UiPath Platform Reviews

We're in the financial services industry, so we target the operations. We use it in finance but we're also going after our wealth management group, capital markets group, and fixed income capital markets group.

In one year we've done 17 automations in about 3,500 hours. We're just getting started. 

We use mostly unattended automation, but we do have both.

It's still early for us so we're selecting specific areas and items to automate based on areas that we believe will provide strategic importance for us.

We're now going to start expanding that and going after some of the larger jobs that we want to try to tackle, now that we've got some experience under our belt.

We have saved costs in terms of employee hours saved. There are definitely going to be costs associated with that. Some of those are pretty high net worth individuals that UiPath is doing tasks that they just didn't need to do.

It's definitely saving time for employees. One of our most successful automations frees them up from doing an entire task. Their quality of life has had a big improvement. It also happens to save a lot of hours. It saves a little over 2,000 hours annually.

We are still learning how to build automations but I'm a fan of the RA framework. We use StudioX to help with citizen developers to help fill our pipeline. The tools are pretty good and evolving.

The ability to bridge various applications that users are using is the most valuable feature. If we have a process that's entered in multiple locations, we can send a robot to do one of those processes on behalf of the person. We've had good success there.

Everybody on the team goes through Academy courses and continues to go back there for continuing education. Citizen developers are directed in that location as well. So we try to get them to complete StudioX. We like its ability to extend the life and the usability of some applications that by themselves can be a little cumbersome to use. I would like to make those apps and those experiences better for the user. And actually do more with them by extending parts through APIs that are passed to other applications.

We're looking to start to modify the meat of the process and then tag on pieces to the beginning and ends. 

Insights is a little clumsy. StudioX is a great start but needs more functionality. They should bring the document understanding into StudioX and make it go a little bit further. There's a pretty clear point at which you really need to switch over to Studio, but in the case of some of our citizen developers, they'd like to stay in StudioX. They just need more features. 

We have been using UiPath for a year. 

It's been very stable. The only problem we had were some digital certificates and those aren't UiPath's fault. It's partly our fault and how we manage them. One of those got in the way and shut some stuff down. It's not really the UiPath platform. That really hasn't gone down on us at all. It was the certificates. 

We're only at 17 automations now. We have a lot of headroom in the bots that we currently own and the licensing that we have. We're getting ready to put the necessary pieces in place so that we can scale it up.

The technical advisor is very good. 

Positive

 We have plenty of solutions that fall in the surrounding area, like various CTL things, automated software, and the types of things that are primarily used by IT.

We had a strategic partner help us with the setup because we knew nothing about it. They helped set up our COE and the basic frameworks that we were going to be using within IT. I came in about four or five months into the project as an analyst so I wasn't there when they did it. 

The strategic partner we used was very good.  They got us up and running and got our initial test trial into play.

The setup process was not straightforward. They purposely gave them some things that were a bit of a challenge. 

We are happy with what we got as a result.

The first deployment took quite a while. If you're considering standing up a whole COE in all those environments, they did that fairly quickly. I believe it was in about three months. It has then continued to evolve from there. That was the learning experience. If you look at our development, that first automation, there's a long flat line. Then it started to ramp up pretty significantly in the back half of the year.

Pricing is working for what we have right now. We set up two Orchestrator environments and we're unable to use our single license of the analytics on both. That's a bit of a problem. We'd like to see a dev environment for us that is free of licensing. It's development versus production. Charge us for production, don't charge us for dev. That's about the only complaint I would have.

Don't be afraid to jump in. Get the IT department involved early, get the security department at the table. As long as you have top-down management that's there to mandate and make sure everybody does what they should be doing, the proper sponsorship, and the proper buy-in from the people that have to execute.

I would rate it a ten out of ten. 

UiPath helps us to develop and build a center of excellence for our clients. I do development and technical implementation of the bots, best practices, and teach others how to do the development.

The client that I'm working with now is in the financial services sector. They do banking and life insurance. They do a lot of contracts and billing, backend, data entry-type work. We process all of the return mail that comes in, scan it using Doc Understanding, publish new bills, generate form letters, and all of those tasks that go along with managing the client for life insurance, annuities, 401K, etc.

A lot of the benefits we've seen are from FTE hours saved. We are looking at almost all of our processes, and it saves us at least a thousand or more hours per year before we go into implementation. We have around 20 in production. We're saving between 15,000 and 20,000 hours of process time.

From the user's perspective, people are happy that they don't have to do certain tasks that they didn't like to do. I only have one of those bots where I have a group of people that prefer the way they've always been doing tasks, but that's more of an organizational thing. I'm seeing across the enterprise with other folks that they're very happy to have this. They are putting more use cases in, and the frontline workers are bringing in use cases. Of course, we need to vet a lot of those so that we get enough bang for the buck, but we're finding a lot of adoption across, up, and down the whole scale so far.

There's also been a reduction in human error. There are so many use cases that have been more on the production side of things, like productivity as opposed to risk avoidance. We enter data and we do bank transfers, so it's important to key the data correctly. We use the attended bot to do that. We took a paper form. We push it in, it comes in as an unattended bot in the backend to read an email from a person and put a transfer in place. It gets approved and put in the queue.

When they run the attended bot, it allows them to do an RSA key into their external site, take the data, watch it go in, they see it, we audit it on the backend with a second user, it gets pushed in, saved, and submitted. From that perspective, if you're dealing with 10, 50, or 100 transfers a day, where you could key in the wrong number, it's important.

That's been helping. Employees are happy that they don't have to type it all in, and that they don't have to worry about the errors as well. It offers peace of mind for those folks.

Getting the bots going and working is the most valuable aspect. We have about 20 or so in production. We're building out from there. We've been very focused on Studio and Orchestrator, as opposed to some of the other product lines. Because a lot of what we're dealing with pertains to advanced technical people like myself that are helping them along that journey.  

It's easy for me to build automations but I am a computer scientist. I have a deep technical background. A lot of what I've been doing is trying to teach people how to build resilient bots, and how to build processes that will run. To me, one of the big things to meet your ROI is that you need to build things upfront that work. You need to verify them, test them, componentize them, and put them together. Otherwise, you're going to spend too much money on the backend with maintenance.

If you can get people to think about what do to in the event of a failure, even from the developer side of it, then they can create things that we can run, and we don't have to do so many new maintenance and operations tasks on it. That's vitally important.

I have used the UiPath Academy courses. I'm a certified developer. I didn't know UiPath at all. I went through the Academy and trained myself. When I brought in new developers, I had them do modules and I sometimes go visit them. 

The Academy is pretty good. It's very helpful to have something like that. Personally, my favorite side of things that UiPath is bringing to the table, is a community edition in the cloud. I can go out and play with the latest and greatest. I have my client's laptop, but I also have my own personal laptop and I go out to the cloud and do tasks out there.

I want to bring what's new, help bring to the forefront what we might want to do in the future, and get a hands-on perspective, without having to go to the client and bug them about bringing in a license for something. That's great and I hope they continue with that.

The fact that they're not charging for training is great. It brings on more developers. The barriers to entry for people are low. And the more developers you have, the more adoption you're going to get.

There's a lot of technological growth that should be done. They need to learn from customers. I talk to people about Doc Understanding which is relatively new. There's a lot of people in the document world that have more experience. They should learn a little bit more about what Kofax has done over the years with their validation actions and those types of things.

There should be more growth, but the platform is there. As they grow those things they should take each piece and make it better. If you start with a good platform and you build it up, it's going to get better. What we have today is very usable, and is only going to get better. I look forward to it.

They should talk to their customers and understand their use cases. Give customers what they need. 

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

Stability has been quite good. I see technical glitches once in a while in the Studio, but when you're running on Windows, it happens. The glitches don't happen very often.

It seems very scalable, in terms of rolling out new processes. We're more limited by machines and getting things set up than we are by what Orchestrator can handle. We have one attended bot and we're 95% unattended.

We have plans to increase usage. Our clients are growing from two developers, a QA and a VA, to a VA, and a team of two pods of six or seven developer QA types, to implement use cases over the next couple of years. They're on a very high trajectory of growth.

I go out to the community a bit. I Google looking for what everybody else has said and figure it out. We only have a couple of different use cases where we've gone back to UiPath, and the ones that we had the most difficulty with, we went right through the local sales rep to get things going. I found their support to be good.

The initial setup was straightforward and easy.

I set up Orchestrator servers, I put bots out into the systems, and I installed Studio in the client's environment. The only problem I have is with the way the client environment exists. Security gets to be a hassle. 

One of the things the company focuses on a lot is employee satisfaction. From a cost perspective, we haven't necessarily gotten to that level. I've been there for two years. I'm a consultant. We have other consultants. We're saving $15,000 a year, while we're displacing certain cost dollars from the people that did those jobs, we get paid more.

Cost-wise we're fairly evening out, and probably bringing an MROI. This is a longer scale process for them, to take them along this journey. It's important for businesses that go under that, to not necessarily focus on year one, year two. We look at this as a longer-term endeavor for them. The key benefit that they see out of it right now is the future. The workers are satisfied not having to do the "bad" work.

I found UiPath to be pretty cost-effective. 

I would rate UiPath a seven out of ten. I see it as a maturing product. It's done very well, because it is stable, and it does build real use cases. But I look forward to the future. There's a lot of good going on here.

We're a revenue cycle management company for medical billing. We've reallocated our charge entry employees. We're using bots now to do the charge entry on medical claims and then also payment posting along with eligibility and AR. We've been able to reallocate about, just within this last year, probably eight employees. They've been reassigned to more valuable work - things that the bot can't do and actually requires a human to do. We've been understaffed, so it's actually worked out great for our company.

The ease of building automation isn't a problem. It seems to be very easy to do to a point. Our challenge is we work in a live environment. We're not able to use a test environment when we build things out. We have to go very slowly.

I'm not that familiar with the product, with the solution, however, the UiPath apps feature and OCR are great. That said, we're not using any of the apps currently.

The biggest benefit we've seen is the accuracy. Even just with employees calling in sick or not having enough staff. We’ve been able to fill those roles.

The robotics piece has been a huge thing. We're doing medical claims. We're always worried about claims not getting paid. This has been able to capture those claims so that people get paid the first time. One of the other things we track is how many times we touch a claim. For example, how many clicks. We couldn't do that before. That's been very valuable to us.

We’ve improved our efficiency in a way for sure. Even just our cost analysis has improved. When we do new contracts, we know what it's going to cost exactly.

I don't know if it's UiPath as much as just what we do is really complicated. Even the consultants that we've used with UiPath, even they've said, wow, this is very difficult what you guys do. There are a lot of moving parts, so it's not as much of a UiPath problem in terms of limitations. It's just our own processes.

Right now, I don't think I've been on there long enough to know if there are missing features or functionalities I’d like to be added.

I’m talking to people right now, to see how it can do things better or how we could use it more effectively. We’d like to discover what worked for other people.

We've been using UiPath for about maybe a year and a half tops.

I haven't had any problems or concerns right now concerning stability. The biggest concern I do have is that we've already invested six people in this. We're going to have a lot more that will, more or less, not have the robotic piece as part of their job. That work will be reallocated. I have about a hundred employees that UiPath could technically reallocate.

When I look at that, I worry about if something does happen or it doesn't work or there's no backup. Then, suddenly, I don't have employees. Right now, we can jump in and some humans can do the work if necessary. My concern is that in the future they won't exist. This hasn't happened yet. I hope it doesn't.

Scalability hasn't been a problem at all. We can just continue to add bots every time we need them. It's been easy.

We started with two. Three months later, we added another two. After another three months, we add another two. From our standpoint, it's great. My UiPath rep was shocked that I keep adding more, so that's good.

I have not used technical support.

That said, we had one issue with UiPath where something didn't work. We talked to them and it was taken care of within a couple of days.

My vendor is working with them. They mentioned there was an issue with insights that they are working through. Insights are still not quite functional, or there are some resources we need. However, the vendor is dealing with it directly. It's a work in progress. 

We did not previously use a different RPA solution. 

The initial setup was pretty easy. We didn't have any challenges with that. I contacted one of our vendors and they ran with it. We didn't have issues at all.

With the vendor, it took us about 30 days to deploy UiPath. After that, in terms of implementing bots, the first bot took us about three months. Once we did the first one, it just went really quick after that. We could reuse some processes which made it faster. There was a lot of reusing of the same. We were also internally understanding what information they need and how it works.

It was all new to us. I'm still learning the acronyms they use. We need to learn what they are talking about. We’re not IT-based at all. It's definitely different.

We had the solution implemented by a vendor. They implemented it all. We didn't have any challenges as far as that goes.

Our experience with the integrator was good. I would say that they didn't realize how challenging it was going to be or, at least, the person who integrated didn’t. At the same time, they know almost everything about my business now.

UiPath has saved costs for our organization. For example, we’ve allocated six employees that are paid around $40,000 a year and we've implemented six bots to do those same functions and they're around $8,000 a year. In a way, we’ve doubled our staff, and almost tripled our ROI.

We had a problem before with the pricing, however, for the most part, it's fine where it is now. My ROI is fine. It works great. I have zero complaints.

You have to do a package at a time. That's my only challenge, where sometimes I don't need that many licenses. 

When you first sign up, it's a package that can renew every five years. I don't necessarily need everything. I'd prefer just to pay for certain pieces. 

We did not evaluate any other options. We started using UiPath due to a referral at a neurological healthcare conference about four years ago. The speaker suggested UiPath. I actually didn't know of any other company until after we were on UiPath. We've since talked to others who have used other solutions and they mentioned that we made the right choice when we chose UiPath.

We started on-premise for the first six months and then we actually moved to the cloud.

We do not use their UiPath apps feature as of right now.

We are mostly using unattended automation.

We haven't really calculated the reduction in human error. We're just moving on to our Insights app. We're just getting ready to launch that, so we're not there yet. We don't know what that turnaround will be.

We do not use UiPath's AI functionality in our automation program right now.

Our teams have not yet used the UiPath Academy courses.

I'm a little concerned about having to bring on more people that are not in this industry. We're going to have to start them over from the ground up, which takes time.

When we first started, we wanted to know if it really worked. We got a certain budget and just started using it, and now I can say that yes, it does work. We can see that now that we've stepped back. We should have done it earlier. That's what I would tell people. I would definitely tell people to look at it first, before anything else. 

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

We are using the solution to create application reports. What we've done is take all of that information, where somebody was initially doing everything as it happened, and create templates that work in another application. Due to our business model, we have multiple applications that are similar but very different. Rather than have somebody go into this application and update it and then go to another application and put in the same information, we've developed bots. We'd go to the template, input the information one time, and let the bots go in and open up the other applications.

The solution has improved the organization just by freeing up the resources to do that MBA work so that the bots can actually do things for you.

We use the solution's UiPath app feature. It has helped to reduce the workload of our IT department by enabling end-users to create apps. That said, I myself am in IT and not a developer.

The UiPath’s apps feature has increased the number of automation created while reducing the time it takes to create them. We're just now starting with that. We’ve only got 10 bots in production. We've got another eight in development right now.

Likely, the automation we’ve created has saved us probably in the neighborhood of one full-time person.

The solution’s ease of use and the UI is great, specifically for the users. Not necessarily the developers. The people actually using it find it very easy to use.

In terms of the ease of building automation, from what I've seen, I'm very impressed. We're using a partner. We built the COE and everything that they're developing right now. Obviously, we're just starting down this path. This means we're going to go work with a partner while we're developing our own guys. We can get to market quicker.

We've got our own VA. The next step will be looking into building our own developers.

The solution has reduced human error. There are still errors in the templates. People still have errors with bigger things, however, we're able to catch it before it gets into any of the applications. Reading the information across the other applications, you can stop it before it gets synchronized into the applications due to the fact that it is the same source. It doesn't go into "A" if it's not going into “B”, for example.

This has had a big impact on our business. In our model, it's a little complex as our customers are our clients. For example, in the ATM business, they charge us a fee, so we partner with a large retailer like Walgreens or CVS and we share the revenue. We actually pay our customers as they use our services. With the help of UiPath, we’re able to keep everything synchronized. We’re not sending stuff to the wrong site, or to the wrong corporate headquarters.

The solution has freed up employee time due to the amount of work that it's doing. We’ve got just one bot and it can do triple the work, covering three full-time employees in a week. Likely, existing employees now can focus on higher-value work, including more customer-facing tasks. We're getting a lot of financial requests and maintenance. They require human interfacing rather than doing manual transactions.

I can’t think of any direct places where improvements need to happen. Whatever I need, it appears to be there. That said, any app could use some form of improvement.

I've been using the solution for a year now.

The stability is very good.

I don't see an issue with scalability. We are nowhere near capacity yet.

While I have not dealt with technical support directly, I have not heard anything bad from anyone.

We did not use a different RPA solution beforehand. About two years ago, in the second quarter, that's when we started opening our eyes to the possibility of automation.

The initial setup was pretty straightforward. We have a partner that assisted in the implementation. 

From the time we signed up until the time of setting up the COE and then getting going, it might have been a few days to deploy the solution.

We have a partner that has assisted us in the implementation process. 

Everything that we've done so far, due to the fact that we run everything through COE and then submit semi-annual budgets, has been good. From the perspective of everything we submitted so far, we've been pleased.

Over and above the subscription fees, we're paying probably $51,000 a year right now.

The pricing is okay. It's not out of balance with what it offers. We are definitely getting value for it. 

We didn't really evaluate other options. We were new to it, and we had a partner that steered us towards UiPath.

At this time, we do not use the solution's AI functionality in our automation program. We also have not yet used UiPath’s Academy courses. We may in the future.

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

We're using UiPath on the customer side, where we have lots of data and PPs on the customer information. We're trying to put in what the customer is including, and then using machine learning. We created a Python type of UiPath to do machine learning and automatically build that so that items can be automated. That was our POC. That said, we're exploring more, to get into the finance area, where we can take invoicing and general revenues and the closing worksheets and automate those processes.

The biggest improvement has been in the ROI we've seen, which has been $55,000 in six months' time. 

The whole bot process and the way scheduling is done is a very valuable aspect of the solution and it's really cool.

In terms of the ease of building automation using the solution, we’re very near achieving that. It's taking more time than what it's supposed to be taking, however, I don't see any complexity in building the code nicely.

So far, the solution has saved costs for our organization.

I’m not sure if the solution has reduced human error. It’s hard to tell at this point. We’re in the early stages. However, simply by looking at the way it’s built, it will.

The solution has freed up employee time. Once again, it’s too early to say too much, however, we are saving approximately 130 hours per month. This additional time has enabled employees to focus on higher-value work. They don't need to just go to the system to click here and there, they're spending more time with the customer.

The management team is more satisfied as it’s much cleaner, with less human error. Management reporting shows definite improvement. In terms of overall employee satisfaction, employees are still not quite trusting the bot. The bot does something and they will go and still validate that. They don't have a hundred percent trust yet. That's what we are trying to build right now.

We have used UiPath Academy courses. It's taking time due to the fact that we have a consulting partner who's helping us. The majority of the workload is being handled by the consulting partner. We're trying to play just the B role of supporting. We're not doing too much development.

That said, with UiPath Academy, just the ease of accessing the material has been great. It's simple.

The only thing which I see is missing, is it does not have an inbuilt machine learning. You have to teach the bot. The bot is not self-learning.

For example, right now, we are using a description. Based on the fields or the description, we're trying to identify what is the category to be used. I have data for the last five years. The bot should be able to go and learn by itself tasks such as "These are the five things which I need to add," instead of me manually maintaining it.

I've been using the solution for six months.

The solution is stable. I don't see any problems.

The scalability I still need to figure out. Right now, with the licenses we have, I don't think we're going to scale it out to where we want it to be. It's my understanding that it just involves increasing the number of parts or number of processes which we can run. It will probably be scalable, however, we have not tested that, and therefore I cannot say either way.

We have close to 30 users on the solution right now. It's mostly our customers' manager and their team.

We do plan to increase usage in the future.

Technical support is okay. I have not really invested a lot of time in getting support from UiPath, however, I get a response.

We did not previously use a different RPA. We had a CIO who'd used it before and based on their experience, we went to UiPath.

In terms of the initial setup, the system side is straightforward. It's the business side that took us a lot of time to understand the concept.

The deployment itself took three months.

The company is probably going to need to negotiate. It's competitive right now, however, once we scale it out, there's going to be some room for negotiation. Likely, UiPath will be responsive to negotiations.

We did not evaluate other options before choosing UiPath.

We're likely using the most up-to-date version of the solution, however, I don't know the version number.

We don’t use the solution's AI functionality in our automation program yet.

I'd advise potential new users to go slow. Always create the roadmap first. Take smaller pieces and then implement those. Don't wait too long, however. Otherwise, you will lose user interest.

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

We were with the Air Force and had really a lot of different use cases including finance, credit card transactions, flight authorizations for training missions, et cetera. There are a few hundred use cases.

UiPath has improved the way our company functions. For our customers, for the Air Force, they've seen a lot of enthusiasm around the ability to develop their way out of mundane work. For those individuals, it's been a good cultural improvement. That's really been the biggest thing for them.

The developers like the studio interface better than other RPA providers that they've used in the past and find it easy to use and can provide a lot of impact.

The ease of building automation using UiPath has been great. We actually have done them with airmen, with people that are in the Air Force. We've done training and workshops such as one-week workshops with about 250 airmen. Most of them, 80% to 90%, have built bots that work in production with basically little to no training. They can do a lot without any development experience whatsoever going into the solution.

The solution has saved costs for our customers. Overall, it's tens of millions of dollars there for a potential return. They're still working on scaling that out. However, bots that have currently been built could be spread out across the entire Air Force, which is 650,000 employees, and would have about $30 million worth of potential benefit.

UiPath has reduced human error. With one particular use case, we did with flight authorizations, they had to compare your names off of a PDF to a 40,000-row spreadsheet. That not only saves time, it also reduces that error dramatically as the bot can go and find the row in the spreadsheet and then match it exactly as opposed to somebody looking for it manually.

It has saved time for our customers, equally likely $30 million in potential savings and allowing for a shift to higher-order work.

We’ve used UiPath Academy courses. We actually have a new employee training right now using UiPath Academy, and we recommend it to our customers as well. It's fantastic due to the fact that we're not spending very much time onboarding new employees. We're letting them go do the academy and then help them in assisting where needed. That's a huge benefit for us as we can continue to do our job rather than focusing on onboarding. Users can also self-lead, and new developers can go and utilize it without a lot of interaction from others or a lot of help from others.

The functionality where you can quickly convert your code from Studio X to Studio is really nice.

The StudioX interface is too different from Studio. We have a lot of people and we'll go in and start people with StudioX and they have trouble mapping to StudioX from Studio.

I've been using the solution for 18 months.

The stability has been very good. We've had no issues with stability at all.

I haven't seen any issues surrounding scaling. We're looking at one of the larger implementations of UiPath that exists right now. We were looking at a 250,000-user solution, however, we haven't done it yet. Therefore, it's hard to really comment on that.

In terms of technical support, our people have used it, and I haven't heard any complaints, although I have not used it directly.

We did previously use Blue Prism and Robocorp.

I prefer UiPath due to the sales support for this specific Air Force opportunity. We started with Blue Prism. We switched over to UiPath due to the fact that they were getting some traction inside the air force, and then we got really tightly in the line with UiPath. For me, it's not as much a software bake-off to determine which software is better or worse. It's really the attraction the customer has, and UiPath is the market leader. That support is really what's driven us to UiPath.

UiPath has a good attendance solution, which helps to ease the adoption. Our developers' feedback is that the user interface and development methodology are better in UiPath. That's why they don't want to go back to the others.

I am usually involved in the initial setup of UiPath. Our initial setup is really unique due to the fact that we're installing it in a government cloud. That is fairly complex, however, that’s very specific to that use case. Therefore, there are lots of challenges with that, however, that's more of a government problem than UiPath.

On average, for us, the setup takes a long time. It's taken us months as we have to get through these approval processes and things like that. In terms of the actual setup itself, it’s pretty fast and takes maybe half a day.

In terms of pricing, UiPath is fine. It is what it is, and I don't find it unreasonable.

Our situation is really unique due to the fact that we're trying to sell an enterprise license agreement through the Air Force. It's a pretty unique licensing situation.

It's my understanding that we are using the 2020.10 version.

We are just using the studio and the automation. Due to the fact that it's the Air Force, we're really focused on just the pure RPA piece of UiPath.

Our clients do not use AI functionality from UiPath right now.

I'd advise anyone considering the solution to go fast. What we see a lot is a lot of go fast and plan for scalability from the beginning. There's a ton of potential out there, however, we see people getting bogged down in a lot of different things instead of really just automating and developing automation as quickly as possible.

I'd rate the solution at an eight out of ten. Any software product is really difficult to be a ten, to be perfect. An eight is probably as high as I would go for any software product. It does a really good job and it's easy to use and scalable. I've had no complaints about any of it.

We're the shared services divisions to contact centers and handle back-office work. Most of our use cases with UiPath so far have been automating back-office work, taking information from Excel files, and putting them into legacy systems or some mainframe integrations. All of our robots, as of right now, are unattended automation. We haven't really used the attended robots just yet.

The primary benefit so far has been bringing up and updating other processes so that I can move on to other more valuable processes. I no longer need to copy here and paste there. It's taken the robot part of the job out of my hands. 

I have not actually developed anything with it directly. I manage the people who do. The little bit of training that I did, was pretty straightforward. I was using the rapid development tools. If you truly want to build something that's stable and fast, you really have to get in there and at a much deeper level than I got. That said, from what I did, it looked easy.

UiPath has saved the company costs. With the automation we've had so far, we're probably in the 20 to 30 FTE savings range so far.

The solution has reduced human error. It helps in the sense that, if you take a process of humans doing it and give it to a robot that's always following a set of rules when it encounters a certain value, it's always going to handle it a certain way. It's the consistency that the automation provides that has been great.

I’m not sure if the solution has freed up employee time. That's tough to evaluate due to the fact that the FTE that would have been doing this manual process would just mostly get moved to perform more valuable work. It has freed up time by allowing us to allocate those resources to higher-value tasks.

We have used the UiPath Academy courses. They are all good. We've had developers go through the UiPath training. In fact, that's a requirement when developing. They have to at least complete the training. We have at least one developer that's gone through it completely. It's a fundamental starting point to training people on UiPath. We've taken internal people and they train them ourselves.

We also appreciate the fact that the Academy is free to use. Right off the bat, due to the fact the Academy was free, we were able to say, okay, complete the training. You have to complete the training in order to be able to develop. Right away, it became part of our standard. We see the value in it.

The speed could be improved. In some cases, when I have to ask analysts to estimate how much licensing we need, we have to figure out how long it's going to run, and right now we go with the worst-case scenario, that the robots are going to run no faster than the human. That's been our stereotype. We've used other platforms in the past, where I could perform a transaction to some websites in three seconds, however, for UiPath it was 10 seconds. That was even after we did some enhancements to make UiPath as fast as we could. I know it's the internals with the way that the platforms work, however, from our robot's perspective, speed seems to be a barrier.

We started using the solution in late 2019.

The solution is stable. 

I have not had any direct relationship with the support from UiPath. When I do have a technical issue, I'm to engage with an internal team and they are the ones that have the relationship with UiPath support.

We did use a cloud solution previously. We switched to UiPath on-premises as UiPath's on-prem deployment was more aligned with our security constraints. 

We've had multiple projects. Some have been very complex and others have been perfect. It's dependent on the projects that we're using it for. Some were a little bit more complex.

It's my understanding that, while the company likely did look at other options, I was not engaged in those meetings. While I recall some high-level conversations, they didn't say which ones we were actively evaluating.

I'm not sure which version of the solution we're using. 

I have not used the AI functionality in my automation program yet.

In terms of functionality, UiPath does quite well. The fact that it's not net-based gives it a lot of flexibility to use it in a non-standard way. For example, we were building a robot interface with an Oracle database, and we could either build a robot to open up an access database with blank tables and pull it down. Or we, due to the fact that it did not have access to the net, could grab an in-memory data set and cycle through that. I liked that flexibility and the fact that we had options.

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

We have around more than 300 bots that are active right now. All the automation we have is based, basically, on Oracle and Oracle ERP. We have other automation as well, however, for now, I am focusing only on Oracle-based automation.

We have so many other use cases that we want to implement within our organization. We try to look at how we can save time for our employees so that they can spend their time on other valuable things, and not waste their time on unnecessary time-consuming tasks. 

Our employees use Oracle ERP, so they have to process so many invoices at one time and it takes a lot of time to consume a single invoice. I'd estimate it would take at least 5 to 10 minutes. But with the automation, we can process one invoice within a minute, or maybe less in some situations. It saves a lot of time - likely hundreds of hours for each employee. It saves manpower for the company and saves you valuable time for the employees. They don't have to do the same things again and again and waste their time on that.

For example, if they have to download an invoice and process that for some reason. They have to go to some ERP tool, log it onto that first, type in the information, and then download the invoice. It takes a lot of time. They don't have to do this once or twice, it's hundreds of times due to the fact that they're not for the same couple of invoices. Therefore, this is one of the best use cases that we have for now. We are still looking for other future use cases, but for now, this is the one we have.

UiPath is saving employees hours of time and has also been able to dedicate their free time to more valuable tasks.

The most valuable feature of UiPath is the time-saving employees get. It's definitely sometimes complicated for the developers when they are automating. However, from a business point of view, I would say this is one of the best tools that every organization should have, to help save time and work hours.

Sometimes if you are doing the same task, again and again, we do make mistakes. Automating those tasks removes that human error. Also, with those types of tasks, a human gets annoyed very, very soon if they keep doing one thing again and again. With the help of robots, we can fix it. There is no error with the bot. The only error would be if there is an exception if something is wrong. That said, from a business point of view, when I'm working on a bot, I make sure that it is not throwing any errors and making sure that there are no mistakes. From a development point of view, we can always fix that, however, we don't want our bot to have an error on the production level.

The ease of use and building automation using UiPath is pretty straightforward. It's not complicated. Even a person who is non-technical can become a citizen developer and use StudioX to automate some of the tasks that they think are time-consuming for them. Otherwise, from a developer's point of view, I don't find it complicated. Initially, when a user is learning and at the initial stages of learning RPA, it's definitely complicated, however, once you get used to it, it's pretty straightforward. I love working as an RPA developer.

UiPath has saved costs for our company. I don't have any metrics on the spot, however, I would say it's a big amount of saving. Our organization is very happy that we are using UiPath. We have a few complications right now, however, in a few months we'll fix everything. By next year, when everything is all settled down within our team, then we can start looking at exact metrics in terms of cost savings.

Our teams have used the UiPath Academy courses. I have been using UiPath Academy for a long time. I tend to keep on checking what's new at the Academy. If something new is there, I always try to learn it as soon as possible. If somebody were to ask me "How can we learn UiPath?" The first answer I’d give them is, "Just go to UiPath Academy and follow the learning path over there." That's what I always recommend to any new person.

UiPath Academy courses have positively affected the process of getting employees up to speed in UiPath. It’s helping employees and companies to learn, and I would say it's a one-stop place for anything related to RPA. You don't have to go to other places. You will find everything at UiPath Academy. Sometimes it doesn't have too much detail on the advanced level of things. However, it provides enough information that you learn by experience. If you need more information, you also have access to the UiPath Forum for that.

The biggest value of the courses is that they definitely save time for someone who wants to learn. I don't have to read a book and I don't have to go to any other place or learn from multiple sources. Everything is in one place and I can just follow the learning path and it's a good education in the tool.

Sometimes we don't see what processes can be automated. When we think that, "Okay, we can do that. It's not so time-consuming," however, we can figure it out with the help of UiPath apps and we likely will use them in the future to automate even more.

In terms of improvements, to be honest, I don't have anything I'd want to be added right now. If I have any problems, UiPath is always there. It's easy to find everything. I don't think anything can be improved. It's going very well. It's working for us.

They could always continue to add new features, however, I don't have anything specific in mind right now.

We have been on UiPath for almost more than a year now within our organization.

I'm satisfied with the stability of UiPath. It's good.

UiPath is always there if you want to scale over UiPath-related items. It is scalable.

In terms of who uses the solution, on my team, it's only me who is an RRP developer. That said, every person in the team knows what UiPath is, and they are joining bots onto the system on a daily basis if they have something to do. In the finance department, there are almost 40 to 50 people using UiPath. It might be more. We have more than 300 bots active right now, and I'm not working on all the bots. We definitely have other developers and other people who are working on it in other divisions within the company. 

We also do have plans to create more bots. We are going to use the UiPath apps in the future to see what kind of automation we can do there as well. for example, the Task Capture is a good tool. We haven't used that yet, however, sometime in the future, I would love to set it up for everyone on my finance team and run that application in the backend so that we can see what processes might be automated.

UiPath support is amazing. We talk with someone on a weekly basis. They suggested we use UiPath technical support as we were having a few technical support issues with UiPath and we couldn't figure it out. When I submitted a ticket at UiPath, they were able to answer within a few hours. At maximum, we would get a response in one day. Not more than that.

They also answer with a solution, and the solution always works. I'm very satisfied with them. We don't have to search on the forum and do our own research. We just submit a ticket and once they get back to us, implement the suggested method and after that, it's all good. I'm really, really satisfied with UiPath's level of technical support.

It's my understanding the company did not use a different RPA tool before UiPath.

That said, there are so many automation tools and I do know a few. There's Blue Prism, Automation Anywhere, and Microsoft has their Power Automate. I'm not familiar with all of them as my focus is only on UiPath for now. I haven't used others. I wouldn't be able to compare them. UiPath does seem to be one step ahead, however, as others do not have a free learning academy the way UiPath has. They do not offer a free trial version initially either. That is the best thing UiPath has done from a business point of view.

I was not present for the initial setup of UiPath.

While I do not have an exact ROI metric, it's my understanding that we have saved way more than the solution costs.

For example, if we are spending, for example, $300,000 on the licenses in a year, and we are definitely saving more than $1 million, or maybe more than that. due to the number of hours that we are saving, it's a huge amount of savings we're receiving. 

The pricing is worth it. It's definitely expensive, however, I wouldn't say it's overpriced. The services that we are getting from those licenses help us to save way more than what we are spending.

My managers were telling me that they were comparing which tool to use before choosing UiPath. While I'm not sure what they were looking at, they said they liked UiPath from the first day and that's why they're sticking with UiPath now.

Maybe in the future, we might switch to the cloud, however, for now, we have an on-prem deployment. We're using the most recent version of the product.

We do not use UiPath's AI functionality in our organization yet. We are not using all the UiPath apps right now.

My advice to potential new users is that the first thing that they should do is they should go to the Academy just to get familiar with the tool and how they can use it. Then, move through to the next steps.

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