UiPath Platform Reviews

We are using UiPath primarily for unattended automation. We are automating processes for business functions like finance and go-to-market.

We have Orchestrator which is hosted on the cloud and we also have UiPath deployed on-premises. We have three different instances of Orchestrator: one for development, one for staging, and one for production.

There are multiple business processes involving finance users. For example, for intercompany settlements, the end-to-end process was handled manually before. But now, the entire intercompany settlement, which involves many transactions, takes place automatically. Users don't need to intervene. They just need to verify whether all the calculations made by the robot are correct.

Another win for us was in the go-to-market function, where our customers talk to a customer advocate for purchasing different products and offerings. If they want to renew a quote or generate a new quote, they used to contact the CAs and talk to them on the phone, which would take a lot of time. It would take more than a day to process their requests and place their orders. Now, with the help of UiPath, we have developed a fixed form which we hand out for the customer to fill in. The average response time, as a result, has decreased a lot. We are now able to close a deal and generate revenue very quickly, compared to before. The process is around 90 percent faster for us.

We have just started using the AI functionality for unstructured invoices which we receive from different regions. Until now, when we wanted to extract information out of them, there was not any particular rule or way to get that information. A human had to be involved. That is where the AI functionality has come into picture. It makes our robots smarter and gives us the ability to train a robot to extract the relevant information out of different types of invoices.

Of course we have also been able to produce increased accuracy for a lot of our processes. With processes where we are receiving data in bulk, it's very natural for a person to miss out on certain things, but a bot does not miss out on any of the information and create errors in that way, so we have been able to reduce human errors to a great extent.

One of the most valuable features is its ability to allow us to integrate any external scripts—code or any other scripting file.

Also, they have recently come up with new features, like Document Understanding and AI fabric, which we have also started to use. These are helping us a lot with unstructured data extraction from invoices. The AI Fabric has out-of-the-box models, so we are using the invoices model from Document Understanding package. There is also the capability to train the model and that is a great way for us to get information out of the different invoices, as we deal with different invoices from different regions, rather than a single format. This is a great feature which is built-in.

It is also important that all the new services that UiPath is adding to the Portal are managed from the same place. Ease of onboarding for the customer should be a main priority. If the new services can be managed from a single place, it would be very easy for us to onboard them, to understand how to use them, and to enable them in our current workspace.

In addition, things like UiPath's navigation, drag-and-drop options, pre-packaged templates, and low-code features help developers, and people who have some understanding of tech, to build solutions quickly. With these features, we don't have to go down the same path all over again. This helps developers.

Each one of us has used the UiPath Academy courses and that has played a major role in getting people up to speed. I, myself, learned about UiPath by doing the Academy courses and then doing UiPath certification. If anyone wants to start with RPA, and UiPath in particular, it should definitely be their first point to get started with it. The Academy courses are really good.

There are challenges raised by the fact that UiPath is coming up with different versions almost every quarter, and at times almost every month. We plan to upgrade almost every quarter. Recently we were trying to add AI Fabric into our production Orchestrator, but we faced a lot of challenges. We had to involve the UiPath support team in the upgrading process. We were quick movers to upgrade to AI Fabric, as not many companies have done that. There were some bugs that we discovered during our upgrade journey, and that's how UiPath came to know about those bugs. It was little tricky, but UiPath's team is always present and helps along the journey. They have been coming up with a lot of new services and products and there are a lot of announcements on their Portal as well. But it's difficult for customers to keep up with their announcements.

Another area for improvement is version control functionality, particularly for Git. So far, for a lot of files, especially Excel, we are not able to compare the differences between two versions of a project. File conflict resolution could be improved.

I have been using UiPath for two years and three months.

The robots are pretty stable. It just depends on the way they are coded and how robust the developer has made the solution. If they have taken care of all the edge cases and of the possible areas of failure, the robots are predictable.

The solution is scalable. There is functionality to add as many robots as you want by purchasing additional licenses. There is a feature where we can use one machine and add different user profiles which is great. We are able to run the robots by using just one piece of hardware with different user profiles.

But if you are willing to scale up and you want to enable a lot of your team members to use the automation functionality, you can easily do that by purchasing more licenses and you will be able to schedule your processes in a better way.

We have about 15 people who use UiPath in our company. They are mostly developers, solution architects, or business analysts. We have 20-plus end-to-end automations and we use the tool on almost a daily basis.

Not all teams within our company know about UiPath. As of now, we have onboarded the finance and go-to-market departments. We plan to onboard the other teams, to run sessions with them and let them know that something like this exists and that it can help them in their day-to-day work. We are definitely planning to increase our number of automations.

The UiPath support team is there to help us to onboard stuff faster. It helps us achieve our business objectives quicker. We are able to solve stakeholders' problems very quickly. Because we have already planned to go live with certain bots, if our platform is ready earlier, we are able to provide the business value as soon as possible. That has really helped.

I would rate their technical support at nine out of 10. They are pretty helpful. Even if they're not able to come up with a solution right away, they ask for the specific files and all the logs and, usually, things are resolved within a couple of days.

I don't really know about the specifics of pricing, but identifying the type of automation you need will determine whether you can go with attended or unattended licenses. Think about whether you want your robots to run unattended and 24/7 or not, or whether you want a person to validate something in a given process, or if you want to constantly monitor the bot. Those are the types of things that will help determine the types of licenses you need.

With unattended, they now have something called Action Center where you can do a hybrid automation. That type of automation will be unattended, but there will be a human in the loop.

It really depends on what you are looking for and what kind of budget you have. If you already have the Microsoft Office suite, you get Microsoft Power Automate which is also an automation platform. You need to decide how extensively you want to go into the automation journey and whether you are really planning to expand it. If you are planning on going big with Automation, UiPath is the way to go. But if you just want to experiment and try out automation, and you already have Microsoft Office suite, you should try the Power Automate platform.

We use it for financial use cases: purchase-to-pay processes, reconciliation processes, vendor payment, and merchant payments. This is just in finance. Then, we have retail order processing, order creation, PO generation, delivery note generation, and all those things in retail. We even have banking processes as well, such as a payments portal. We use it in most of the fields.

We don't use cloud licenses. Most of our licenses are on-prem.

We use both attended and unattended automation in UiPath.

We are partnered with UiPath. Sometimes, UiPath refers customers to us, bringing us business. We also give them business.

We have a third-party order processing portal, which keeps on changing its UI very often and has elements that keep on shuffling between the metadata. What we had in this case was the script running was shuffling the elements, and we are disabled that thing. Then, we used the selector technology instead. Selector technology is very important for all our UI-based processes. We rely on it. 

We used the AI Fabric functionality in one of our projects. We had to categorize users' reviews based on the sentiment scores. Everything was already available, including the model. So, we just have to click on all those things from UiPath now.

The new features that they are adding in, these are very different from other RPA tools in the market:

• AI Fabric
• Integration with different data models
• You can do all the data processing, data mining, etc., in the back-end UiPath. 
• You don't need a separate tool for data mining or other cognitive abilities. You can do all the cognitive abilities in UiPath. 
• UiPath Apps, which they're bringing in just now, is a really good thing. It has a good user interface.

Most RPA tools do not directly have these features. Also, we don't have to rely on other tools in order to develop these things. We can directly develop and integrate them with UiPath on one platform. So, we don't have to struggle within multiple platforms.

UiPath Apps is available only on Community. So, this was a best case scenario for us. It was pretty good. The only thing is that it has to be more advanced. Now, it is very basic. I would like more integration with the UI elements. It should be more user-friendly, especially if we go for any other application development. For example, in other UI development platforms, you can easily drag and drop to develop in a UI. However, it is a very initial phase for UiPath Apps, and maybe in the future, they might improve this.

We have used the Picture in Picture functionality for a few attended automations, where the user is monitoring or we are installing a new interface. Sometimes, in my experience, Picture In Picture is a bit buggy. It takes over your control, then the controls get mixed. That is one of few issues that I have found. Other than that, Picture In Picture works pretty well.

I had an instance when UiPath crashed on my computer. Then, the code that I was working on also crashed. This was a very crucial process for us, but we apparently didn't have a backup. UiPath also didn't have any way to recover that code. This was something which I found very strange, because ideally the source company should have a mainframe where they can recover a code. Or, if I give them a corrupted damage file, then they could easily recover that code. 

The stability is pretty good when we follow the best practices, i.e., whatever is in the REFramework. 

Scalability is something that we are still figuring out. RPA is something which we cannot do for everything, because there is a small gap between profit and the cost.

The support has been pretty good so far. The response time could improve, then it would be much better. However, once we get a ticket assigned to a technical person, then it is pretty straightforward. They are very fast, know their job, and know how to resolve the issue.

The on-prem setup is straightforward. There is very detailed documentation. We always get support from UiPath, so it is not difficult. I have never faced any issues, but I have only deployed on a small scale.

The timeline of the project depends on the project's complexity. Usually, the due diligence and everything else takes about two or three weeks. Then, the design takes another one or two weeks before we start with the development, depending on the inputs.

I get involved with small client setups.

There is a client-facing team of around 25 people who do due diligence and design work. There is also our back-end/technical delivery team, which includes mostly developers, a product project manager, project owner, and developer lead, who are there mostly for their technical abilities, not for their design abilities. 

The price of Orchestrator is pretty high in general as well as compared to other solutions, because Automation Anywhere does not charge for its Control Room.

We can develop our own packages and integrate them, which is pretty good. Other tools don't have that.

There are a lot of cons with Automation Anywhere, which we are using. They deployed a new version, 2019, which is very buggy, and they are still working on that. I don't know how or why they released it to the public. They did so much testing, but it is still buggy.

Power Automate (previously Softomotive) needs to improve on its UI. The ease of use is not there with this solution.

Go for it. It is a pretty good tool, which is straightforward and easy to use. They have training in place. Even if you are new to it, you can go ahead and learn to do it. 

They are bringing in new things. You can automate, integrate, and test things. It is even used for mobile testing. It is pretty good in that case. For most of people's use cases, UiPath will suffice for their use cases.

I would rate the solution as an eight (out of 10). 

One of the use cases that I have recently completed is related to SAP and the interaction with Excel and our internal application. We are going with the JD Edwards EnterpriseOne ERP application and we used UiPath to help in this area, and were able to do so within a few days.

Some of our people are going for process automation and some are doing desktop automation.

It helps our developers learn and implement things faster.

Also, the UI Targets feature has helped us with some difficult situations. We were using other solutions for these situations but our company has moved away from them to using UiPath, and it's working very well. 

UiPath provides lots of integration to our ERP application and lots of new updates are coming out day by day. It helps us to automate our tasks.

We are using the solution's selector technology for UI automation. That is the most important feature for us. For example, one of the applications in our company is being updated day by day, by the development team. We use selector to make it dynamic.

We also use the latest version of the desktop Assistant tool for some queueing activity in UiPath Orchestrator. The tasks in the queue are continually updated and then they are run by robots. Using Assistant, we get a lot of information about our queues, like if something fails, for example. Also if a robot fails we get robot status-type information from the Assistant. The Assistant plays a good role because, if a process is going wrong, we have control. Using the Assistant we can stop that process. It is a most important feature from UiPath.

An area which the UiPath team is rapidly working on is machine learning and artificial intelligence. At the moment, it is a little difficult to understand. If they could add some more training on it in their Academy, it would help customers to learn about these features.

I have been using UiPath for the last eight months.

We only use the stable versions, regardless of whatever they are releasing, to avoid bugs and errors. In the stable versions, we have never found any issues or any bugs. If there is any issue, we have a team that will contact the UiPath team and we will get quick solutions. But so far, we have never had any problem or issues with a stable version of UiPath.

We use the Assistant to handle all the robots' actions. We are scaling and tracking it. That is very important for us. The scalability features of UiPath are awesome.

In the eight months I have been working with UiPath I have implemented seven or eight projects. Day by day we are increasing our usage of it, and UiPath is also increasing the product's features and adding technologies. That enables us to work on more projects, as it is easy to integrate.

We have been able to implement a lot of little projects. That is one of the reasons that it is cost-effective. In addition to the affordable price, it just takes a few days to develop solutions for these projects.

In India, a developer costs about 16,000 rupees per day. Using UiPath, all our projects have been done in 30 days. If we tried to do these little projects in another technology, they would be more costly because they would be more time-consuming.

Our company is based on automation. UiPath is the correct solution for this. It is cost-effective and has an affordable price.

UiPath is not the only technology we are using, but we are migrating to UiPath because it is cost-effective. The previous solution was Blue Prism, but for the little projects, it was not the right solution.

In addition, the Control Room is really required for other technologies, like Blue Prism, but there is no need for it with UiPath, because we manage and deploy it with our team only. We don't need to worry about the Control Room.

For the beginner the UiPath Academy has a lot of training available. It's important to go through the training. After the training you can easily work on any project in UiPath. So first of all, follow the training. For intermediate-level users, UiPath is the correct solution. These users just need to keep up to date, day by day, because the UiPath team is rapidly updating the features.

The Picture in Picture functionality for attended automations is a new feature. Up until now we have not used PiP, but we have some use cases for an internal project we are doing and are looking into it for the future.

We are using UiPath Automation Cloud, but we have not yet migrated our on-premises UiPath instance to it. We are thinking about the on-premise because it fully depends on our own enterprise. If we go to the cloud, we will be able to collaborate better with our team and what others, because it is "public."

We are using attended automation. I help drive a lot of products in UiPath. Now, we are using their data process mining and document understanding features. We are creating forms, then putting data on the forms, so our attended bots will work.

We use UiPath to resolve customer complaints by creating buttons that link to back-end integrations.

Employees can see information very quickly, reducing a lot of complications.

Uipth gives us as good speed and accuracy to improve all the bot la performance.

I like the document understanding feature. It gives us more accuracy. 

The AI and machine learning features are very useful for us.

UI Targets enabled us to quickly build automations within multiple applications, even without the right connectors. For example, we can drag and drop Outlook activities.

We use UiPath selector technology is a wonderful feature, especially compared to other RPA tools.

From mobile applications, we use Orchestrator where we can monitor processes and share them. 

Need more AI and Machine learning build technology and integration of 3rd party applications. Need some improvements in orchestrator

We have been using it for around two years.

5,000 people are using UiPath.

Any queries that we have, we can go onto their forums. If there are issues, we can contact their support and they will resolve them.

We have used Automation Anywhere, which is complex to understand. 

The initial deployment was not complex.

I will rate the level of expertise is 9(out of ten)

The attended automation has saved us time.

The pricing is average; it is not too high nor too low.

Its speed is better than other RPA solutions. They release more updates, details, and features compared to their competitors. 

We can learn from UiPath Academy.

I would rate the solution as a nine (out of 10).

We're mainly focused on finance for the time being so we've used UiPath for invoice processing and e-billing reconciliation. It makes sure that all of our converting information matches within our client databases. We've done a couple of solutions that track budget spend for certain clients, making sure that if the budget overruns or comes close to overrunning, then someone gets notified. If we get a new client or if a new legal case is opened, automation can make sure that all that information is then uploaded into our database. 

We've done a couple of smaller automations for the legal teams. These have been fairly basic ones though. There were a couple that download files from an email for them, and then rename them with the correct naming conventions, and saves them into correct drives. 

Another use case is to remove outdated users or information from our databases in line with the GDPR system.

In a general sense, UiPath has helped with data lineage, understanding where a process starts, who it rests with, and where it ends. It has made the process that we have automated a little bit more clear of which parts of the process are necessary, which are the parts that hold up the whole process, and which are the ones that are needlessly complicated.

For starters, it just helps give a bit more of an understanding of our processes once they're automated. Secondly, it's changed the way that we approach problems. We're tied into contracts that we might necessarily not want to be, but because we rely on the solution, we don't have a choice. Whereas, because UiPath is so versatile, we can use that to fill in gaps to take over processes, which otherwise in the past, we thought that only one specific tool could do for us. Now, we feel like we'd be less reliant on these specific tools to do a specific job. 

Third, a lot of teams are starting to understand that things can be automated. Whether it's in finance, HR, or even the legal teams, we started speaking to all the different teams and now they're bringing work to us and they're getting an understanding of things that do need to be done by a person and which don't. People aren't just doing work for the sake of it now. If they think there isn't a point to something and it can be automated, they bring it to us and we automate it. So, it's changed the way that we look at processes and don't just hardheadedly get someone to do it for no reason.

It checks our invoice stage for one of the processes that we do for e-billing. Previously, there wasn't anyone to check the financial data that we have in our systems against our clients and our recipients, and making sure that it all matches up. That process wasn't done at all so a month or two months later, a client would come back to us and say, "Hang on, you billed a strong amount or you've put our billing address wrong" which is obviously a little embarrassing. These things went completely unobserved for months. The client had to chase us, complain, and tell us we needed to fix it. Whereas now, it's more of a proactive approach rather than waiting for clients to come to us and tell us that we've done something wrong. We actually have the automation that can check and then validate those mistakes before they're even a problem and before they're spotted by anyone.

We're still in the early stages but we are starting to reach the point where UiPath is speeding up the cost of our digital transformation.

The digital transformation has made a couple of the lawyers' jobs easier by getting rid of the admin staff. It's freed up time and it makes things easier for everyone.

UiPath has definitely reduced our processing times as well. It really depends on the process but it has sped up. 

It has also decreased our error rates. At the moment we're looking to purchase an orchestration platform. At that point, we'll be able to collect more information about exact numbers and we'll actually have the analytics. 

The ability to use APIs within UiPath is really helpful. The web scraping is really great. It's so easy to use, it's very intuitive, and it's usually pretty consistent. When web pages change you need to update it, but it makes it quick. If you need to do another quick process, it's really easy to get it quickly and set something up. I can just scrape data from a website and save it somewhere.

The ease of building automation depends. UiPath makes things that are fairly simple but looks a little bit tricky in another language really easy. But if you're trying to do something really complicated, then sometimes it can be a little bit more tricky. It depends, sometimes it's really simple for fairly basic automations, I think it's fantastic. But when you want to try and get into the nitty-gritty and try and write your own code and then stick in there, it can sometimes be a bit difficult to use.

The documentation can be a little bit lacking. I think they improved it a little bit last month. Last time I checked, it seemed like they spent a bit of time trying to improve it. Sometimes some of the processes are nicely documented. UiPath offers training, which they provide on their website. They teach you how to use it, but for some processes, it just seems like the documentation isn't really there. It makes it a little bit difficult when you're using a specific process from the first time. 

If you're trying to invoke a method in UiPath, if you're trying to write a C# in there directly,  or if you need to do something which can't really be done in UiPath, but it can be done in C# or Python or something else, sometimes it's not that intuitive. It can be a little bit more complicated than it needs to be. I think that integration with other languages could be a little bit better.

We have been using UiPath permanently for around eight months, but we've been using it in-house for about a year before that.

UiPath itself is very stable because it interacts with so many different applications. I noticed in the past, at times, when using it with browsers, for example, using it with Google Chrome or Firefox, occasionally Chrome or Firefox will update and UiPath can take sometimes a week or two to update with it. For that week, you're able to use any solution that involves Google Chrome or Firefox, because it's waiting for that update. I've seen that happen with a couple of different applications, not as much recently. UiPath itself is very stable because it can interact with anything. If anything is updated and UiPath doesn't have time to update drivers to match that, sometimes you can get left a little bit stuck.

It's not really easy when you're using orchestrator to scale up and create a server, add a new bot, get a new license, and get it running. 

At the moment, it's just me using UiPath. I'm a developer and the architect for the solution as well. But we're planning to expand the team next year. 

We have a couple of processes that are running constantly, so I think we're using it as much as we can, and as much as our licenses allow. We're at a point now where we need an orchestrator to keep track and run everything at the same time. We're in the process now of purchasing that. I'll see where we're moving to, to expand quite far beyond that after we've got it. We're just at the point of ramping up.

I've sent a couple of requests to support when we needed licenses and when we changed to a different computer or a different user, and they got back to us really quickly and solved it within a day or so. I've been pretty happy with UiPath so far. I think every time I've sent a request to them, it's been resolved pretty quickly, and even if they couldn't resolve it super quick, the response times are usually within 24 hours or so, which is really good. I can't remember a time where we've been stuck in the dark with them.

I've used Automation Anywhere, but I haven't really used it within my work.

The initial setup was pretty straightforward. I implemented UiPath for a couple of years before I came to my current company. It was quite easy, but even the first time it's always been quite easy and quite simple to implement.

The initial setup only took a couple of days to get it all installed properly and cleared with IT. In terms of getting the first process up and running, it took about a week or two because we already had a couple of processes that were available. That's just a case of tweaking them, making sure they're all okay, and then just getting them set up and getting more packaged up.

Our initial strategy was mainly to focus on finance and to try and reduce the outsourced headcount with a couple of the finance teams. We outsource a lot of our work to a couple of other companies and we want to reduce the cost of that, so I automate it in-house. Our other strategy was to try and free up as much time for our lawyers as possible to make sure they weren't bogged down with work. It gives them more time to focus on the clients and work up better relationships with them.

We're still looking at the process that we've automated and seeing how much time and money we're saving with this crisis, but we don't have that information at the moment.

The pricing is pretty fair. Sometimes the pricing can be a little bit strange. There are different prices if it's for a specific user, a specific PC or if it's an attended bot or unattended bot. The price can be quite different, but I think when you talk to UiPath or when you look at the pricing sheets, there's not always a justification of why a certain license is more expensive than another. 

Licenses are more expensive than another but I wonder why there's such a big difference, why attended is four times more expensive, and that sort of thing. In terms of the orchestrator, I think it was a bit too much. It used to cost about 20,000 pounds a year. Now, they are ramping up costs. If you get an orchestrator but with just a few blocks, it's cheaper and then you can add up more parts to the orchestrator. So the cost goes up, which I think is better.

Definitely to try and get as many teams involved as possible to open up the conversation about RPA within the business. It works best when you've got lots of teams who have an understanding of RPA and how it works. They can come to you with their potential projects and you can filter through them and see which ones are going to be the most helpful.

It's hard if no one else in the business really knows RPA or how it works, or if there's a bit of a wall there. It's important to introduce RPA to as many different teams as possible and to encourage people to get involved, think about the processes that they do in it, and try to identify what can be helpful.

It's important to keep RPA close to the applications and the IT teams because if you're using RPA or UiPath you're going to need to be able to be speaking to your team who need permissions or admin privileges, or you need apps to be updated. It's important if you're going to put it in, have it as close to apps and development as possible.

It's a case of understanding that it's not a case of trying to get everything automated that you possibly can. The goal shouldn't just be to automate everything. If you've got a process and you can do 99% of it automated but you can't automate the last 1%, you can but it's going to be really fairly inefficient. Understand that it's fine for a process to have some bits that are automated, some of which are done by a person. The hybrid workforce, rather than going into the strategy of just automating everything is ideal. I've learned that trying to find that balance and getting that communication between the two is good.

I would rate UiPath a nine out of ten. 

We are in healthcare, and the supply chain can be a fragmented process, and now with the Pandemic quite fragile. In recent years, companies have been implementing leaner supply chains to reduce their costs. We found that our best approach to dealing with supply distributions was to create a partnership with a distributor who could provide us with a very large percentage of our day-to day-supplies. We have Central inventories in each of our hospitals; however, we use a stockless operation Monday-Friday. This means we fill supplies for our nursing units on the weekends, but during the week, the distributor is picking, packing, and shipping those supplies in a low unit of measure. Orders are placed electronically by noon daily, and start arriving by late evening. A 'back order' list is sent to us each workday in the late afternoon - too late to do anything with it. 

We did work with our distributor to develop a more customized spreadsheet that detailed each item, by hospital and delivery location. Each following day we would break the file down so that we could e-mail it to each area, to get feedback from them on critical needs.  This took our resources time to prepare and send the next morning. Staff getting the information didn't have much time to review and respond. In addition, we would update each PO line item with the revised 'due date', for back-ordered lines - this was a manual process.  This same resource would then use a tool to send each requestor a 'delayed delivery' e-mail notice.  The overall PO update and communication process took an additional 1-2 hours a day in staff resource time.

With the robot doing this work for us, the vendor sends a file to an address by a certain time. They send it in at about 3:30 PM every day. The robot now takes that file and works that file, which it has ready for us usually by 4:30 PM. Now, it still may be too late for us to work, but the first thing in the morning, we have the file, and the Bot has already sent out notifications to all the users of any backorders. First thing, when they walk in the morning, they know what their backorders are. They didn't know that until halfway through the day before. Now, they get the information first thing in the morning so they can react. Now, we are getting the information first thing and have the time to work with the manufacturers and distributors to come up with other products so that we might backfill or get a branch transfer.

Our end goal was to make sure that we had a daily tool that was 100 percent accurate and could be deployed across a broad spectrum of healthcare workers. Then, they could get information faster and more accurately with as much information to eliminate a lot of extra calls and communication. That is what we embarked on. We dissected our current process and looked at all its different triggers to see how we could turn this into an automated tool. We broke down our process and identified everything that we were doing, then UiPath helped us identify what we needed to modify. We worked that into a tool where a Bot could come along and process it every day, then deliver every afternoon. That was our end result, and it's been extremely successful. We started using the tool last December.

We combined some automation that we already had in this process into this tool to make it a whole automated process, rather than partially bringing it under. We have a vendor who delivers us a report daily of all their backorders because we use the main distributor, so they deliver us a backorder report. Therefore, we made sure that they aligned it in a way that the robot could read it. Then, we wanted to break that down in a way so each of our hospitals could see their section. So, we added some data to this tool which allowed the robot to see that record, and say, "This belongs here, and this belongs here."

Our staff have been reassigned to more value-added tasks. We haven't eliminated anyone because it's been very challenging for us to keep up with the COVID-19 issues. Now, we have resources who have the time to contact vendors, and find out, "When are we getting this? Can we get ourselves pushed to the top of the list?" They can actually be a voice on the other line, a human voice, who communicates. When you're sitting there doing all this other work, you don't have the opportunity to spend it on being a voice for the health system. So, we put people back on working back orders with other vendors and doing other things that needed to be done. We have not eliminated staff because we are using them in more productive ways, getting more work done.

Our staff can now do the things that we need them to do. It has given us the agility to pivot and move to other things, because we are not trapped in trying to work these files every day.

Our customers are getting information about 12 hours earlier, which makes it much faster to resolve back order concerns for their areas. If they have procedures, or certain kinds of cases coming up, and see that they have a back order, then they have much more time to react and try to address their shortage.

It provides information to people by automating that information in a much faster time.

Since we are getting information out to folks faster, they can spend the resource time needed to determine the best approach for what to replace it with, or if we need to work with a sales rep. It ensures that our staff have the best tools to do their job faster.

We have not seen it do OCR, and that would be helpful. Right now, the tool will not read a PDF file, and we can't use PDF files. We want it to able to take an image, then take that image and put the particular field out in the right spot in a table. We have not seen it where you can scan a document in, then it reads fields and places those in a table.

We began our journey last Fall - 2019 

It is very stable. Once we got all the kinks worked out, there hasn't been any maintenance. 

We had a little problem with getting it to run at night. We moved it off of one platform and put it on another one, which fixed that problem. These are things that we encountered early on that went away as we figured out how to resolve them. Most of those changes that we made were internal to our process and caused by some slow responses within our Citrix environment. Once we resolve those, we have not had issues with the tool itself.

I have one person in IT doing deployment and maintenance. We also have a second person under contract if we need support.

The solution is scalable. 

The robot processes the file in an unattended mode, then sends out an email with a link to its output file. From there, all the users, and there are probably about 20, get this file and react to it. They review it from their perspective because there are many hospitals involved. Each one of them has their own tab because the robot creates a tab for each. This makes it easy for them to go right to what they need. There are a lot of folks reviewing the results of what the robot has produced.

I have not used their technical support.

We were passively looking at some tools to automate some of our procurement processes. We are highly automated in our department, but we are always looking at ways to take the things that are not already automated, get into those, and see what parts of those we can streamline.

We met with UiPath last Fall. At that time, we went through a company by the name of Speridian, UiPath is a partner with them. We came to the conclusion that we had a manual process where the right components could be automated. Therefore, we made that our focus and started answering all the questions around the process to ensure that we had everything necessary for a robot to be able to answer the questions and keep moving the process forward.

The initial setup was very straightforward. We outlined what we do and what our end result needed to be. They asked us some questions, then sat down with our resources and walked them through it (or did it through Webex). I don't think there was ever any confusion on what was being discussed.

We didn't spend that much time on the process. Overall, as far as our work, the deployment was 10 to 12 hours, if you look at the meetings and such. Most of the time was spent on their side, because they had to go back and do all the development. So, I thought it was very painless.

We worked with the UiPath team and Speridian to ensure that the bot would know how to handle each aspect of the data and where apply it. As we tested it, we saw that we needed to go back and reconfigure this or this isn't how this is handled. We were kind of working through the things we forgot until we got to the point where, "Yes, this is it. We can do this every day." 

We had the robot tied into an automated tool that we were already using to send notices out. They were able to pull up that tool and have these automated components to all this stuff that we had a manual person sitting there doing every day. She was sitting there taking this data and sending it out, and now the robot was like, "I got the data. I'll send it out." So, we just ran it through the whole process. However, it does take having resources who can ask the right questions. What I found with this team was they were good in actually asking the right questions and helping us with what the robot would need in order to make decisions. Because that's what the robot is doing, it is automatically looking at a value, and saying, "I do this. I have that." 

We learned with it: How we need to respond and how we need to give the robot the feedback. It was quite an interesting process for us. Although you're always thinking you can automate so many things, there are components that you do need a person's brain to figure out. We found those pieces in this tool. We found some areas where, "Here's the exception." So, it even writes off the exceptions for us. While I do still need to have a person looking at exceptions, rather than the 100 lines that they used to have to look at, now they look at two, three, or four lines, then make decisions on those.

They gave us the opportunity to create a tool which would automate as much as possible, then provide us the data that we needed to act on. It has basically filtered out all the things that we didn't need to deal with. It has taken care of those, leaving us with everything that a human being needs to respond to.

I felt very comfortable with the UiPath person who was doing the programming, though I never really met him. I was very impressed. We talked on the phone a time or two, but they just seemed like they got it. They understood. It didn't take a long time for them to figure out what it was we wanted to do. They were able to tell us, "This is what we're going to need. Can you get it?" So, they were easy to work with. They also acted quickly. I thought the whole process of developing everything that we did went very quickly. 

They were able to link into our tools. They made suggestions to us, "Well, these are exceptions. We can put these here. We can do this. We can give you all this." They were providing us with ideas on how we could even expand on this. I found that to be very helpful. I really thought that they did it very quickly. They did not take long to understand what we were trying to do before getting in and really learning the impact. When we needed a change, the changes have come very quickly. 

It has gone so well that we will be doing a few more enhancements. Now that we've worked with the tool for a while, and know that the ability of UiPath and what they can do, we can enhance it even further.

We are doing things at a much earlier time in the day. The robot compressed the time it takes. We are getting our users' information earlier in the day. Now, it may take five to 10 minutes, where processes used to take half an hour or 45 minutes to go through everything. 

With COVID-19, so many supplies have been impacted. Our line items expanded and grew, so it would have been very difficult management manually. Thankfully, we had this process in place last December. It really came to our aid in March, April, and throughout this year, because it has streamlined the process. It has given everybody more time to pivot and make decisions.

The UiPath tool takes redundant processes away, and says, "Let us handle those, then you do all those creative things." It has given us back a lot of staff resources that were being used up by mundane, redundant processes. That's how it worked in our world. In other areas, anytime you fill out a form or answer a question, a robot can post that to a table. There are all kinds of things it can do. However, for us, it took these manual processes that we were doing day in, day out without a lot of thought and gave us that time back to be more thoughtful of what it is we need to be doing to be more thoughtful of what it is we need to be doing, in order to ensure that our health system has the products that it needs to support the community. In my mind, that is what it is about: Giving back your resources to use them in the way they were intended and using a robotic tool to do those things that you can eliminate, like mundane, redundant processes.

Start with processes that happen over and over every day. Something that you have to do, like data entry, whatever it is. Peel back the onion, then look and see how you can automate some of that through a tool. You have to look at what your processes are and understand how those are getting done today. Maybe even share that information with somebody outside your area, because people from the outside might say, "Well, why don't you do it this way?" Because you've lived it so long, you don't even know why you wouldn't nor do you know the questions to ask. Therefore, look at your base processes that you're doing day in, day out and see how you might be able to automate any aspect of those that doesn't require human thinking. I'm sure you will uncover many things.

It is a learning process for everyone, but I thought it was a very fast track learning. Sometimes, you think, "Well, this is going to take six months," and it didn't. In a very short time, we were seeing samples of what we were going to get. Therefore, I was very impressed with the amount of resource time that it took. It was beyond what I expected.

Some tools we are working on will reduce the purchase order build, but we haven't implemented that yet. That's a whole other project that we're working on with them, and that piece goes into procurement.

It is very doable. I was probably fairly skeptical, but once we started thinking about it, it became very clear that this would be just a slam dunk. You have to open up your mind to it, but it was something that when they said, "Well, we want to use some robotics." The fear is you're going to take my staff away. There are some cases of that, but it is not so bad. I don't have to worry about the robot taking days off, getting sick, having a mother in the hospital and needing to be with them. I don't have to pay it scale. I just don't have to do any of those things. Now, the robot can't automatically think outside the box, but sometimes it can depending on the questions I ask it. 

Everybody just needs to take a breath step back, and say, "Yeah, maybe it can replace this." However, that doesn't mean we won't use this resource in another way.

I would rate this solution a 10 out of 10. I'm not the type of person who just gives a rating of 10 all the time, but this solution has just been a phenomenal tool for us.

Originally, we were using UiPath to draft documents and send emails on mass to where we had large communication exercises. We used a robot instead of a small army of paralegals to generate the documentation and draft up the emails where we had to communicate with 2,000 to 3,000 people. It was a little bit more involved than just doing a standard mail merge, but we were able to use UiPath to create a number of documents and email it to an individual customer, all through a central email address.

Fast forward to where we are now, we have a few of these things focusing in on what we call post-completion activity, like the things you do after you sign a contract. So, it may be you're uploading it to the client's contract management system, applying stamps, or registering the contracts in an official register. The robot is able to do that for us post-completion. Those are our primary use cases at the moment. We're looking at more data integrity type stuff, like comparing our internal data sources against public record.

The ability to displace some activity that was traditionally on our paralegal team has improved my organization. We're an outsourced managed legal services provider. We're primarily a people-based business and UiPath displaces some activity off those paralegals and brings in automation. For me, it becomes an additional type of resource. The long and short of it is that we are able to move work that was traditionally done by people and would be charged at a rate, off to automation where we can bring the costs down. It enables us to reduce our running costs of our clients. A single bot running post-completion has saved as two FTEs.

UiPath has helped to speed up case resolutions in a couple of ways. It's focused on doing particular jobs, so it achieves the job faster. People don't need to complete an entire task end to end. They can stop at a certain point and the robot takes over. That allows a person to get through more work. Also, the fact that the robots are able to do this stuff overnight 24/7, means that we have more capacity to do stuff.

It gives us the ability to respond to clients. It gives us an option in how we're going to automate work for clients. It's hard to say if it has reduced the cost of our digital transformation because we deal with all the people. I suspect it hasn't done it internally, but suspect that has made some things cheaper for our clients. It enables us to deliver digital services cheaper for our clients. 

UiPath had an effect on our legal staff. It takes work that people don't want to do at the moment, having to download the document, take some details off the top and the bottom of the document, apply a stamp, and then re-upload, it's not what our paralegals and new trainees want to be doing on a day-to-day basis. So we are able to shift activity nobody enjoys onto a robot and let them focus on the stuff they've been trained to do.

In terms of how much it has reduced the processing times, the task itself still takes as long but we've got a robot doing it instead of a human. I don't think that the impact isn't that dramatic on-site processing times. At the moment, humans are only involved in 80% of the transaction and 20% has been held by robots.

These automations have decreased errors but it's hard to quantify by how much. They've inserted 20,000 transactions a year. I have no doubt that the error rates improved. It's just a hard thing to quantify.

The most valuable aspect of UiPath is the fact that it's a low-code platform. Being able to use a low-code platform really lowers the barrier entry of introducing automation. Normally, you fill in a request to go to IT to get a development resource allocated, and then you spend six months trying to do a project. Because UiPath is a bit of a platform, you can quickly, within weeks, start to knock off automation and get it checked and then successfully deployed. The low-code development environment is key for us.

Now that we're scaling up and taking advantage of Cloud stuff, it's become a lot easier to use. When we started our journey, we just bought a couple of bots and had them sit around on machines. It was a bit chaotic and we thought that if we take advantage of their wider platform, the orchestrator environment, it would make life a lot easier because we have all the monitoring and management. We have access to that in one platform rather than having to watch the individual robots, which is where we started.

We're going to use the solution's AI-enhanced document understanding feature. It's something we're looking at to help us with invoices and incoming bills that come in. It's on the backlog. We haven't got to it yet.

UiPath enables me to free up capacity for people to work on new work because they are involved, they're less accessible. At the moment, the majority of our staff is focused towards the end time making sure that things are filed correctly. It's more about focusing resources rather than being more responsive.

As things become more and more data-heavy and accessing other people's products and managing things, like obtaining the data through APIs, it feels like there could be a lot more for them to do, to make interacting with data or manipulating simple things like text strings. You need quite a strong development background or a reasonable level of understanding to achieve that. I think that could be made a little bit more achievable.

Three years ago we started using UiPath relatively small and we are looking to scale up significantly this year. Originally we started on-prem and as we're scaling up, we're going to move towards the cloud instance.

So far the stability has been good. With all of the low code platforms, it's actually more of a problem of what we've developed and deployed. It's how well we make our own software so that the platform will provide. It seems to stand up very, very well. I have not really had an issue. Anytime we have encountered a bug or whatnot, it's something we've introduced to ourselves, but thankfully there's a strong community where we can post questions and queries to get a response within a couple of hours.

I don't see scalability as being too much of a challenge. If we need more capacity on the robots, we're able to buy more licenses and additional VMs on the machine. If we need to expand or scale, it's just about deploying more machines. I don't feel it's that complicated. I suspect there are some constraints on how you build your applications, but that's more of an internal decision rather than UiPath's.

There are three people who are responsible for how to put a source of business analysis as well as development. Their role is to work with SMEs or people within our business units to understand a customer's process, get them deployed, and work with them to do it. The stuff we've taken on tends to be the easier, quick wins. We have three internal developers who were able to break down processes. We're a large organization. We have a large IT function that helped us with virtual machines and data centers, etc. We're not directly involved with them.

It's very easy to build an automation and just let it run. One of the key lessons we learned is the fact that you have to keep an eye on these things and that things change in the environment. Passwords run out and expire, folders may move as people move things around the network and a robot is just as susceptible to everything else that our user is. In terms of when you're designing any solutions, you have to pay a little extra attention to things that may cause you problems in six months' time. The simple fact that a password that you were using has been reset or is expired or something else, could cause the robot to failover. While the robot can tell you it's got a problem, you still have maintenance effort to keep an eye on. There is a maintenance commitment that you need for everything that is put on it. You need to spend a bit of extra time detailing exactly how you are going to respond to those things. Just because it's easy to deploy stuff, it doesn't do away with the fact that you have to keep an eye on it.

There are three analysts who are respondents to book fixes, etc. We have people in the business who we work with to automate these processes. They take a level of responsibility and keeping an eye on anything we try to automate. They're the first line of support. If anything's going wrong or something they can keep an eye on it and then if it is a technical book fix or something that needs to be resolved, that's then escalated to one of those three developers.

I only had one issue which was to do with the proxy setting when deploying some of the software. I raised the ticket on the website, got a response within half a day and it explained what I needed to do to fix it. That's my only experience of having to deal with them. I raised a ticket, I got the answer, and it worked. My experience so far has been fairly good.

We decided to use UiPath three years ago when RPA was starting to become a bit of a buzzword. We took a look at it and realized that it would be a very, very good solution for the right project by allowing us to automate mass activity all at once. One of those projects came around and we had to communicate it to a large audience. The process once agreed upon and nailed down could be very heavily scripted. We looked at a way that we would communicate it to the 30,000 people, all with documents that are pretty much the same but with a slight variation. We knew we wanted to try an RPA solution. UiPath was a very strong contender in those days and it was easy to access. That's why we ended up with it. We're able to achieve something with a single bot. All of those things make the software easy to test out. And then from there, you're able to make a decision.

The initial setup was really straightforward. In such a large law firm that has high data security obligations, we set these things up, appoint the orchestrator, and it just works. I have not encountered too many problems. 

It doesn't feel like a heavyweight ERP system or some larger workflow tool. These things are deployed onto a desktop and they speak to a server. It's not heavy. It doesn't feel like a piece of software with a heavy footprint.

The deployment took a week. It took us longer to end-to-end to get the invoice approved.

We've taken advantage of the architecture. Our IT team set some ground rules about where the virtual machines need to be hosted and deployed, but it's not that heavyweight. We increase some standards with IT and then install the software on those machines. We're using the Cloud version so there's not a lot to worry about.

We were able to do the deployment internally. 

Some of our ROI is quite dramatic. We have to email lots of stuff out to different people and our projector will require this to have a team of six or seven staff working solidly for a couple of weeks. The robot was able to get it done after a couple of weeks of configuration. This thing was able to pay for itself in a matter of hours once it was done. One of our post-completion robots took a week or two to develop and get stable enough to deploy. It's able to offset seven or eight hours a day. If we target the use cases correctly, we are able to get a return on the automation we deploy.

Take advantage of the Cloud-based implementation. You'll have to handle the Orchestrator licensing costs. It's obviously different for every organization. It's beneficial to get away from the on-premise installation. Also make sure that your business case justifies whatever the license cost is for an unattended or attended bot. 

Show your business case and that the automation will help you to exceed the license cost. You want to look at things that are going to give you a return on investment in about six months' time. Take advantage of the Cloud-hosted version so as not to pay the cost for Orchestrator. Then for your bots, make sure you will see a six months ROI in terms of how much automation you've gotten and how much you can get the robot to get done.

We also looked at BluePrism and Automation Anywhere. We took a quick look over the top three solutions at the time. UiPath seemed to be one of the leaders in the area.

We partnered with an organization to help us deliver it. We got some consultants in and sorted out what they were comfortable with using and what they recommended. For us, it was the size of the platform. We were looking at Automation Anywhere or BluePrism. It just felt like it would be a bigger project to implement when in reality all we wanted was one robot to do one job for us at the start of the project. It was more about the barriers of entry to getting started.

I would rate UiPath an eight out of ten. It feels like nothing deserves a 10, and I highly recommend every organization has a handle on RPA. There are still a huge amount of features we're still yet to explore.

We are a UiPath customer, working with them to develop some products. It is a bit of a mixed thing where we are developing some products with them from scratch, but they are acting as the provider. We develop things, and if they're useful for others, then others can use them.

We are doing some pretty bespoke things to help us develop some solutions, but also help them develop their UI solutions in the legal area. We are working on a few things with UiPath to develop some search robots, some solutions to automatize subcontracts, and some timekeeping entries. These are several things that we are doing right now.

We are doing three things with them:

1. A robot to help us with software for time management, automating time entries. 
2. A robot to help us with filling in our engagement letters (contracts). 
3. A robot to help us with various public searches, i.e., the automation of searches of the public record.

We are adjusting robots from similar things that they do. The robots are not yet in production. 

The most valuable feature is its ability to save time with a task. In general, it improves accuracy as well.

UiPath's ease of use for automating our company's processes is a five out of five. We have found it very easy to talk to them, identifying what can be done along with the potential use cases. They have been very good at guiding us through what is realistic at this point, how their robots could help us save time and improve accuracy, and how our users can engage with their robots, e.g., ensuring that users engage with the robots and use their product. 

When we started to talk about practical implementation, their team was extremely switched onto identifying and fitting their product to our needs. They explained to us how we can use their products, what can be done to adapt their product, and what may happen sometime in the future, not necessarily now. I found this very helpful and straightforward.

What we have in mind in terms of what the robots could do for us is significantly more than what UiPath does now, but it takes more work. From my perspective, there is just a wide scope of implementation that goes beyond what we're starting right now. That is essentially the improvement. While I have nothing negative to say about our experience with them so far, I think we can work to develop more complex products with them. They are already working to develop something for our use cases, but what I would like is if we could develop more things for more complex needs, e.g., where we start with simpler stuff, then we can add things to what we're doing now.

We are in the development phase.

It is too early. We are still in development.

During the development phase, there are five people involved in the development phase. The users will be about 100.

We have not used their support.

We were not previously using something in this area. 

We have been thinking about ways to streamline our activities using technology. It happens that we knew UiPath, so we started to engage with them about what they could do for us. We had something like 20 ideas that we could implement, then we just started the easier ones which were closer to the products that they have. As things go, we will see whether we expand to other things.

We have known UiPath quite well and for a long time. They are also the leaders in the field, so it was a very easy choice.

The initial setup was quite straightforward. We started to discuss potential solutions, then we met with parts of their team, developing that business area. After that, we met with the technical people designing the product. We had a couple of initial conversations and did some testing. It has been extremely simple and straightforward.

We are supposed to review some of their proposals and provide feedback. We are probably a week or two away from production.

UiPath could have probably implemented the solution in a couple of weeks. We had some delays on our side.

We did the initial setup ourselves.

It is important for whatever we implement that it's cost effective in a sense that the robots will replace some human time. If human time costs less than the robot, then that's not a good deal. Normally, human time will cost more than a robot, and that's what we're trying to displace: the human time. We want to replace it with a cheaper robot. 

We only looked at UiPath, because we know them quite well.

So far, the experience has been excellent. I would rate the solution 10 out of 10, but we haven't finished the implementation.

Look internally what your needs are. Try to identify what you could improve with software robots, ensuring these needs are clearly identified and the product is fit for purpose. Also, you should make sure there will be buy-in in the organization, so people will actually use the product.