the certainty would be much better.

The length of time it takes to set up a robot deployment depends on the project itself, however, for a small project, it can be in one month to 45 days.

The initial deployment of UiPath is not more than three days.

Setting up UiPath doesn't have any standard process. There's just documentation. We are always using its documentation.

We do not have any relationship with UiPath directly. We are just a contractor doing RPA for foreign companies that are based in Iran.

Iran has sanctions against it, and there are a few companies that are local branches of foreign companies, and those that have licenses from UiPath all use on-premise deployments. We're always using the latest versions of the solution. Right now, we are on version 19 and it's in the 2010 LTS.

I didn't have the opportunity to use UiPath Cloud. I'm in Iran and I don’t have access. There are some capabilities that are still in the cloud version, like Apps.

While it depends on the project requirements, much of our work is on attended automation. I see attended automation as a gateway to an RPA solution as users are very busy and we cannot just pop-up in some programs, random programs, and stuff so they end up having to wait. I do not believe that attended automation helps users as much as an unattended version can help. This is due to the fact that at some point, someone still has to be involved in the process.

RPA is a new technology and a new shift that there's no good book on how to manage. Maybe there are some, however, they can be obsolete rather quickly, as the technology is changing and with every new version. That's why hands-on experience is the best way to learn. Even for UiPath, without any practice, without any hands-on experience, and without any good community, you cannot do anything.

If someone wants to learn UiPath, first they must sign up within the community and then go to UiPath Academy. Start there. Practice. Get in touch with people in the community, and then create a small use case and do some hands-on work. Practice is very crucial in RPA. Don't forget to review official documentation as well, as it will save you lots of time. 

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

We use attended and unattended bots, Orchestrator, and Studio for development.

We're seeing increasing adoption of Studio because more people see how easy and straightforward it is to use a lot of the features. It helps that UiPath training is free. Our entire team, including our salespeople, have gone through the training. It's free and it makes a big difference. For the salespeople, they're able to talk more intelligently about RPA.

On a scale of one to five, judging how beneficial it is, I would rate the training a five, for sure. In fact, I have taken a lot of ideas from their training to educate my customers about RPA. When it comes to RPA, a lot of it is education because some of them don't know exactly how automation can be done. I've told UiPath that I use their training in my presentation, and it is great.

We are working with a technology company called Rammer, Rammer.ai. What the Rammer software does is listen to conversations to learn the details of what is being discussed. A third-party system is used to transcribe the conversation into text, then Rammer will learn the details without much training. It knows the topics, it understands what is talked about the most, talked about the least, how much we are adhering to the script if it's a call center use case, or if it is a simple meeting use case then it knows who is assigned what tasks, it recognizes the follow-ups, and it knows the summary of the discussion. All of this is summarized in a nice, consumable manner. So now, when a bot knows all of this information, it goes into Orchestrator, logs all these activities that are picked up by unattended bots downstream, and they trigger all those processes back. So it's a massive consumption of all of those heavy use cases.

We have not yet run automations in a virtual environment, although we do have customers who are asking for it. We are not sure if we will need UiPath's help for this yet because we haven't tried it.

With respect to how easy it is to automate our company's processes, on a scale of one to five, I would rate it a five. Really, it depends on how clearly we understand the requirements. So a lot of times we are able to find process gaps, which wasn't the case earlier before we started thinking about automation in this manner. I would say the ease of use is actually dependent on some of those factors as well.

Usually, starting is the biggest challenge for most people, and I think this is because it is in a trial environment and there is a lack of documentation, with multiple people doing one part of a small subset of a task. There are these challenges and then if none of them are documented, you need to figure out the process flow. From person one, where does it go? This can change when people can do multiple things.

It becomes a very complex web to understand and navigate through. We need to understand the task and how it should be performed. For developing the robot, it's very important to have the clarity upfront, otherwise, we cannot code them. That is the biggest challenge, I feel.

From the point that a UiPath license is purchased until the first bot is ready is almost immediate. This is because we usually start with a PoC on a small scale, just to see if automation with this approach makes sense. By the end of the PoC, we'll normally know exactly how many bots are needed. Sometimes it is on us, more than the customer when we cannot estimate every process that is outside of the departments and division that we work with because we just work at finance. For example, we can't just estimate what marketing would use, and so on. That will sometimes delay things.

The attended and unattended classification and simplicity are great, and it's easy to explain to people. Right off the bat, the task performing the lowest granular entity is very clearly defined, which is something that I like.

I really like that I am able to tell the story, using Orchestrator, how humans work, how bots work, and how humans and bots work together. Orchestrator really tells a lot more than just being a simple task manager.

In future releases of this solution, I would like to see more packaged solutions.

We would like to see intelligence built into the core. Specifically, we would like to see the recognition of human to human conversations. That intelligence would be great because we have some very important use cases in that space that we are seeing. Our focus is moving closer to one hundred percent in that space, as all of our new work is related to conversations.

UiPath should offer an on-demand cloud-type model where you can get bots for five minutes, ten minutes, an hour, or whatever duration you need.

With respect to the stability, on a scale from one to five, I would rate this solution a five.

We don't see many failures, and this is partly because of our approach. We start by creating something called a heat map, which I learned in some of the training from UiPath. The training clearly explains how to handle errors. It includes which process to automate fully and which processes should be automated partially, with a human in the loop.

We start with the right approach. We understand the process and we have the heat mapping that gives us full clarity of where the exception flows are and how to handle them. So when you do that, it becomes second nature to handle those exceptions. We are pretty comfortable, and we are applying the best practices, which adds to the stability. 

Talking about our own people, we have roughly sixty-five who are either developers or architects. For our customers, the number is growing all the time. The requests for training and setting up workshops for them comes to us every week, basically from different customers. We don't know the extent of automation beyond the people we work with because there are other vendors like us who are also there, so we don't have the exact number but what is refreshing to see is that even VP level or senior-level employees are interested in learning. They ask us if we can hold a workshop for their entire team, whether they're doing the development of bots or not. Hopefully, that will increase the numbers, but right now I don't have an estimate on the total number of customers. I only know on our side.

We have tremendous support from UiPath. We can say that from our perspective, we are very fortunate to be in the Pacific Northwest and that team is one of the best. It doesn't matter if we are big or small, they help everyone. So every time we have an issue or a challenge, whether it's engineering, presales, architecture, or development, we get all the support.

Our customers usually don't know much about RPA, so one of our jobs is to educate them on it to get them interested. Gradually when they understand, it moves forward.

In the majority of cases, the initial setup of this solution is simple to medium in terms of complexity. We are finding very few complex scenarios at the moment.

I think the overall architecture is simple. It is very clear and very straightforward. UiPath's product team is doing a great job in is creating a lot of very out of the box integrations and analytics, and that always helps. That is good, but I think if people are not trained yet and they think that it's easy, drag-and-drop, and simplistic, those folks struggle a lot.

We've seen that people think "Oh yeah, it's just some scripts and drag and drop so we can do this easily" and that misconception exists. We don't treat it as an easy scenario, so we gave it all the respect that proper Python code, a data science problem, or a highly complex situation deserves. When you approach it that way, it's at best at a medium complexity.

In general, we treat it right in the middle. It's not that straightforward, but the architecture is simple enough that the development complexity is medium. That's the simple and medium combination.

When it comes to ROI, for some scenarios it's immediate on the day you go to production. Doing the math, if it is automating thirty hours of work in a week, it is going to be the moment you turn on the switch.

Sometimes when the expectation is set at a different level, the KPIs are different. It may be that the customer is looking to have an "X million" dollar cost saving. It just depends on how you're defining the KPIs. So in those scenarios, obviously it'll build up to that saving.

A lot of people talk about the total cost of ownership as being a real saving or real value for products. So there are just all these different layers of complexity in that. I mean in theory it is immediate at the moment you turn on the switch, but then you need to consider the bigger picture, and it's not a straight answer. It'll be different.

The most important tip that I would share with respect to the licensing is that you should not think of a bot as being able to do only one thing. You should always consider the downtime and utilize the bots properly. That's the way you can have exponential ROI from just that one simple investment.

Even though these bots don't really cost much, you still want to say there are resources like a dedicated machine that is there, there are electricity and all kinds of resources that also go into it. So the overall cost, we should look at that. If a bot is doing ten hours' worth of work in five minutes, there are twenty-three-plus hours work that the bot can actually do. So, think of orchestration.

Some of our customers have tried different solutions. There are some customers who have even tried a lot of competing products and they're not satisfied. They have a very low expectation from what automation should or could do. So for us, that's even harder in terms of educating them.

People who don't know anything about this kind of automation, sometimes it's a little bit simpler to just run them through an hour or two of our workshop, but people who already know about it may have set their mind in a certain manner. Sometimes for those customers, the customers with experience in other solutions, are usually a little bit more difficult to convince. They have doubts that have come about because of whatever they've been using, and they don't fully understand the capabilities because UiPath does things very differently from others.

So on both ends, education is a challenge.

We are very excited about the new things that have been announced recently. There is the integration with AI, with AI fabric. There is Studio X, which has pre-built APIs with Microsoft Office and all the other Salesforce integrations that they've come up with. These are very exciting because that will increase adoption even more. People already understand unattended and attended automation, and now with Studio X being available so easily, and with analytics being part of its fabric, it's going in the right direction.

We have a very nice step-by-step flowchart that explains how to approach or what processes to automate first of all, and what are the chances of change or variations and all of that. While we are developing this, we at least are following the best practices from all the training that we received to ensure that we have taken that int consideration and we have not picked the process that is hard to automate, or which should not be automated. Then, it's more of a system change or any transformation that the customer should do first and then do automation. Basically, we should not do automation for the sake of it.

At my company, we don't work with any other RPAs. When it comes to customers choosing this solution, it should depend on the use case. If there is a strategic advance that they need to get and they need to really think of analytics and intelligent automation, UiPath makes a very compelling case. I think that it is important to choose your solution wisely and do it based on your use cases.

From a cost perspective, there is a big difference between the attended and unattended bots. One is twenty-five percent the cost of the other, which is a massive difference. Our customers use both, and we like this a lot because the way we utilize attended and unattended bots are the right way to do it. If you need to do multitasking and handle a lot of tasks, the choices vary.

Specifically from a pricing point of view, I think it is justified. When I first heard the price, and obviously I didn't ask about the duration or subscription levels, I thought it was a monthly price. Hearing that, I thought that it was cheap. Later, I was told that it was an annual fee. So for me, I understand that my customers can afford this price, and I am happy with that.

I would rate this solution a ten out of ten.