What is our primary use case?
With federal governments, a lot of the use cases vary around what they're doing, however, it's just a lot of PDF, Excel, and Microsoft Suite automation and then interacting with their custom and web-based tools for subject information.
How has it helped my organization?
We don't use it a ton internally. We do more consulting services where we help other organizations get it set up. We're trying to look at maybe more internal ways to use it, however, most of what we do is external. That's just our entire model.
The typical spiel with UiPath is you're getting rid of the tedious and redundant work and you're saving time for people and bringing them up to do more human-oriented tasks.
What is most valuable?
Anything and everything under the solution has been very helpful for us. UiPath Studio is the most valuable for what we're doing simply due to the fact that it’s development software.
The most valuable part is how it interacts with the websites. A lot of the other automation solutions aren't doing that. A lot of what we do is involved in web-based automation and that's pretty key.
As a developer, the ease of building automation is great. I don't know if it's easy for the typical business user that I interact with. That's why there are professional services to develop and things like that.
We do use the UiPath Academy courses. UiPath Academy is great. It's one of the best online training platforms I've seen. That said, it’s an average user base that we're working with. I've had to teach people how to copy and paste. That level of user is not going to learn how to do variables and selectors and things like that.
The science of the software's easy enough to pick up if you know how to develop and I thought the Academy was fantastic at helping the learning process along.
The biggest value that the UiPath Academy offers is just the ability to train somebody up and know how to use UiPath in roughly a week.
The solution has saved costs for organizations. The exact amount is very tricky to quantify as I have multiple clients. It depends on which client we’re talking about. A lot of them are coming up in the beginning stages. My first client saved around 200,000 hours, which was significant. More recent ones may be in the tens of hours at this point. Those numbers relate to nobody specific, just a fledgling RPA program.
UiPath has reduced human error. That said there's plenty of bot error that occurs. You have to be aware of that if you are going to replace humans. I haven't honestly tracked it to see what the percentage is on errors on any of my projects, however, I would assume it is a reduction, and yet not quite 100%.
Right now, reducing errors is not yet important for our business and the businesses that we consult for. We don't really come across processes where there are so many errors. That's what we need to fix. It's not why people are using it. They're using it for the ROI value.
The solution has freed up employee time. It generally allowed the employees to focus on higher-value work and their level of satisfaction with the job.
What needs improvement?
I’m not sure if the Academy fulfills all of our needs in terms of staying up to speed with the solution. I haven't really gone back to the Academy after I first got through the development training to look at other solutions and stuff. I usually just rely on meetings with UiPath.
The stability needs to be improved, as does the scalability.
For how long have I used the solution?
We've used the solution for four or five years.
What do I think about the stability of the solution?
In terms of stability, that's where there's room for improvement.
It just comes down to a lot of selectors and items of that nature. Selectors can fail randomly and then start working again and can cause issues. That's been our issue with stability.
What do I think about the scalability of the solution?
The scalability is directly tied to the stability. It's a lot harder to scale the solution to run on a lot of computers. Each of these has some unique issues when it comes to deployment.
With my current client, we have probably around ten users at this time.
How are customer service and support?
Technical support is great. Also, the UiPath forum is super helpful, however, when I've used the license key, you got actual support and that's been really good.
Which solution did I use previously and why did I switch?
I'm not aware of the company using a different RPA solution previous to UiPath. I personally only use UiPath.
How was the initial setup?
The initial setup was straightforward. The deployments have taken six months to a year.
What was our ROI?
We have seen a return on investment from the companies that are utilizing this solution.
What's my experience with pricing, setup cost, and licensing?
The individual robot and studio licenses are good. Usually what I see clients shake their heads at is the add-ons, the AI capability. Insights, for example, was very expensive. My client didn't want to get it due to the price.
Orchestra is usually acceptable as it's part of the package, however, the other stuff that's not studio or robot, usually, clients aren't, in my experience, interested in paying more.
Which other solutions did I evaluate?
We are primarily focused on UiPath due to the fact that that's what our clients are using, however, we're vendor agnostic. We support UiPath, Blue Prism, and Automation Anywhere as well. We have developers that are all trained in each of their usages. Whether we use them all at once or suggest them depends on the client. We have one client where they're using a bunch of them, however, most of our clients use UiPath I'm with the federal government, and UiPath is the only one that's really approved to do that.
What other advice do I have?
I'm not sure which version of the solution we're using.
We do not yet use the solution's AI functionality in our automation program.
I would advise new users to be patient due to the fact that it's going to take a while for it to get stood up. Also, when you are working with the federal government, there are lots of approvals. Other than that, new users should make sure they get use cases and have everything very well documented. Users need to understand all the decisions and the logic behind it. That's the main advice I'd give.
I'd rate the solution at a nine out of ten.
Which deployment model are you using for this solution?
On-premises
Disclosure: I am a real user, and this review is based on my own experience and opinions.