UiPath Platform Reviews

We use UiPath Studio, Orchestrator and Robots, all unattended currently. Our primary use case is one-off for mediation projects because we're trying to set up our infrastructure. Once the infrastructure is set up, we plan on creating a federated model throughout our entire organization.

Right now, our remediation teams do a lot of large one-time projects where they have to have policies for scaling up and scaling down the volume of full-time employees. I know we have avoided that situation in at least three cases now where they have not had to hire or remove people because they have been able to automate the remediation process.

The most valuable features for me in Studio can be anything that helps me test or debug. It saves me a lot of time and it saves our QA team a lot of time setting up separate environments, test data, and things like that.

The most valuable thing in Orchestrator is just how easy it is and the fact that it's cloud-based. It is also useful in that it allows non-technical users to get information about their projects. For example, they can find out if independent components are up and functioning; if something is down they can find out what went wrong.

In the next release of the solution, my biggest hope would be getting more accessibility to test data processing information. I was told that this feature was coming already. Being able to see what my variables and my arguments look like when things are being passed and making the processes very clear to my customers when we are doing test cases for UAT (User Acceptance Testing). That would be invaluable. It would help the customer to see and understand the data flow more easily without having to go through training or being very tech-savvy.

I think Studio has a little more room for improvement and could use a few more features. They just announced Studio X and Studio 2 which actually addressed many of the issues I hope to see resolved, but that is assuming that they come through in development and do what they say they are going to do.

On a scale from one to five, where one is not stable and five is very stable, I would rate the stability of the UiPath platform as a four-and-a-half. I've only seen one or two buggy behaviors, so I think that qualifies as extremely stable.

In our organization, there are five full-time people involved in the automation program. We can drag people in from different departments in the business on a case-by-case basis when necessary for resolving issues with automating.

Before we started, all of us were involved in using UiPath Academy RPA training and learning through it. On a scale from one to five where one is the least beneficial and five is the most, the Academy is something I would give a three. I say that because I don't think they went into enough detail. I understand that they didn't because they are trying to save time for non-technical people, but I love knowing everything and I would love to see more detail in their presentations or have options to do so.

Customer support overall is very responsive and they say a lot of helpful things, but I'm often able to find the same information and answers on the forums. It would be nice at times to be able to talk to someone from support over the phone. I can describe my problems without having to send dozens of emails back and forth in order to get an answer. It just isn't terribly efficient.

The decision to automate and the product selection for the solution were completed before I was brought on as part of the team. I was actually brought on as an expert from another company in order to help them stabilize their deployment. The product vendors which were on the short-list actually include some vendors which the company has licenses for in addition to UiPath, like Blue Prism. They are exploring multiple options because we are a global entity. They want to offer the option to entities to choose whatever partner they prefer to go with.

The approach to the initial setup which was selected was a complicated process. I don't know much more than it took a long time, it wasn't very successful and that's why they brought me on.

They did the entire implementation in-house.

We have seen some return on investment to a certain extent, but a lot of it's coming from one-time processes and not from recurring processes. In other words, the ROI is already there, but it is from one-time processes we've deployed. These are processes that we would run a bunch of items through one time and the circumstances are not repeatable the next year or even the next week.

I'm not sure about the exact numbers, but I know that the cost of our department has been saved roughly four times over. Again, a lot of those savings are from one-time events that won't be recurring in the following year so they can't really be seen as predicting the future results.

The solution has helped to eliminate human errors in some cases and that also has value. In addition, there is the benefit of saving the employees time. Right now I believe that we have approximated that we saved somewhere between 40,000 and 45,000 human hours. That resource can be re-allocated.

Part of our deployment is in a virtual environment and part of it is not. The implementation is actually still in progress. We are in the phase of setting up our infrastructure and trying to automate some POCs (Proof of Concepts) and some early successes to show the financial benefits of RPA to the C-suite (C-level executives such as the CEO and CFO).

On a scale from one to five where one is very difficult and five is very easy, I would rate the ease of use of the platform as a four. I think the product is fairly intuitive. Because I come from a tech background though, I feel like it is going to be a little easier for me to understand than some other people who don't have that same background. The only reason I don't give it a five is because the integration between Orchestrator, Robots, and Studio does require a little bit of intimate knowledge to be able to connect them all and make sure that they stay connected.

We have not used attended robots yet, so I'm not sure how cost-effective they are because we don't have any data on that. We use unattended bots and they seem to be effective solutions, but I don't know what they pay for them.

On a scale from one to ten where one is the worst and ten is the best, I would rate this product as a nine. The only reason I'm not going to give it a ten is that I have struggled with certain errors and stability issues. Whether that is our fault or a general bug in the actual software is yet to be seen. I have a few open tickets, but I've really liked this software overall.

Advice that I would give to a colleague at another company researching this or similar solutions would be that they look at their organization and see if they are really ready for deploying RPA solutions. A lot of RPA solutions are sold with the promise that anyone can build solutions with the products and the bots are going to deploy quickly. I don't think quick deployment is deceiving, but I do think that trying to implement a solution that does move so quickly like this into an organization that doesn't move quickly can create friction.

Our primary use for this product is to automate processes that we are capable of automating at our tier-one level human resources center.

This product has improved the way the organization functions by helping us go through a digital transformation. RPA is able to bridge a lot of the gaps that we had in our processes and processing what we had before we moved to this platform as a solution. With a little effort, I was able to bridge those gaps and automate a lot of processes that were manual and less efficient prior to involving the product.

The most valuable features for us are the recording tools. They allow the capture of user actions on the screen and then the recordings can be converted into workflow sequences. The activities are very simple to use and easy to put together in order to automate the processes. Once we get Orchestrator, that feature will probably be the most valuable, but we are currently not able to put it into production.

As far as additional features, there doesn't seem to be anything outstanding that I can think of right now. Maybe some off-the-shelf "How To" features could be installed with Studio so that you can search for how to do something and pull it up directly in the Academy or on-screen without leaving the product.

There could be room for improvement in the ticketing feature. It's kind of hard to find that feature sometimes.

On a scale from one to five, where one is the least stable and five is the most stable, I would rate the stability of UiPath as a five. It is very stable. We have never had any issues with regards to UiPath. The actual problems seem to be network issues and our environment.

We started out sort of small in the beginning and we've invested more in buying licenses and functionality. The scalability in that way seems very good.

My experience with customer service has been very good. They make a few different types of resources available and it is usually pretty easy to find what you are looking for. For example, I have used the RPA Academy. It is pretty easy and it was very beneficial. I haven't really opted for using customer support or technical support much. I've been able to just call, text, or email somebody and get a solution.

There were really no automated processes when I first came on to work at this organization. When we made the decision to go in this direction, we made a comparison of products to solve the automation issue. What made us choose UiPath to automate our processes was price, availability, ease of use and customer services. They were also willing to be the quickest to work with us as well. It seemed to be the best mix of all these.

We knew we needed to invest in a new solution because, where I'm working, we had 600 or 700 processes that I knew could benefit from automation. As an industry and in total, we probably have thousands of processes that could benefit from and be improved by automation. Coming into the company and seeing how things were done just made it obvious that automation was missing but necessary. Government processes need to be automated to be more efficient because of the volume and the potential for human error.

I would describe our initial setup as complicated because of our industry. We never worked with software like this prior to implementing UiPath. Just to get permissions to use the product on our network was one obstacle. It wasn't always easy to get to ATO (Authority to Operate) and get the capabilities and rights to do certain things on the network like to have the product interact with certain programs that have sensitive information. It's kind of complicated, but that is a whole new path within our industry whenever introducing new technology.

From the time of purchase of the UiPath license until adding our first robot in production was a few months. We purchased a license in February and got a robot into production in May. Most of that time spent was because working on the project is not even my full-time job. I have a whole different responsibility in the organization. So, I was doing a lot of developing in my free time. It probably would have only taken a month or so if I was doing it full time.

We did not use an integrator, reseller or consultant. I did everything in-house.

We have seen a return on investment and performance benefits. The ability to notice a difference was almost immediate for certain things and in certain programs. I know that I've calculated that we saved $1.47 million through the automation we have already set in place. The solution also helped eliminate human errors which are more difficult to approximate as a dollar value or percentage.

Basically, using the product has allowed us to take between four to six full-time employees from doing very mundane transactional processes to doing more value-added work. That shift alone reduces human error because the human mind is not made to do this kind of transactional work over hours and days at a time.

This solution saves our organization time on an ongoing basis. I would say it saves a minute to three minutes per transaction per thousands of transactions. It certainly has value in more than one way.

We license the use of the product on a yearly basis. The licensing we bought costs $7000 in 2019 for what we have in production. That is the cost of the license plus Studio.

From a cost perspective, I believe that unattended robots can save even more time and more money than attended robots. The only reason we haven't gotten unattended processes into production yet is simply that we haven't got the authority to operate Orchestrator on our network server. The cost is not an issue given our budget, we need to be able to justify how secure it is.

The vendors who were on our shortlist were UiPath, Automation Anywhere and Blue Prism. All of them seemed to be good solutions.

We are currently running some of our automation in a virtual environment. The implementation performance is all right. Our system environments are pretty out of date and a bit technologically behind. Sometimes that fact will hold things up. I am the only one in the organization involved in the automation program. I'm the only developer and the only person who uses UiPath directly, but it affects thousands or even tens of thousands of people.

On a scale from one to five, one being the most difficult and five being the easiest, I would rate the ease of use of the platform as a five. Personally, I had no developer experience. I never heard of RPAs or UiPath a year ago. I was able to learn it and figure it out using the Academy, YouTube and the forum. Coming to it cold and doing it part-time, that really doesn't seem like a long time.

On a scale from one to ten, where one is the worst and ten is the best, I would rate this product as a ten overall. It has been completely helpful in achieving the goals we set for it and the technical help and customer service I've gotten have been good. Most of the issues we have encountered with the product are because of the way we operate and not because of UiPath. The support from UiPath provided everything we have ever asked for and needed.

The advice I would give to a colleague at another company who is researching this or a similar automation solution is to just do it. It really creates the opportunity to make things more efficient.

We are using Orchestrator, attended robots, and unattended robots.

Our primary use case for this solution is in the financial industry.

We do not yet run our automations in a virtual environment.

With respect to how easy it is to automate our company's processes, on a scale of one to five, I would rate this solution a four. The whole interface needs some TLC because it can be a bit tricky.

We have used the UiPath training and it has improved a lot since we first tried it. When I used it a while ago, it had its problems. I think it came due to the fact that it was not developed by native English speakers. For example, they had questions that were simply wrong. It has improved a lot and now it is beneficial. I think that the biggest challenge is for them to stay up to date.

From the point that we purchased our UiPath license until we had our first robot was approximately four and a half months.

This solution has saved us time, but more importantly, it has saved us money by not paying certain fees or certain penalties. With respect to saving money, the last amount that I saw was six figures. Legally, I am not allowed to say more.

Being in the finance business and having certain audits, this solution helps to make sure that we have validations and checks in place to help us to do our processing quicker. Also, with invoices, normally when you pay them by a certain date you get a certain discount. So, we've managed to significantly increase the savings we get just from having invoices processed earlier or on time.

In terms of eliminating human errors, we have one process where we've eliminated errors completely. The average is that we eliminate errors by fifty to sixty percent.

The most valuable feature in Orchestrator is the scalability.

The most valuable feature of unattended robots is that they are always available.

They have added a lot of new features over the past months, and things are a little more complicated. In the interface, sometimes you just have the screen full of windows and figuring out what goes where can be a bit tricky.

We would like to see improvements in Studio such as syntax highlighting and documentation functionality for audit purposes. That would be great.

With respect to the stability, on a scale from one to five, I would rate this solution a four. There are a couple of things that break the robots, and it has to do with the technology itself. The user interface and other components are prone to error, and it's not one hundred percent automation. This is something that you take into consideration when you do RPA. They have also had a couple of updates over the past years where they made significant changes that basically broke the robots.

We have more than a hundred people involved with RPA.

So far, I have only used the ticketing through email support, and it is sometimes frustrating. I've only just learned that there is telephone support. It is hard for me to rate customer service because I was looking for telephone support, thinking that it was not available.

In general, there is room for improvement support-wise.

We are in an industry that is heavily targetted by low-cost countries, so in order for us to stay competitive, we had to do something. When we did our research, the two obvious solutions were RPA and AI.

When we started, it was with Blue Prism, and we learned from the issues we had. When we were looking at what we could do as an AI, UiPath started to emerge and started to become a big player. We then looked at capabilities and the licensing model, and at the time there were two vendors that had pretty similar capabilities.

These two were Automation Anywhere and UiPath. Automation Anywhere had a very high initial investment requirement and UiPath didn't, which is why we stayed with UiPath. I believe that you had to buy at least a hundred licenses for Automation Anywhere, whereas with UiPath you can buy one or two.

It looks like we made the right choice.

The initial setup of UiPath was straightforward. The approvals on our side slowed things down. If it were not for that then we could have been up and running in six weeks.

We implemented the solution ourselves.

We only automate processes where we expect to see ROI within twelve months. As such, most of our processes have an ROI between six and twelve months.

We evaluated Blue Prism and Automation Anywhere before choosing this solution.

We are in the process of moving this solution to the cloud.

From a cost perspective, it is very hard to get ROI with an attended robot. The price is too high.

My advice to anybody who is researching this solution is not to overthink it. RPA is a technology that you learn by doing it.

This is a very strong product. I think that there is a lot of good investment and a lot of good attention out there. This is the best or one of the two best tools out there. They are listening to what the market wants and just need to be careful not to get greedy. That said, there is always a little bit of space for improvement.

I would rate this solution a ten out of ten.

We are using Studio, Orchestrator, and mostly the unattended bots.

Our primary use for this solution is to give time back to the employees.

We do not run our automations in a virtual environment.

With respect to how easy it is to automate our company's processes, on a scale of one to five, I would rate this solution a five. It's drag-and-drop, and all of the activities are there.

On a scale of one to five, judging how beneficial it is, I would rate the training a four. All of this information there is self-explanatory and it works. 

From the point where we started using the demo version, it was a couple of months until our first robot was ready.

This solution has probably helped to eliminate human errors.

I can definitely say that this solution has saved the organization time. With all of the processes together, we have saved one full-time equivalent person. 

The most valuable feature of this solution is the unattended automation.

This solution is easy to use and it saves you time.

In future releases, we would like to see more drag-and-drop, and more out of the box AI.

With respect to the stability, on a scale from one to five, I would rate this solution a four. We had some issues where we needed to get in contact with the support, and sometimes, UiPath crashes on our servers.

We have about eight people in our automation group.

Most of the time, the technical support for this solution is very good.

One one occasion, it was not very good. We had a problem with a new version. When we updated to 18.2, the robots stopped working after some time. We had a lot of emails that included session logs. I made it quite clear that it was really important because we were in the beginning phase and the robots had to run. In the end, I fixed the problem by downloading the next version, 18.3. When we asked whether the problem was version-specific, they never got back to us, which isn't very good.

We did not use another RPA solution before this one.

From the external consultants, we got the idea that RPA has the possibility to save us time and money, so we decided to do it.

The initial setup of this solution is straightforward. Orchestrator is easy to understand. You can connect the virtual machines to it and then run the robots.

In the beginning, we used a consultant from Roboyou to assist us with the process. Our experience with them was good.

We recognize ROI in terms of performance benefits as soon as a process is automated and an employee can do something else that is more meaningful. It is not a benefit listed on a spreadsheet, but the employees are happier.

Our licensing fees for this solution are €68,000 (approximately $75,000 USD) yearly.

Two years ago, we evaluated Automation Anywhere and Blue Prism, in addition to UiPath. UiPath was the best overall solution then, and it still is now. It has a big community, and you can download the demo versions to start testing immediately.

This solution saves us time in all areas. We don't keep track of exactly what we have saved in terms of time, but we can say that we have more customer experience. If somebody has a mundane task and wants it automated then we do it.

My solution for anybody researching RPA solutions is to try UiPath. When you want to start, it is easy to register and get going.

This is a good solution and it saves us time, but there is always a path for improvement.

I would rate this solution an eight out of ten.

The primary use case is around manual conversion of data from one system to another. These are big processes right now.

We are using Studio, Orchestrator and the robots.

Our organization is more efficient. The people that you're automating processes from are happy they are getting done. They are excited and like to be a part of the process. It's also new technology. It's innovative. and people enjoy being around that.

We don't have a baseline metric for the elimination of human errors. So, we don't know how many errors a human actually makes doing some of the conversion data entry processes. We assume they are about 90 percent accurate and UiPath is 100 percent accurate.

We have saved 18,000 hours so far this year.

With the robotics and management of Orchestrator, we are able to kick things off. We are starting to get more out of the scheduling of these and into more on demand triggered events, such as a RESTful service calls and things of that nature.

The ease of using the platform for automating your company's processes is a five out of five. It is super simple. Everyone who we have in our robotics team had no experience with automation or robotics previously. They went online took the classes from UiPath. They started with the Community Edition, just to play with it themselves, then they were probably experts within a couple of months.

Everyone has used the UiPath Academy training. I would rate it around a three or four out of five. While it's simple and you get a decent understanding of what's there, you still have to dedicate on an awful lot of time doing the automations to become proficient at them.

While it looks like it is being addressed, getting the unattended robots to every person's machine in the company and executing on their machines needs improvement.

I would rate the stability as a five out of five. it hasn't gone down yet.

We have a team of four people involved in our automation program.

I have only used the technical support to fix a licensing discrepancy. They were okay.

Everybody said, "We had to do more with less," from the C-suite on down. RPA is the only way that you can do that which seemed viable. So, we tried it out.

We were previously using VM. 

The initial setup is straightforward. With our proof of concept, it took us two to three weeks to develop it, then another week to make it production ready. When we deployed it into production, we had the license. We installed the robot and had it running through Windows Scheduler before we had Orchestrator, and it just worked

We started with a proof of concept, had it running in production, and bought the license that day.

We did have a systems integrator who helped us. Overall, for the initial implementation, I would rate them a five out of five. They came in, and it was great.

We have been able to achieve our ROIs on pretty much every process that we have done. You see it almost initially, as soon as the process starts running. However, until we get the actual feedback of, "Yes, I can tell this is saving us time and effort." It takes about a month for the business unit to really recognize it.

We haven't technically saved money because we haven't gotten rid of anybody, so our CFO will not let us claim money. However, we do calculate time given back. Right now, I believe for this year, we've been given back 18,000 hours so far.

Our licensing costs are around $40,000 a year.

We looked at the big three: Automation Anywhere, Blue Prism, and UiPath. Then, we chose UiPath because of cost and ease of use. The training was there. It was so quick and easy to pick up.

I would recommend UiPath. It's easy to use and learn. It just works and doesn't break. It's cost-effective.

We run our automations in virtual environments, such as Citrix. Orchestrator sits in VMware along with unattended robots. It kicks everything off behind the scenes. Most processes are set on a time schedule.

We prefer unattended bots. We're moving into that real-time trigger, but still like to run unattended to give some form of user interface for the user to call them.

I would definitely rate it a 10 out of 10 because of what it delivers and allows, along with the benefits. You can also see on their strategy on the roadmap, it's just expanding and getting better.

Our primary use case is IP invoice automation.

We are currently using Orchestrator and bots.

It gives you a technology or ability to build a solution on any legacy system.

I love Orchestrator: 

• The configuration part
• The amount of keys
• Transaction reporting
• Logs
• Accessibility on the iPhone.

VM was on the service for high density. It is finicky at times. The latest release is a lot more stable. However, I've had a two week production outage where DLLs weren't registered and someone from Vegas had to login for eight hours onto the fraud service to work it out. Even though they uninstalled and re-installed it, all the different apps still wasn't working. So, I  have lost a bit of faith in it to be honest.

I would like to have cloud stuff back in Australia and hosted there. I want everything in SaaS, bots included.

While it has eliminated human errors, it has created other errors.

I would like something that better identifies the processes. If it could watch the computer, then work it out for me, that would be good.

Now that I've done an upgrade, it seems to be a lot better. Because I was running high density on the 2016.2 or 2016.3. I had a lot of problems, but I couldn't work out whether or not it was just UiPath or our client app that was timing out. But, we noticed that if you login as console, you have far less issues than if you run high density.

These days, the stability is a four out of five. Back in the day, it wasn't.

In my old organization, 50 to 100 people were involved.

I have a bit of a different issue because at my old company that I just left, I was only paying $3,600 USD per bot. I turned up at my new company, and because of our size, we are paying $8,000 per bot.  

The support is not good. I had a two week production outage.

There was a business problem, and we needed to work at how to solve it. The partner was a big driver in this process.

The initial setup was pretty straightforward.

It took two weeks from the time we purchased our UiPath license until we had our first robot in production.

We used Blackbook.ai, and our experience with them was awesome.

We have seen ROI. The last company that I work for was trying to get 1000 FTEs out the door, and I think that they are already at 60. In Australia, at my current company, we are already at 10 FTEs. Just in Australia, we have save a million dollars, and maybe five million in India.

The reduction of 10 FTEs has saved us time.

At the last place that I worked, it was $700,000 USD.

Everything that I read about Blue Prism suggest that it is too heavy and takes too much development to ramp up.

I looked at Automation Anywhere for the price point, especially for a PoC. Between Blackbook.ai and what I saw already with UiPath, I just thought UiPath was the better option.

Scout it out. I am going to try to work with this company a different way than what I did than last time, e.g., federated.

I would rate the overall product as a nine out of 10. It's an enabler. It seems pretty good. There is a lot of investment and new things.

I would rate the ease of use of the platform as a four out of five. It is pretty easy to use but it is not doing everything for me. I still have to do stuff.

I would rate the UiPath Academy as a four out of five.

We're starting within our finance group, so a lot of different processes in our finance group are being automated. Our main project was for our tax department, extracting data from PDFs and putting them into Excel.

We have two people involved with RPA in our company.

We just purchased this solution last week so we're still installing everything. We did automate four processes with the community edition. The length of time in development varied by the process. The longer ones required help from UiPath. They came on-site for the PoC, so that helped us out. Some other easy ones we just did ourselves within a couple of days.

With respect to how easy it is to automate our company's processes, on a scale of one to five, I would say that it is a four. But with Studio X, I think it will probably be a five. I say four because as you get more complicated with your processes, you need to learn how to code and there's a brunt learning curve. A lot of people will get turned off by that. So, I made some good sessions with Studio X, it's all drag and drop, mostly, so that's perfect for the business users.

On a scale of one to five, judging how beneficial it is, I would rate the training a five. We are actually in the process of taking it right now. It's good that they have something like that available. There are not that many who have aced it.

So far we haven't gone too far, but I expect that people will be a lot happier because they won't be doing the jobs that they don't like doing. They'll have more time to learn and up-skill technologies like this, which can help further their careers rather than just learning, or not learning by copying and pasting.

The most valuable feature is automating processes and tasks, giving users time for more value-added activities. This results in cost savings.

The free community edition allowed us to test out the technology before investing in it.

I would like a better ability to connect and integrate with other software systems. An example would be integration with data and business intelligence tools. I don't think they have a native connector yet. So, just something that a user can connect, and have RPA in the middle, would be helpful.

I would also like to see an easier UI for the user. It may have already been taken care of with Studio X, but I think if they keep improving that, it's going to get a lot of people interested because users are attracted to it.

We were just using community edition for about six months.

With respect to the stability, on a scale from one to five, I would rate this solution a five. I mean we haven't used it too much so we haven't really pushed the boundaries, but for the stuff we've, done I would say it is stable.

Their sales and pre-sales support is very good. They've been very willing to come onsite and help us out and help with our pilot as well.

We got introduced by RPA from PWC. They came and talked at one of our finance summits.

The paid version, I'm still learning how to use, how to connect everything together. There is still a little learning period for that as well. Learning how Orchestrator works, how the licensing works and things like that, were necessary after using the community edition.

UiPath helped us with our PoC and they were great. I mean they came for free and through just a pilot or a proof of concept. We could actually see if the technology works for a use case.

Before we start anything we evaluate the process and we take down how many hours it saves, the costs, and ROI. In our main project, it took someone approximately three hundred hours a year to do all that data extraction, data input, and that also came along with errors because someone could fat-finger the value.

Then, through the PoC, they're able to turn around within two days. A bot can basically do that entire process and do it error-free as well.

It is a savings of three-hundred hours, and the cost savings is a multiplier of hourly pay.

We also use it as an ETL tool sometimes, so instead of paying for an API connection, we can use RPA. Simply just to run a simple report of the system.

I don't have any other software vendors to compare it to, but I would say if you're fully utilizing it then there's definitely an ROI in it. Obviously, if you have only one process running five minutes a day with the bot, it's not worth it. For us, what we did was we built enough use cases before we bought that enterprise license to make the ROI on it. We've got eight or ten and then we realized that we can cover that license cost easily with ROI before we purchased it.

Ultimately, we realized ROI within six months.

We got purchased the basic minimum package and it was around $35,000 USD, annually.

We tested out Kryon RPA, and we looked but did not test Automation Anywhere and Blue Prism. Those two were out of our price range, and at that time, neither of them had a free community edition, so we couldn't test out the technology.

UiPath sort of fit our company well because it was priced reasonably, and they also had a free version so we could test out the technology. Ultimately, we chose UiPath because of the price. It was not as expensive as Blue Prism or Automation Anywhere. It has a free community version where you can test new technology, which was huge. They also have a local office next to us so we can get their help pretty easily.

They have announced features in the next release, and I think that they are all the things that users would want. There are easier ways to document processes and a better and more user-friendly UI. A lot of people just got turned off by having to learn code. So that was a lot easier, and then being able to track all your RPA projects and the ROI on them saves time. Doing them manually is time-consuming. Fortunately, we're a small company because I couldn't imagine if you're trying to implement this for a bigger company.

My advice for anybody who is researching this solution is to, first of all, do their own research on the ratings and independent research. Secondly, I would just say a lot of them now have free community editions, so there's nothing holding you back from testing out the technology and seeing if it works. I think Blue Prism is the only one that doesn't have it now. That's a really high cost and a barrier to seeing if the technology works. Just going and validating the software and doing a simple automation task is important. All of those vendors have free training so you can just go step-by-step and learn something. I think that's the biggest thing someone can do, and then obviously finding enough processes within your company as well.

This is a good solution but there is always room for improvement.

I would rate this solution a nine out of ten.

The solution is primarily used for invoice processing in combination with intelligent data captures. It's used for anything to do with lots of finance processes. Typically they go into lots of HR processes as well. They're the two main business functions that we work in.

Orchestrator has valuable scheduling and being able to run things on demand and dynamically as well allocating the transaction, and the studio are good features. Nothing stands out in particular. Everything's kind of equal, it just depends on the task you need to complete.

With an unattended robot, you can schedule it and have it running autonomously.

The solution is quick and easy to implement. It's fairly easy, and it means clients don't have to get IT involved. If you get IT involved in anything there's always blockers and there are always other priorities. 

They should expand on workflow type items and take another step up from the long-running workflows to offer more visibility of business processes within Orchestrator.

The solution needs a better integration team, different versions of Orchestrator, and to make it easier to identify problems with versions, as well as to be able to fix those kinds of problems. It's hard if you don't keep up to date all the time as well, for example, to go from 2018 to 2019 versions. It's quite a big jump considering activities and things like that.

I'd rate the stability five out of five.

When we were using technical support we were typically going directly to some people we knew in UiPath because we knew them very well. We haven't had that many instances that we needed to use the help though.

In terms of ease of setup, I would rate the solution four out of five. From an IT perspective, it's pretty simple, but from a non-technical perspective, I think people will struggle.

They've brought us Studio X which is starting to increase that to a five out of five. From a business user perspective a lot of the sales teams will sell it as a very easy to mend product which isn't particularly helpful because when you go into a customer environment and you have to build via a complex process and then integrate it with IT and all of the business systems then obviously it's not a five minute job. It's not overly complicated but can take three to four weeks for some processes to be implemented successfully.

From the time the UiPath license is purchased to implementing it virtually takes about three weeks.

ROI depends on the process. Some customers are using their people badly and they literally have a person doing the job of processing invoices all day long. It's very quick to realize their ROI because it's a 30-40 thousand pound salary that they get to replace very, very quickly. More commonly, on a big project, it takes 6 to 12 months to get to an ROI. Even if you are just breaking even, in a year or two you'll start to get an ROI.

There's information online. There's actually a section where you can go through training online for licensing. There's some documentation available as well from the UiPath sales team. You can just ask them.

I've already struggled with licensing a little bit. It's never been super clear because you have the notion of a mode lock and concurrent users and things like that depending on whether you want it on one machine or whether you want the licenses to be able to float around different users. The wording around it can be improved. They communicate in a simpler way.

Usually, the client looks at UiPath, Automation Anywhere, Blue Prism, and sometimes other smaller competitors but that's quite rare.

We use Orchestrator, Studio, and unattended and attended robotics. We typically use more unattended than attended generally. Increasingly we're using attended robots. We use Orchestrator but at 1:1 per client, and Studio for development.

For the larger clients, they still go on-prem, but mid-tier customers start to use the cloud solution.

We try to encourage clients not to run automation within virtual environments like Citrix. UiPath does work through Citrix but it's only if clients really don't have control of that environment. We have done it, but where possible we always ask clients to install either the robot on the local machine or to install the major Citrix extension. By running within virtual premises everything's a little bit more or less stable so you have to add more checks, which means the development time takes a bit longer; and the data coming out is a little bit less reliable. But with the Citrix extension, everything has become a lot easier.

I used a web tool for the UiPath Academy RPA training. I did a lot of the training before there was an Academy, and then when it came out I did the certification. We always put our team through every stage of the training. I'd rate the Academy four out of five. It's easy to follow and get through. The only thing that's lacking a little bit is, it's just that you can't do 2 weeks worth of training and then become an expert. Another thing is that there is a further certification which is an advanced developer certificate which needs product experience as well, and for me, there's not been enough distinction between the 2-week online training vs that proper diploma. There's always some confusion, when people say, "Oh yeah, we've got this", many people say it doesn't mean as much as it could, or other software companies have a better distinction between levels of certification experience. They need to offer a solution architect type certification for someone who knows the infrastructure really well and can prove it. There needs to be a proper qualification for that.

In terms of reducing human error with the solution, I've always been an advocate of the software benefit that comes out of automation. AFT savings are great but I think a lot the other benefits include less mundane work being done, fewer errors, better compliance, better visibility. One of the things that hasn't been exploited that well is the additional data that you get from automation. Where humans previously were just doing a job, for example, we automate a lot of processes.

I'd rate the solution ten out of ten.

We primarily use the solution for the financial processes. 

In our company, we are freeing up 14,000 hours per month.

All of the UiPath's components, meaning Studio, Orchestrator, and Unattended Robotics, are really important for us because they offer really clean processes. The one that generates more value for us is the Orchestrator because we are planning to really scale up the factory. It helps us to have an overview and control. With the insights that they announced recently, I hope we have really great control over it in the company.

In terms of ease of use, I would rate the solution five out of five. It's really intuitive and any people that have the basics of coding can handle it. 

In the next release, they need enterprise connect. That's something we were wondering about. 

The solution could maybe use more artificial intelligence components or stuff we can start to use in the AI field. 

It could use an easy integration with SAP. Most of the processes of our company are in SAP. Sometimes it's kind of tricky to automate it.

I'd rate the stability four out of five. We haven't presented problems but sometimes with the UiPath robot, the robot attended license breaks.

We have reached out to technical support. We are in Columbia so sometimes there are slow responses because they don't have too much capacity to attend to us in Latin America. It could be better.

Our time to market in implementing our first robot was four months because it was new for everyone in the company. We started too many processes at the same time and we were preparing everything around the company. It was slow. It was four or five months.

The initial setup was easy. We didn't have any problems.

We implemented the solution ourselves. Our IT department and our robotics architect handled it. We also had UiPath help us with the set up as well.

I'd rate their assistance five out of five. They helped us a lot.

Unattended robot costs are high.

For our company, we have money to buy the solution and we have a huge contract with UiPath, but for companies that are smaller, the costs are too high. For example, a company that is not too big, because they have to pay in dollars, may suffer because conversion rates are high.

When we started we started with UiPath and Blue Prism. We made 14 processes with each and we decided to stay with UiPath. Mostly because of the IT architecture. We really like the Orchestrator, for example. It was like a huge consideration we had because Blue Prism is like a closed book and we didn't like it too much.

We utilize the full UiPath package. We are all on the cloud using the Microsoft Azure platform. 

We also use it within the virtual environment. It has been tough implementing it. Sometimes it doesn't identify the selectors or the images. It has a higher risk of failure. It's risky to have a centralized process.

We plan on automating the drilling process, the upstream and midstream process of the company, and the transportation of oil and gas for the company. Those are the main areas for us that we are aiming to automate. We started with back processes such as financial processes, logistic processes, and HR processes because they are not the core. As we continue learning about it, we will focus on the back-office processes.

A prerequisite for us in the company is to go through the UiPath RPA Training Academy. They have many courses, including foundations and advanced certifications. I'd rate the Training Academy four out of five. If they didn't explain too many things that would be great. They do basic stuff that will help people have a different mindset about it. They need more of an overview. Use cases, examples and more explanations about the activities in the UiPath would be useful. 

I'd rate the solution nine out of ten.

We use all of the UiPath products: UiPath Studio, Orchestrator, attended robots, and unattended. Primarily, we use them for financial liquidation. Our customers frequently use it for different cases. Some use it with chatbots.

Sometimes, our customers run automations in a virtual environment. In terms of implementing UiPath within a virtual environment, UiPath staff are working on the cost. Currently we have UiPath with a Citrix client and you need to go to the Citrix virtual station to activate. It's more difficult to implement as a user.

Our customers' organizations have involved about 15 to 20 people in their automation programs.

I would rate its ease of use as about four out of five. It's not so easy, but it's also not difficult. We have a great UiPath Academy and it's really useful and helpful. Sometimes we need to do difficult operations and use other frameworks, through activities in UiPath. I think this mechanism is very nice, but in implementation, the customers are pretty close. Sometimes we must do it.

This solution helps to eliminate human errors. The amount depends on the process and the customer. Even unattended robots don't provide 100% automation. Sometimes a robot interrupts and waits for a human to make a decision. There is a process when unattended robots do fewer steps and after ten interruptions are waiting for a human to go on. I would say there is about a 70% reduction in human errors when using an unattended robot.

UiPath also helps save time. One unattended robot works 24 hours a day because a robot doesn't get ill or need to sleep.

All of the features are valuable. I think the best feature for Russian government customers is security. Security in Orchestration for requiring credentials. Our customers are usually serious about security.

I would like to see more AI features with data classification and computer reason. I think it would be great to have more features in full monitoring robots.

I would rate their stability as four out of five.

In cases of high scalability when we have one process and many of us use that process, we sometimes have problems. When one process uses about 24 robots for 24 hours, we have problems with it. I think when many robots work at the same time, something goes wrong in orchestrating tasks between robots.

I am happy with the support. For me, it's okay.

The initial setup can sometimes be complicated, depending first of all on the environment, as well as the implementation strategy of the company. Too many processes or only one PoC could lead to a more difficult implementation. Sometimes, customers try to automate a lot of the big processes. When we try to automate the complete process, we understand with the customers how many FTEs you can get from it. Everything depends on the customer's requirements.

It takes about six months from the purchase of a UiPath license until our customers have their first robot in production.

UiPath is a data mining solution. Our company tries to explain why RPAs are useful.

I don't know which other solutions our customers evaluate. Kofax might be one. Sometimes we work with a customer to make a decision about which platform to choose. Sometimes we do a PoC for Blue Prism. In the Russian market, there are two major vendors that are competing against each other: Blue Prism and UiPath. Usually, customers go through a PoC to choose the best vendor. UiPath wins because you can automate more processes with it.

I would rate UiPath as nine out of ten.