UiPath Platform Reviews

We use all three of the UiPath components which include: Studio, Roboyo, and Orchestrator. There are a bunch of use cases that we explored for the POC (Proof of Concept) to be sure the product fits with our expectations for automation. For example, one use case is reconciliation processes for insurance group retirement and LOB (Law on Occupational Benefits) plans. We built it, tested it, and now that is one of the primary things we use the product for.

This solution has improved the way our organization functions in several ways. It has helped to eliminate human errors. It already saves 20 hours per month for reconciliation and LOB. It helped clients schedule their transactions before the end of the month. All of that automates tasks and makes financial processing faster in the insurance industry. That works out great for us.

The most valuable features provide solutions for when I am using OCR (Optical Character Recognition) technology. It easily integrates with Google OCR, Microsoft OCR, and ABBYY OCR. We are using that integration feature to incorporate OCR mostly for reading scans. To interact with Google OCR, Microsoft OCR, or ABBYY OCR, you don't need to implement a separate component but you can just — in a blink of an eye — integrate those peripheral solutions into the UiPath Studio and use them in your automated processes.

If we can integrate other features that are not part of UiPath, it makes it far more useful in automation. In this case, UiPath is not building out an actual OCR component but they are just giving you an option to incorporate the other OCRs. That is very valuable.

In the next release of the solution, I would like to see the ability to grant permission to users at the job level. Some jobs or processes may need to belong to only one person. Right now, I believe we don't have that feature in UiPath and we can't assign a job to a user. We can give permissions on a tenant level, or we can give permissions on the environment level, but not at the job or process level. 

I would like to see the ability in UiPath to be able to assign each job or each process to a particular user and give that user some specific access and privilege. For example, maybe they should only be able to run or stop a particular job or a particular process, but they can not do anything else. That makes a lot of sense because all users may not need to see all the processes in Orchestrator in one instance or have access to administrative features. The same goes for a tenant or even in an environment. If UiPath can make that happen at the user-level or process-level for a robot, that helps a lot to enable customized bots.

On a scale from one to five where five is the best and one the worst, I would rate the stability of the UiPath platform at a four-out-of-five. The stability is a four instead of a five because the stability is not completely dependent on only UiPath. Underlying obligations play a part too. Sometimes when I am writing applications, I'm not up on how to handle every exception. That is not possible because a developer does not know all the scenarios an application can become involved with. In that scenario, the product can lag. But, otherwise, it is really a very good solution that is dependable and stable.

Approximately five people in our organization are involved in our automation program working in the CoE (Center of Excellence). There are four developers and there are 200 users including business users. So, you can say there are around 250 people currently involved in this. I don't think scalability is an issue.

We did have the opportunity to use UiPath Academy RPA training. On a scale from one to five where five is the most beneficial, I would rate the training as a four-out-of-five. It is good for basic understanding. We have usually had UiPath foundation training for all of our developers. Really, I think you can say that we have not put fully utilized it.

Other parts of technical support we have only used very minimally. For example, we have not used premium support or licensed support levels. Sometimes we called customer support on tickets to integrate with mainframe obligations the first time or some more involved issues. But that type of situation was unusual. We have barely used the customer support because most of the information is available in Academy, in the portals, or the user forums. A few times when we left a ticket, it was not even necessary for us to get back to technical support because we resolved the issue on our own.

We knew that we had an opportunity to invest in a new solution when we heard about RPA three years back. UiPath and WorkFusion came to us at the same time and saying, "We have a solution to improve your work processes."

We spent some time evaluating which tool was right for us by doing a study inside our organization to determine how much manual work could be automated. With some analysis, we found out that there is a huge opportunity for implementing this type of RPA solution in AXA (global insurance, not an acronym) as it is a large organization with a lot of repeated processes.

Because there was a lot of manual work, people in our organization had to work for more hours at times to properly complete a job. Sometimes they had to stay overnight and work additional hours on weekends to complete processing on time. To avoid that we requested that operations consider our proposal for automation.

We showed operations where we could automate repeatable and mundane tasks. The response was very positive and they realized we need to implement these solutions to help us to buy some time for employees to properly do their work and reduce labor intensity.

Our previous solution was either no solution at all except for manual labor or some experience we had with one tool called OpenSpan. OpenSpan did not have a proper management console and was difficult to use so it mostly remained unimplemented. When we introduced the potential solution for seriously pursuing RPA to reducing the workload, that is when we started looking at UiPath.

The set up for the product is straightforward. It is seamless. In fact, you just need to know the server where it will reside. There is material available in UiPath guides and the UiPath forum where you can just follow along step-by-step and install your Orchestrator. So it is very straightforward. 

From the time we purchased the UiPath license until we had our first robot in production is not exactly clear. We had developed a POC, which was ready to be put into production and then we bought a license. After we bought the license, we just put it into production and it had already been built.

We did the entire implementation ourselves with some contact with UiPath.

We are not yet really realizing a return on investment as our deployment continues to be in progress. How much money we have saved is what we are hoping to eventually count in the ROI. In terms of the calculations that we started last year, we asked that the KPI (Key Performance Indicator) points look at time-saving and not really the dollar saving. The time saving you can say approximately 20 hours per month, which we have achieved consistently up until now. We have achieved something but we are expecting that to grow a lot.

The solution has also helped to eliminate human errors. I cannot say exactly what that percentage is —  say even 20% or something like that. There are a couple of instances before we automated the reconciliation process last month — before we actually put the bot into production — where people were getting the wrong details by mistake. I would say we have reduced the human error because those situations are being handled by the bot and they will not be repeated now. 

We license the product on a yearly basis and it costs us around $80,000. We are a very large organization. We have unattended bots and there is a pricing structure surrounding that but I'm not involved in the licensing terms.

What made us choose UiPath to automate our processes was evaluating the capabilities of competition and deciding on the best solution for us. We compared UiPath, WorkFusion and other products — and even other types of tools — in terms of infrastructure, setup, how easily it could be scaled, etcetera. UiPath stood out a little as it had the capability to invoke virtual machines automatically without any human intervention. A lot of other tools didn't have that capability at that point. But the time we had to come down to a decision, UiPath had features that were not available in any of the other tools. With other research into the company and product, we saw that UiPath listened to the customers' needs and was often upgrading. Now all the competition has seen them as the leader and they have tried to incorporate features UiPath had already deployed.

That initial difference we saw between UiPath and the other tools we compared was the reason we took this direction. We believed UiPath and we decided that this was our theater for RPA. Now, if we see some enhancements that need to be made in the product, we just communicate to UiPath and we know they will look at the idea and maybe implement it. UiPath has the capability of adding features immediately. They are releasing around 10 or more versions in a year with important new features. 

We do use a virtual environment such as Citrix when it is appropriate and that works out pretty well. The obvious advantage is there is no dependency on a physical machine being available and they are available 24/7 from anywhere. I am actually comfortable developing anything and everything in Citrix via virtual machines.

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 five. Ease of use is one other thing that I like a lot about UiPath.

Going a step further, on a scale from one to ten, I would rate this product overall as a ten compared to other RPA solutions. In comparison to its nearest competitor — Blue Prism — UiPath is way ahead in terms of providing features, giving customer support, ease of use, ease of access to our personal history, and surely in the development of robots.

Everybody can understand easily what exactly the product is doing and can become familiar with it quickly. With other competitors, there is a huge infrastructure to set up. Some of the products make it so each bot needs a control room. Those products are not centralized, which makes them more confusing to use.

People have to manage on their own how they are going to build all their RPA management solutions. When you are using UiPath, you just get Orchestrator instead of multiple robots and control panels, then you just scale whenever you want.

I definitely recommend UiPath for simplicity and ease-of-use. If somebody was getting an RPA solution, the advice I would give them is to definitely go for it. Setting up RPAs eliminates human error in tasks and lightens workloads for menial jobs. This lets people focus on more innovative work and it can lead to further integration. What I would think is the natural path for UiPath is that it can integrate the AI in the future. Right now, people think that this is already cognitive or AI integrated, but there is a very long way to go in the future for it to become truly like artificial intelligence.

So, what I am saying is I would take it as a first step towards the AI. I would definitely recommend people use it so that in future when AI comes in, you can just grab an AI solution from UiPath and improve your implementations further.

We use only unattended robots with Studio and Orchestrator. Our primary use for the bots is in finance, so we only do finance use cases like AP (Accounts Payable) invoice retrieval.

The solution has improved the way our organization functions because no one has to sit for hours just spending time retrieving documents. The staff just picks up the documents they need in the morning, start their analysis right away.

What I find the most valuable about UiPath is flexibility in adding code. That ability is the most important feature for me and what I do.

In the next release of this solution, I would like to see better scheduling options. Because of the schedule limitations, you can only schedule one process at a time. There are situations where I might want to build five processes that need to work together. As I can only schedule one at a time, it isn't currently possible.

On a scale of one to five where one is unstable and five is very stable, I would rate the stability of the UiPath platform as a five. There are not many issues at all. On other platforms that we use, we always seem to encounter small things that cause problems. For example, with other solutions, we have had problems processing things like resolution and there is always an issue. But with UiPath, I can control almost everything from the robot and get it working.

There are ten people in our organization involved in our automation program and I think it can be scaled at any time.

While we don't use technical support directly, our team has used UiPath Academy RPA training to become more familiar with the product. On a scale from one to five where one is the least beneficial and five is the best, I would rate the Academy experience as a five. We've also used the forum. In all, between the implementation help, the Academy and the resources, I would rate the support as a nine-out-of-ten.

From the time we purchased the UiPath license until we had our first robot in production took only about one month, and that was without previous experience with the product. The initial set up of the product was straightforward, so it was all pretty efficient.

We did not need to use an integrator, reseller, or consultant. We did the entire implementation all in house. The only exception is that we did get some help from UiPath by working with them directly. 

We have experienced some return on investment and performance benefits, and it only took about one month to see it. There is one monthly process we use and in just one run — the first time we ran it — something that took two people two days was done in two hours. So, what took 16 hours to do analysis on before has been cut down to two hours. It is hard to say how much money that saved as we just changed the allocation of resources. The solution also helped to eliminate human errors which are even harder to account for.

We chose to try UiPath because we wanted to test the SQL capabilities that it has. I don't know that I would say we evaluated other options before choosing it as a solution. We currently work with both Blue Prism and UiPath at the same time. 

On a scale from one to five where one is very difficult and five is easy, I would rate the ease of use of the platform as a seven. I think that especially business users who don't have more of a technical background can get lost in all the different features that are available.

For this solution, we could totally deploy with attended robots, but our business just isn't ready for that yet. I think, with the adoption of Studio X that we might be in that position, but not right now.

On a scale from one to ten where one is the worst and ten is the best, I would rate this product as a seven overall. The scheduling feature just isn't there yet to allow more flexibility in programming and use, but the development is much faster and the flexibility better than much of the competition. The introduction of open-source changes the game for RPA solutions.

The advice I would give to a colleague at another company who is researching this solution or a similar one would be to clearly evaluate the use case. Don't just breeze through and assume you need automation. Take a good look at what you actually need to do, make sure the solution fits, and make sure the targeted processes are processes that should be automated.

We use Studio, Orchestrator, Studio and Orchestrator right now for RPA development for automating pretty much anything that rules-based processes can accomplish that are mundane and take time. 

UiPath has improved our organization simply through the ability to automate. Creating rules-based processes and making them automated can allow us to make better use of people's time. Now people are not working weekends and overtime. People are working their regular hours and doing their regular jobs.

I would say the most valuable feature in the solution is Orchestrator in conjunction with the customer service piece which is also very valuable. The ability to troubleshoot whether it is infrastructure support or a development support issue, having somebody to reach out and provide feedback is very beneficial.

One additional feature that I would like to see included in the next release of this solution — and actually looking forward to — is more development in the reporting. The Insight piece that was announced was very good to hear about. We are excited about that and looking forward to it just so we do not have to develop our own reporting infrastructure. Instead, we can leverage UiPath's Insight platform to do reporting, deliver reports, measure production errors, and further simplify how we gather and assess information. As far as room for improvement, I would say that is my biggest missing piece.

On a scale from one to five where one is not stable and five is very stable, I would rate the stability of UiPath platform as a three. Right now, we are having some connectivity issues, between Orchestrator and our environment. We have been working with our infrastructure support team and UiPath infrastructure report team to figure out what's going on. We are working through the issues and I'm very impressed with the support that we have been given, but we have got to figure out what the issues are and solve them.

We have approximately 15 people in our organization involved in the automation program and I don't think it would be difficult to scale that usage up.

I would say that overall I'm very pleased with the customer and technical support from UiPath. They have been very responsive. If there is any need or if there is an issue, they are good at getting to work on finding a solution. They also provide additional resources.

Our team used UiPath Academy's RPA training and on a scale from one to five, where one is the least beneficial and five is the best, I would say the training is probably a four-out-of-five. The feedback that I've gotten from others that attended is that it is very informative and they are good training courses. The tests are challenging enough that it makes participants involved so that they are prepared for the next course. So mostly the RPA training is a positive experience.

We did previously use a different solution, but it was a proprietary vendor solution — one of our servicing vendors created it. They were not able to deliver solutions of service packs within an expected timeline. We had to identify different short-term and long-term needs and decided to invest in a new solution. We had to identify a way to bridge some of those gaps in the interim until we could get those upgrades on that platform.

We ended up choosing UiPath automated processes on the recommendation of Accelerate who we were using as a consultant.

I would say the initial setup was straightforward and it wasn't too complicated. From the time we purchased the UiPath license until our first bot introduction I think it was only about two months. The installation itself was easy too. We were able to install it on-premises, get all the licenses running, get all our basic needs set up so we could do development, and put a bot into production. It was not a long onboarding process before we started seeing results. 

We did use the assistance of a consultant for the deployment. That would be Accelerate. Our experience with them was okay. On a scale from one through five I would say they scored a three-out-of-five. The delivery was not quite what we expected and did not meet our timeline. We set out with a goal and we fell short of that goal, and we're working with them to help us have a good forward-thinking plan. Delivery was not fully met, so we weren't too happy with that. But otherwise, they were right there.

We have seen a return on investment and some performance benefits. For example, we were able to pretty much completely automate one process that had two FTEs (Full-time Employees) who were spending 40 hours a week completing a process. Using UiPath we were able to almost completely automate that process and bring that workload down to 10%. So now the bot does 90% of the work and they just handle Excel. 

I think I could say we'll save approximately $400,000. Somewhere around there. But it isn't just financial savings. The solution helps to eliminate human errors, saves the organization time, and allows the reallocation of resources. I would say, based on the use cases that we have, we have saved roughly 60% of our effort on automated processes. So the users are now managing business exceptions that they may have and are handling things on a higher level.

I don't know if we had additional options on a shortlist because I wasn't involved in that part of the selection process. I was brought in a little bit later. But there are obviously a host of different vendors that have different solutions that Accelerate would have been aware of. We went through a vetting process and identified Accelerate as our number one choice as a consultant. From there, UiPath was the vendor they suggested, so that's how we got connected with UiPath.

We run our automation in a virtual environment. The implementation is good. We are having a few issues. I don't know if it's directly related to the virtual environment, but we are having some connectivity problems which affect stability. Otherwise, we're good.

On a scale from one to five where one is very difficult and five is easy, I would rate the ease of use as a four. It is a four and not a five for the simple fact that the product does not really achieve the level of simplicity I expect. I'm not a technical person. Most non-technical people can — if you're kind of familiar with the different workflow options and sequences — go in and develop some things you need to accomplish for automation with this tool. I would say that for more complicated pieces, you need a more technical background. The focus on making it easy for non-technical users is very important and they could do a better job of it in my opinion.

On a scale from one to ten, where one is the worst and ten is the best, I would rate this product at probably a seven out of ten. That leaves a lot of areas for improvement. On the other hand, I'm pretty pleased with the product and what UiPath has delivered.

The advice I would to a colleague at another company who is researching this solution is that with UiPath, customer support is a driver. Anybody can deliver a product, but it's what kind of system or service you provide to back it up that can matter as much or more. My experience has been great with UiPath and their ability to provide excellent support matters a great deal to my customer experience.

I'd say our finance applications, like accounts payable, have been our biggest use cases for this solution. 

I would say just the ability to be able to go outside of the IT department in our organization to get things done and have a sort of agile group to do automation. It is difficult to get IT involved in this type of thing in our organization. So being able to have our own agile group is beneficial for us.

Another thing that is valuable is that I think it's just saved a lot of our finance and customer service people a lot of manual time on processes. We are just able to involve a lot more value-added work.

I really liked the insights dashboard. I guess that there is an additional fee for that. Being able to see your return on investment in real-time is definitely beneficial. We spend a lot of time manually calculating how many hours we saved and that would make it a lot easier. The improvement I want is already there. I have to look into implementing it.

The area of the solution that has room for improvement is the stability of the bots. It just seems like we have spent a lot of time trying to fix bots that are down and whether that is our coding or the product. I think there must be a better way to diagnose the issues and avoid them.

On a scale from one to five, five being the most stable, I would rate the stability of the UiPath platform as a three. We've had a lot of issues with bot stability. I don't know if it is how we go about development or if it is the platform itself, but we spend too much time trying to fix all the bots that seem to be breaking.

I have not used technical support personally but our IT group has. Everything I have heard about the customer services group has been positive.

I have used the UiPath Academy RPA training. On a scale from one to five where one is the least beneficial and five is the most, I would rate the UiPath Academy as a four out of five. I'm not an IT person, so would have given it a five if I was. Parts of the training may have been more advanced than I expected.

We had a lot of archaic processes in our company — a lot of paper-based processes — so we knew we needed a better solution. That meant we had to work through a lot of processes and re-engineer what we were doing. We knew that we needed to move in the direction of automation because the processes were just not sustainable. We had processes but we did not actually have an automation solution until we started using UiPath.

The initial setup for the product was something I found to be a bit complicated. At least the first couple were pretty complicated. It was just that we were all new to the technology and we didn't really know necessarily what we were doing. It is getting better. From the time we purchased the UiPath license until we had your first robot in production, I think we took about three months.

We did you use an integrator. It was EY Technologies (Ernest & Young). They helped us out a lot and our experience with them was good.

We have certainly seen a return on investment. As far as how many months it took to see real value, I think we just crossed that threshold. So it was about twelve months in total. We have probably saved — just at our platform — around $100,000. The solution has also helped to eliminate human errors with a couple of the bots that we've deployed for sure. It has also saved our organization time. If I had to estimate, I'd say probably 8,000 hours a year so far.

We looked at Blue Prism, Automation Anywhere, and UiPath. We kind of landed on UiPath because it just seemed like it was a little easier to navigate than the other ones from a user experience.

Currently, we do not run any of our bots in a virtual environment and we use only untended bots so far. Either of those situations could change at any time. We have a couple of processes that we are looking at for attended processes, but we haven't implemented any yet.

We have about five people involved directly in the initiative. On a scale from one to five where one is very difficult and five is very easy, I would rate the ease of use the platform for automating as a four. It is a four because I would say it takes a little time to kind of get up and rolling for a developer, but it is not too bad.

On a scale from one to ten where one is the worst and ten is the best, I would rate this product a seven. We have just had some issues with keeping bots up and running. I feel like the issue is the learning curve.

The advice I would give to a colleague at another company who is researching this solution is to just do it. Make sure you know what processes you are going to want to automate. If you need to do standardized anything in the processes, do that on the front end in the planning stages versus kind of chasing your tail on the back end.

We primarily use the Studio, which is for developing the robots, and we deploy to Orchestrator.

We went through a large SAP transformation and we had a lot of issues getting the users to accept the new systems. They were issues related to the adoption of new systems. We decided to build these attended bots in order to guide the users through the system. Essentially, it is navigation or guidance assistance. By helping the users with proper data entry and design, flowing in a logical sequence that is easy for the user to follow, it minimizes end-user training.

Running our automations in a virtual environment is something that we had tried during our PoC. Currently, we have attended bots deployed in more than twenty thousand laptops, and eventually, we're planning to have more than eighty thousand deployments. Because of the large scale, initially, we were having a lot of challenges because of things that go on with the users' machines. We wanted to explore Citrix because there is just one virtual environment that every user logs on to, and then run the processes from there. Unfortunately, it did not work for us. We were seeing a lot of issues and felt that it was much more stable deploying individually to each laptop, instead of using Citrix.

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. There is always room for improvement.

On a scale of one to five, judging how beneficial it is, I would rate the training a five. The material is very sequential and logical. You don't get lost because you just follow the modules from beginner to intermediate to advanced. You cover everything from end-to-end, and it is very structured.

From the point that we purchased our UiPath license until we had our first robot was approximately one year. This included our pilot project, then the development and the UAT. When we went live in production there were three thousand users. 

This solution saves our users time. For example, on a standard SAP system where a user has no training, and you tell them to go and finish performing a transaction, it will take them between thirty and forty minutes. Now, with these attended bots, it is almost reduced to half. They can finish the same transaction with minimum training in probably fifteen minutes.

This solution has definitely reduced human errors. We have cleaned up the transaction screens and we help the user to focus on what is needed. We give them the right instructions to make sure that they enter the right information.

This solution is mainly used for navigation, position making, and reducing errors. It means that we have a quicker time to finish any transaction. We are a financial organization, so obviously, for us, it's important to record every sale that we make and every client that we have. It has significantly helped our client servers to reduce the time that they spend on these systems to finish a particular transaction.

The most valuable feature of this solution is the ease of using it. This includes the way the activities are set up, and how easy it is to solve problems by searching with Google if we're stuck.

We did not have to do a lot of customization because the standard UiPath activities fit our needs. This is a big point for us because we end up customizing most of the products that we use just to satisfy our own business needs. In the case of Studio, we didn't have to create a lot of custom activities.

I find it difficult to set up the Orchestrator and it should be more user-friendly for non-technical people. I understand how we create packages and push them, but I find the maintenance hard to follow. As it is now, I have to contact our IT department, which takes two to three days. In the meantime, we just have to wait.

With respect to the stability, on a scale from one to five, I would rate this solution a four. In terms of attended automation, we did have a lot of issues. We have requested lots of product enhancements, which then came through the pipeline. Initially, we did see a lot of issues and they had to make some changes to cater to our needs. Also, we have some more requests that have been put in the pipeline to make it a bit easier for us.

We have about twenty people working with RPA in our organization. At this time we have automations running on more than twenty thousand laptops.

The technical support for this solution is very good. They're very responsive.

We have had people working on-site at UiPath too, and they have been hands-on trying to see what we are solving. They have given us very good and very relevant suggestions, which has been helpful for us. 

We did not use another RPA prior to this solution.

We knew that we needed to invest in this solution based on user feedback. When we launched our new SAP system, everybody kept complaining about how difficult it was to use. There is a lot of training involved, but it's not like you can remember the training. We replaced fourteen hundred systems and put them into a single instance, so even if you are trained for weeks it is hard to remember all of it.

Basically, we needed something that was easier and helps us navigate through the systems so that we can complete our transactions. This solution does just that. It guides the user, waits for the user to give the right input based on what is expected, and then takes the user to the next relevant screen so that they can perform the transaction.

The initial setup has been complicated for us. After we went live in production, one of the issues we saw, but didn't realize initially, was that even though the tray was not open, by default though, if the bot is pushed onto a user's machine then it will be connected to the Orchestrator. Even though the user is not running the process, the bot always stayed connected. That was causing a large load on the Orchestrator and we didn't realize it until we started increasing from three thousand to twenty thousand users. That's when we were seeing a lot of timeouts. The production connection kept dropping and we were not able to figure out why. UiPath helped us to restructure the whole SQL database and the way we established the connections.

We have not yet seen ROI, although I think it's too early because we only went live two or three months ago. The big expansion in users was just this week, so it is too early for us to say.

We do know that we have been receiving very positive feedback so far. The users with machines where these bots are deployed have been saying it is very easy to use and there is minimal training required. It's out there, on the desktop or laptop, and they just have to launch by clicking the play button and the process starts. 

When we started this project, we explored Blue Prism and Automation Anywhere. I don't think that they were able to give us what we were looking for in terms of attended automation. When we looked at UiPath we found that it could satisfy all of our business requirements, which is why we chose this solution over the others.

I am really excited about the new Studio X. Ours is a consulting firm where not everybody is tech-savvy, but everyone wants to get their hands into automation. UiPath is saying that it is going to be very easy. Even for people without a technical background at all, they will be able to build their own process and bot. I'm looking forward to seeing how our users are going to make use of that within the UI.

This solution is easy to use and adopt in an existing environment. The best part for us is that even though some features were lacking, the turnaround time to have them implemented was amazing. We have always coordinated with our UiPath partner to tell them what it is that we need. When we have requested features, we have found that in the next release they are added. We found this unique among vendors.

My advice to anyone who is researching this type of solution is to definitely go for it. There are a lot of materials out there which will help them make the decision. Our own journey showed that it was easy for us to use, learn, adopt, and finally deploy.

I would rate this solution a nine out of ten.

We are in the finance industry, so we use Studio and Orchestrator to automate a lot of Excels and making reports.

The product has given us the opportunity to automate processes for our industry and specifically for our business. We have set up best practices. So we know what description needs to be at the top in the code. We just start there, read what's going on. Automation just makes everything simple and standardized while reducing human error.

I don't know all of the features so the scope of my view is a little limited as to what may be best or most valuable overall. For me, the ease of use is definitely valuable. Assembly of processes is just drag-and-drop and that simplifies a lot of things. Annotation is also very easy to do and it helps to make things clear to understand during development. I can go look at someone else's code and within an hour understand what it's doing without having to consult the other developer. On a scale from one to five where one is very difficult and five is great, I would rate the ease of use of the platform a four. 

Even though there are things I'd like to see, I also know that most or all of them are already being announced for new releases. As a developer, I would probably say the most important thing I would like to see is that the IDE (Integrated Development Environment) a little bit more fleshed out. It could use more debugging capabilities, for example. But again, we've been seeing that they're adding stuff like that. It will be getting in there and playing with it when it is released to make sure that it has got all the stuff I want and I might be able to be more specific after that as to what still needs to be added.

On a scale from one to five where five means the product is very stable, I would rate the stability of the UiPath platform a five. It works and nothing breaks that is directly related to the product itself.

The technical support, communities, and resources are all pretty good. We use the forums and I like the forums a lot. It's crazy how many people actually spend time on it and reply. You get your answer pretty quickly. The guys are really open to work with, so if we need help we just reach out and we get all the help we need.

We also use the UiPath Academy. On a scale from one to five where one is the least beneficial, I would rate the Academy as probably four out of five. It is easy to use. You go in there and you know what training you are looking for and what you need to take. Most of the training is in-depth enough so that when you complete it, you really have a good grip on what's going on. It eliminates barriers to getting the information you need when you need it.

The initial setup and implementation happened before my time at the company.

A lot of our return on investment has to do with time savings. It is definitely amazing to see processes that could take eight days before actually run in ten minutes. Just because of automation. It eliminates Hangouts and just makes the whole process and the people involved in the processes more efficient. As far as how much gets saved exactly, it depends on the complexity of the project and what it resolves. We have to invest in our BA (Business Analyst) work so all together it may take a couple of months for anyone project to pay off.

We use the solution on-premises right now, but I think we are going to move to the cloud because of the advantages. We also do not run our automation in a virtual environment, such as Citrix either. Our bots run on a physical server, but there may be reasons in the future to explore virtual environments for that purpose. 

The approximate number of people in our organization involved in the automation initiative, strictly considering developers would be my team of six. It is harder to say how many are using the bot solutions who are not directly involved in the development.

We currently tend to stick more with attended bots which just helps take a measure of human error out of the way. A lot of problems that we had in the past have come from users not updating their personal machines. That can obviously cause things to break. We try to make bots unattended if we can, but it isn't always practical to deploy in that model.

In any case, the solution has definitely saved our organization time and reduces human error either way.

On a scale from one to ten where one is the worst and ten is the best, I would rate the product as a nine or ten. Beyond just the product, there are tons of resources that we have available. Finding things other people have already made is an additional benefit. There's no point in reinventing the wheel if something's already been built.

My advice to people considering the solution is pretty simple. Buy it.

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.