UiPath Platform Reviews

Our primary use case for it right now is in human resources. We are using it as a recruiting capability where we receive resumes in from recruiters, one in particular. Then, we're looking at the emails, pulling data off the resumes, and loading it into a database. We are also identifying resumes which might need some additional clarification. This saves a lot of time, so somebody doesn't have to go through each email, evaluate them, and pull the resumes down.

Our customers are the DoD, mostly, and some civilian agencies.

• The ability to integrate easily within our IT environment.
• The ease in which we are able to program and tie it into our various applications.

I would like more defined processes for around use cases. This might be helpful, as it is more general at the moment.

We have not experienced a whole lot of issues with UiPath at all internally. 

In some of the pilots that we are developing for our partners or for our customers, we haven't seen any major big issues or bugs.

We are still in the initial phases of deploying different bots, one bot at a time. Once we get into the Orchestrator area, we are looking at more of shared, multiple Unattended bot deployments. Then, we will have a better feel for it.

The support has been excellent and very helpful. We have received a lot of great information and assistance from the UiPath engineers and partner alliance people, who has been very helpful and responsive.

It took us only about two days of man-hours to build it out. Thus, it is easily implemented, programmed, and deployed. The ease of use and implementation together are a huge value-add and time saver to any organization. 

The ease of use did exceed our expectations. We heard it was easy. We had been trained up and had certified people. However, this was our first endeavor, in terms of deploying it internally, and it went extremely well. 

We have seen a huge benefit time-wise, in terms of the repetitive type of activities that we do. Now, we have automated those and can do the more hardcore analysis of the resumes. In the human resources area, it would take 27 minutes to process 20 emails. With UiPath, we are doing it in about two minutes, which is a huge time savings.

Given how cheap it is to initially buy the product, the licensing methodology that they have in terms of renewing every year is appropriate. Later on, if they start charging more early on, for deployment, buying the license, and deploying it initially, then having a lower maintenance fee might be more appropriate. Now, with the scale they are at, it is an appropriate way to do the licensing.

We are a partner. We are totally onboard with UiPath. We did not look into different partners to use as a product internally.

It is the market leader, particularly in the federal government. It is getting the widest use right now.

The product is extremely helpful. In terms of usability, capability, and functionality, it's one of the best products that we have used in terms of being easily implementable and cost-effective.

We find that all the materials out there for partner use are extremely effective and organized extremely well. They are very detailed and helpful.

Internally, we use UiPath to automate financial transactions, specifically for invoice processing.

Externally, on the client side, we use automation in the financial space, primarily. There are various use cases from generic file uploads to transaction processing that we implement for our clients.

We have some processes that haven't been completed flushed out. Right now, there has not been an exact improvement yet.

Ease of use and speed of development are the most valuable features. 

The overall integration with Microsoft stack and a few other third party vendors, like Google, are very useful to us. Having these built into the product speeds up our development, so we don't have to code a bunch of connectors on our own.

I would like to see some sort of better implementation of the Python modules. Right now, any error code that Python throws up turns into a generic error that is difficult to track down. I would want to see some sort of integration that at least lets me debug the issue.

Its pretty difficult to do source control through the typical Git functions because of the nature of the UiPath and the visual element. Some sort of method to bring source control home for us would be very helpful. A way to systematically track which actions or activities were added and subtracted from a given process before adding to a repository would be very helpful to us right now. Our team of developers is growing, so control has become somewhat of an issue for us.

Ease of use has definitely exceeded expectations. Initially coming in, UiPath had some features that needed to be implemented that weren't quite there yet. Now, we are on 2018.4 and all of the features that we desperately needed are there. Thus, ease of use has been pretty great.

We have looked into scalability a lot. So far, we haven't done anything that involves a 100 bot. However, the scalability seems pretty easy. Scaling up to just five bots running in parallel has been very easy.

If we are going to build up the environment, we would run on virtual machines. We would connect through Remote Desktop Services, not through Citrix.

The technical support has been fairly good. I like that they pick up on interactions in the forum. However, some of the transitions from the forum to submitting a ticket are a little clunky. If a ticket could be submitted on my behalf on the forum, then have me boot over to where the ticket is, that is fine. Just kicking me out of the forum, then having me submit a ticket seems counterintuitive to me.

As a company and for our client, we see any sort of legacy system or too many individual systems as somehow needing to be integrated. This is the bread and butter for RPA, and where we started our conversation (and our clients' conversations).

The complexity of the initial setup depends on who you are. First time implementing, it seems a little complex. If you know how to develop UiPath, it is more straightforward. I had to walk somebody through the implementation setup of the environment because they had a lot of questions about where they were going. For software development is not that complex, it is pretty straightforward.

Having some understanding of database management and services is helpful, so you understand the inner workings of UiPath.

It has definitely eliminated human error in our internal process, somewhere between full production, deployment and testing. There were definitely some error prone tasks that we eliminated. If I had to give a ball park, maybe 10 to 20 percent of the process was error prone, which we were able to resolve with UiPath.

For time savings: What used to be a 15 minute task, now it takes the bot two minutes for the bot to run through, for example.

Generally, we push unattended. We think the cost savings is better with unattended. As far as ROI, when you are talking about returning man-hours or moving people off work, unattended does that efficiently. Attended doesn't always save much time. Thus, we push unattended for cost.

We have seen general platform survey before implementing RPA of the different market vendors.

Personally, I looked at other platforms, and it is hard to transition from UiPath. It does have ease of use that now I am used to.

If you are starting with development, start with the UiPath Academy. For the end user or client, start conversations about security and prevention now, while you get trained up on development.

Internally, there is not a lot of automation in place. We are using a good robotic process automation software to bridge that gap right now and get us further down the automation road. 

We use the UiPath Academy for new hires. The new training programs, both the previous and current versions, with the UiPath Academy work out for us. I have the previous videos, then the current new slide deck idea. It is pretty streamlined and high level, but it is good for getting new people started.

Also, I used Academy just last week. I used it for security because I had some knowledge gaps on security with UiPath.

It is looking externally at how we can enable the government to identify efficiencies and improve effectiveness. The other is, internally, how can we drive efficiencies within HR and finance, with everything that a big corporation can do. 

1. How do we help the government realize these benefits? 
   
2. How do we help our internal workforce benefit?

It is two different things, and they are similar, but they're not the same thing.

A lot of people externally are worried about the elimination of jobs, but at the same time, they still want that efficiency, and they are looking for it. We want to drive the effectiveness of the workforce, whomever we're working with. 

There are plenty of automation opportunities out there: DoD, the federal government, and commercial space. There are all sorts of stuff that we can do. Internally, we feel the same way. There are lot of things that we can do to make ourselves run more efficiently. If we are preaching to the government that they need to be using this, it's beneficial for us to say, "This is what we have done as a company."

Our company is 25,000 people across the globe. There are certain opportunities for us to include automation in what we do every day. We are doing it now by instituting RPA, specifically, and the tools that the UiPath bring to the table. It will be a game changer for us, if we can get it done at scale.

Automation is growing at our company. A lot of what we do is focused on AI. Going from zero to AI is a Herculean task. It's extremely difficult. However, there are many steps in-between zero and AI that we can do now to help realize the benefit to the company or the federal government, such as the benefits of the efficiencies that we can identify. That intermediate, non-threatening first step can be RPA, which ultimately will lead to enabling AI, but is not AI. 

Within our company, we are looking to identify what those pre-AI steps are, with the goal in mind that we know that the federal government is asking for AI. What we do in the interim is a type of level set, where you can build an algorithm, AI, or machine learning algorithm. This ultimately is what they want, but what they need right now is to aggregate their data in a structured way to be able to feed into those algorithms. That's step one. This is the first step to getting all your data right. It's not easy, because you have to take people out of the mindset of AI.

A lot of times, in the government, people say, "I'm wearing two hats." It's an idiom. The question I have in response is, "What if we could take one of those hats away?" We can take one of those responsibilities that someone finds cumbersome, or annoying, and remove that from their task list. We have them tell us the steps of their process, so we can automate it, if not pieces, but all of it. That is our starting point with a lot of people, "We can take this off your plate," which is definitely exciting for a lot of people. It scares some people too, but we're working on that.

The most valuable features are the unattended bots. Initially, we are going to be looking at a number of attended bots in a pilot phase for our HR internal operations personnel. We are going to come in and try to remove tasks from their daily lives, such as ten minute tasks brought down to five seconds, or we could just completely eliminate them, making them unattended.

The training and certification online is very helpful.

The software is easy to use, as a drag and drop function. Even if it wasn't, the type of support that we get from the people who work for UiPath is paramount to the capability of the tool. The ease of use has exceeded our expectations.

The Academy Live that I took was only a half a day course. There needs to be diverse set of courses for those introduced to RPA for the first time. There are different people who show up to this course: 

• The developer who is interested in automation and automating different facets of the tasks that they have, either at work or for their clients. 
• Business managers who want to know more about what RPA can do for my business or company. They want the operational and strategic level versus the tactical level of how do I get automation to do the thing I want it to do?

The course was only a half a day, and although we were able to provide two automations and build two bots, it would be helpful if that was extended to include the RPA story and pitch. E.g., What's the story that we need to tell in order to get people to say, "How do I get into the pilot phase now."

I would like to have the course do an introduction, "Welcome to the course. This is what RPA is. Now, let us build your first bot." 

The sales elements of why RPA should be there too:

• What is the value proposition that RPA brings to the table.
• Here is the expected ROI for a menial task, saving an hour a week equals this in the long term. Even if you can cut a 25 minute task out of somebody's daily routine, this is the benefit in the long term.
  

That wasn't there as much. I wasn't really expecting it to be there, but in the long term, if there are a number of different types of training courses which are offered, people will have different breadths of understandings of RPA can really do, e.g., it needs a hardcore developing training and a capture manager. It needs to explain what sort of things a capture manager needs to know. Maybe not necessarily how to develop the architecture for it, but what does that even mean? For example, how easy is it for me to get Orchestrator onto a server? How do I become a reseller of the software? These are the capture manager responsibilities, and it would be helpful if they were explained. While this is probably more of a day two of a training rather than day one. 

I would like to see a UiPath user group to discuss issues. I am unaware of all the activities and features, and this would help. Right now, there is just the user's guide and UiPath GO! It would be great if this feedback went back to the UiPath development team. We should also be notified of new features through an alerting system on UiPath GO!

With our focus on the federal government, they're looking at dozens of bots: Scaling of five instances of Studio, 10 bots of Orchestrator, and three unattended bots. That is far easier to scale than in the commercial world, where they are asking for 1000 instances of Studio and 500 unattended bots, touching 100 different processes. We haven't had that experience yet.

The current staff at UiPath won't let you fail (the customer support and customer success managers). They are not going to leave you hanging.

They are an honest broker. They told us when things aren't going to work. They've been upfront and transparent about everything with us.

Our developers have found that it is relatively straightforward. With any installation issues that have come up, we have always had somebody just be able to pick up the phone and call.

ROI depends on the complexity the project. Unattended bots tend to see ROI immediately, where attended bots take longer. The savings starts as soon as a bot is deployed.

Getting licenses has been relatively easy.

We have all the prices for the software. Every project is up for a negotiation on how it's going to be done. A lot of times, with the federal government, it will be necessary to put it on contract. When we are bidding for something, we need to know, how many bots are we talking about? The tricky part is when the government is unsure what they actually want. A lot of times when contracts or proposals are put on the street, the government wants something that can support 100 bots. That's not really helpful given that the price points for unattended and attended are different. So, clarification is often necessary when we're asking, what ratio of attended to unattended are you really asking for?

There is some initial sticker shock from a lot of people regarding cost, until you show them what the actual benefit is. Initially, people are just going, "Why?" So, the retort for that is, "Look how much you will save, time, and budget-wise with one bot. If one bot costs X, this is how much it will save you over one year. This alleviates the "Oh my gosh" face, when it's 1200 dollars for a bot. 

Getting clients, and our own people internally, to recognize that this is an investment in efficiency to drive effectiveness. If you can do that, and you can get past any initial sticker shock, thinking strategically and long term, then you've got them. But if they say, "Look, my budget this year is only 10,000 dollars. Why would I put that into bots?" That becomes a different type of discussion. It's mostly focused on, you're thinking about today. We need you to be thinking about three years from now.

If you look around at the other software systems, we have chose to go with UiPath because of the ease of the interface and also the customer support that we get from their people. There are a lot of tools out there. The reason why we have gone with UiPath is because of the relationships that we have built and the type of success that we are going to get working with their account leads.

We looked at Blue Prism, Automation Anywhere, and briefly at a couple of the start ups. However, we figured that they didn't have the ATOs that we needed to go within the federal space. There are a lot of people who say they can do this, or they say that they have an offering that can do this. In many cases, that is absolutely true. We wanted to be with a company that we feel is up and coming and will be around in the next decade. We want to use software that is going to be recognized by the federal government as number one, or at least very close.

Be prepared, because you are going to be asked a hundred question. This product takes a team. Your senior management needs to want this product and sign onto training. You will need developers capable of using the UiPath software.

UiPath is not just a technology business. It really comes down to a people business. The people and culture that UiPath provides us leads us to use their software more often.

The NextGen workforce is not going to be cutting and pasting for eight hours a day. That is not a function that a human should be doing anyway. Therefore, we treat RPA as a digital assistant, because who would not want a digital assistant.

People are finding ways to automate the reporting functions that Workday can really provide. This is not at an individual level. At the individual level, you can go in and check your benefits and check your 401K. However, at a macro level, we need people to run Workday reports pretty much daily, and that gets updated in the systems that we have. Therefore, our HR and finance people are all working with Workday, as people of incorporate these big management systems, trying to find new ways to automate them.

It is now on us and our team to be able to implement automation with the Workday, and have it work more efficiently. That will be our next challenge moving forward, automating Workday.

At Forest Service, we have a massive onboarding season. Because our primary mission is to combat forest fires, we have a huge intake of firefighters that we hire every season. Because of that, there's a lot of onboarding material that needs to be processed through HR, literally tens of thousands of people in such a short amount of time. I can see, potentially, RPA being able to help with some of the manual work that we do.

It's probably the best bang for our buck, but there are certainly other use cases potentially. That is the area that I'm more familiar with, though.

UiPath can batch process a lot of the hands-on manual work that nobody wants to do. I think that's probably its best value. That said, it does kind of highlight the need for standardized processes, which can be challenging at times, specifically in our space. Just having formalized documentation about what the end-to-end process should be is key. Once that's standardized, then it's a lot easier to leverage UiPath for automation.

Having looked at other RPA software, I think UiPath is the most user-friendly. At the same time, it's robust enough to customize and get into the source code. It's accessible, but also has enough features for more hands-on developers to be able to do what they need to do. From the two that I've seen, it was the more user-friendly one.

I have used UiPath's Academy for some of the foundational level training, not the more advanced ones. I think I had some feedback at the time. It's been a few months since I've taken it. Overall it was pretty good.

I feel like it's pretty good as it is. One thing I would change is when you're nesting certain workflows, it can get a little complicated as you start getting deeper. For example, if you have multiple blocks that need to live inside each other, and you're using a library to drag stuff or just insert it, it can be very challenging from a visual level to see what level it's in or how deeply nested it is. It's hard to roll it up into a parent level display. So, that's a little confusing sometimes. I guess, if there's any way to improve that, I think that would be helpful.

I think UiPath uses VBScript. If there were some kind of library of common things that developers could use, that would be helpful, but it's not a big deal. You can just Google that stuff. Making something like that accessible would be nice, but I don't think it's crucial.

The big question on my end is just how to scale and keep things stabilized. This is such a new technology for us, that there's a lot of questions around it. I think, being able to answer that would be helpful. I don't really know the answer.

I don't know about technical support. We were talking to a developer that was helping us at the time just to walk us through. Our experience with the developer was good. They have a very knowledgeable staff. They're very eager to help us figure stuff out. All in all, it was a positive experience.

The setup, at least from the local side, makes sense. This could be just more of my experience since my expertise in UiPath is not as high as it could be. I'm not super familiar with how Orchestrator is deployed and managed, in terms of multiple bots and scheduling, but that's probably a limitation more on my end then with UiPath.

We are currently in the research stage. It's more like proof of concept work. Right now, it's really about convincing people that this is a technology to look at and pay attention to. We are trying to convince the people with the authority that this is a good way to invest.

I have local test environments that I've used personally. At Forest Service, they're very visually oriented. If you talk to them about it, they won't get it. They need to see it to believe it. So, I've been trying to do that locally in my own environment. I have been building use cases that I think are parallel to what we're trying to do, to demonstrate the value.

We looked at a couple of alternatives. Automation Anywhere was one of them. I haven't looked at the other ones, since we chose UiPath pretty early on, having heard about them previously. We also considered some others like Pega and a few others.

Automation technology is non-existent in our company currently, but definitely something that should be leveraged for. I think there's a lot of value in being able to free up people from doing small repetitive tasks and just be more strategic focused. The challenge, really, is just convincing people that they're not going to lose their jobs. We need to show them that we're freeing up their time to be more valuable. The challenge is just educating people about what it actually is.

I would rate this solution as eight out of ten. I think it's going a lot of places. It's definitely more advanced than some of the other ones that I've seen. UiPath is probably the best one that we've seen so far.

My advice is to make sure you have your processes documented before you try to fix something that can't be fixed through robotic process automation. At a fundamental level, your organization needs to be ready for it. It's not a magic bullet to fix stuff that's confusing at your organization level. But, if you have it straight and documented and you're doing high volume amounts of it then you should use this to free up people's time and make them do better work. I think it would be useful.

We use UiPath to log into a system, run a report, extract the information from the report, and send emails to hundreds of people, all in just seconds.

We have a requirement when someone leaves the agency that you have to remove access immediately but that wasn't always done. This allows us the ability to take the daily report when people leave and send notifications to the right people to remove system access.

UiPath allows people to do more value-added work. I found that we were able to take a person well versed in access programming and convert them to be an RPA developer with relative ease.

The UiPath Academy RPA training is phenomenal. Just the fact that they offer that information is a huge selling point for them. I continually share links to the site and I encourage people to go out. I tell them to take the training if they want to learn more. I started the technical training, but I kind of oversee the program, so I didn't have to learn all of it. Nevertheless, just the awareness of what RPA is and those intro-functional courses were very informative.

It was more difficult to use than we originally thought it was going to be. It's not as simple as drag and drop. You really have to have a background in IT development type of work. I suppose you could make simple automations but we definitely found it to be more complex, especially the supporting infrastructure beneath it.

I think where the improvement needs to occur is within the federal government to put out the policy that it has been determined to be a safe product that can be put on any DoD network. That would be huge, but right now that decision isn't out there and every agency has to go out and make its own determination. Some CIOs are more risk-averse than others. That would be one thing, but obviously, UiPath doesn't have a way to influence that.

We don't know about the scalability until we get in there. From everything I've read and heard, I think it will be scalable and should fulfill our needs.

Technical support has been very accommodating. In fact, they'll be on site to help us overcome some of the challenges we've had without having third-party integration support. We've been struggling on our own, but UiPath has been there and has even agreed to come onsite to help work through some of these issues.

We have automations everywhere through the agency. There were a lot of presentations being held. Senior leaders started to get wind of this and other organizations were sharing their successes and that kind of piqued our interest to assign somebody to explore it.

The initial setup was complex. I've just seen the emails that go back and forth and I think if we had a third-party integrator, it would have resolved a lot of our questions. The security aspects have been our biggest challenge and concern.

We absolutely have a return on our investment. It gets difficult to really quantify what the ROI is when you start looking at that. Just the ability for technicians to do more value-added work is hard to put a price on. We have a system that stores a lot of documents. Our pilot bot was just to log into that system and download the documents for audit purposes. Now we can literally let the bot run for 12 hours pulling all the documents and those people can do more important things.

The pilot bot we set up to send those emails, equated to about 350 hours a year. The audit bot is almost endless because if we can share those bots with our customers and the customers can do the same thing and achieve those same benefits, you're getting into millions of potential dollar savings.

This solution has definitely helped to eliminate human errors, as well.

It would be nice if you could just buy the product instead of having the annual rate license renewals. I assume that's how UiPath makes its money. It's expensive, but I guess we'll have to do the business case to see what the ROI truly is.

Automation Anywhere and Blue Prism were really the main competitors. The UiPath Academy, for one, was a big selling point. Other than that, just having conversations with other government agencies that have used UiPath and have succeeded in that development helped us make the decision to choose UiPath.

We have hundreds and hundreds of IT technical specialists. We have very sensitive information that must be protected, which is IT's primary focus.

I would rate UiPath as nine out of ten, not a ten just because of the pricing.

My advice to someone starting out with UiPath is to get third-party integrator support.

We are using UiPath primarily for process automation. We are trying to consolidate information, eliminate redundant manual tasks, and save some money.

I'm developing my first bot, so I can't answer that yet. I've just got my UiPath certification, been thrust into a project which I'm pretty excited about. I don't know what our client is going to ask as of yet. Obviously, those parameters are probably going to change weekly, if not daily. I think there's some scalability to UiPath that's going to make everything pretty convenient and easy to use.

The tool is very simple, even for a layman like myself without a coding background. It's a gateway to the process automation industry. I think this is really the simplest and easiest way to do it.

I used the UiPath Academy and got a certification. It was very easy to use, they are very patient, but it's not automatic. They are very diverse and applications are necessary. The steps just take you all the way through. If you reach a stopping point, you can literally just start over. Then you can try again with another series of questions, some more accessibilities, or different paths towards the same outcome. I loved it. I thought it was pretty simple and pretty easy to use. It's very non-stressful.

Regarding automation, we serve the federal government here, so I'm working for a very specific division in my company. We're serving the client, so I don't even know how new and exciting this is going to be. This is going to be huge. I think we're right on the cusp of all of it. The sky's the limit.

Due to the sensitivity of my project, I would like a new feature like some sort of generic interface or input where other UiPath users can examine our product or our situations and help us fix them. Some sort of official UiPath community within, where everyone can kind of help each other out.

The stability is fine. The only factor we have is a finicky customer. We need to help them with their choices, changes, reversals, augmentations, but it seems to be pretty simple and intuitive so far.

Our initial setup was pretty straightforward. We used it on a secure client-server, so there was no change from what I'd learned on my own and what I had to use in the work environment. It was pretty simple.

In as far as learning the product, it is almost free in its efficiency in teaching people like myself how to use it. With regards to the client, it's a little early yet, but they project incredible savings. One thing I should say about UiPath and process automation is that it's not an attempt to eliminate jobs. This is a huge misconception and stigma. It's an attempt to make working more efficient. In that respect, I think it'll save everyone a lot of money if they're willing to try it and implement it.

I've heard about some alternatives, but I haven't used them yet. UiPath is my first entrance into this. I really don't see the need to use anything else. The client likes it as well, so if they're happy with it, I have absolutely no desire to investigate anything else.

I would rate this solution as a solid nine out of ten, just because I haven't used it very long. I'm probably going to give it a ten. I don't know what else UiPath can do for me, and I'm sure there's more.

We primarily use it for delegating access permissions to help desks, for example. We use it to automate certain things, like onboarding new users, or deprovisioning leaving users. When we add somebody to a group, it triggers some kind of automation workflow. Lastly, we use it to sanitize data entry, so to make sure that capital first letter in the street name is used, certain zip codes aren't allowed, others are, etc., so data is controlled.

It helps mitigate the risks. With traditional native active directory delegation, it becomes real messy, real fast. You lose oversight on who has access where. We are an acquisition merger company, so we let go of certain companies and onboard new ones. With native delegations, you lose track of who has access where. With Active Roles, we can always see who has access and what they can do in a very granular way. You can modify the street name but you can't modify the city for example. Or you can modify the picture, but not the names and so that granularity is not available normally.

This product has eliminated a lot of tedious IT tasks, especially when people leave. There are about 10 or 15 actions that Active Roles does, scripted, in the same way, each time. It used to literally be a list of things that the admin would do, like: hide the mailbox, disable user, remove the groups, etc. Also, the auditing history that it keeps is very handy for us. We have a change record of what's been done to a user, who did it, and when they did it, which really helps us out.

We really needed this kind of product for its Active Directory delegation. We could not allow everyone to have native access to our Active Directory. The delegation bit was really the trigger. Automation is also a major reason we use UiPath. There was just so much room for human error that we wanted to script activities rather than rely on the admins to know what to do. This is especially important now that we are outsourcing many activities and dealing with a changing audience. In order to make sure that everybody does the same thing at the same time, tools like these make sure that you do everything in a structured manner.

The value for us is that it resembles the native tools that most people have grown accustomed to. Most people come from another company where they may not have used Active Roles. Active Roles resembles traditional tools like Microsoft's, which is really good because it eases the way people interact with the tool.

AD and AAD management features are really good. They're better than native tools; they offer an added value. They show more fields than traditional tools, such as password age and status of things that you normally wouldn't see. We still have the mailbox and user information all on one screen, whereas in native tools, you need two tools to show that information.

Active Roles works with policies and access templates, as well as workflows, which are really powerful. While it comes with a lot of example policies and access templates, there are zero built-in workflows. I would personally love for it to come with 10 to 20 sample workflows that achieve a certain task but are not enabled by default. In that case, I would be able to just look at those to see how it's done. I could clone them, copy them, and modify them to how I want them. Then I would be good to go, rather than having to reinvent things from scratch.

The solution is very stable. Even if components lose connectivity, or the database dies, as soon as it comes back up, it just reconnects and goes.

It covers all we would like to do. It's scalable; you can make it replicate databases. We don't use a lot of those features, but it is very scalable.

It needed a bit of getting used to, in terms of where you set what, but once you get the hang of it, it's really straightforward.

I think we're just paying for mitigating risks. There is the risk of leaving all authorized access behind and the risk of having Active Directory pollution. With that comes a risk of people getting access that they shouldn't have or having multiple accounts for the same thing. There's no money or value added from using the solution, but there is risk management. That is really what you pay for.

We did consider using the Microsoft solution because it's free and built-in, and that's what everybody does. However, when you grow beyond a certain ping, or scope, you find out that it just does not cut it anymore. We also considered using other tools, but at the time, I think Active Roles was very much alone in this world. I have to admit, now there are other vendors available, which I don't have any personal experience with, but on paper, they seem to do a bit of the same thing. At the time, though, there was simply nothing else that could even come close.

I would rate UiPath as nine out of ten. There's always room for improvement. This is definitely, really up there.

I personally do a lot of process automation and data visualization. I work with a lot of people in procurement and finance to pull data from a lot of different systems, consolidating it, and creating reports, then presenting it. What I do a lot of is taking that consolidated data and creating automated reports with Microsoft Power BI and visualization tools. A lot of where people get hung up is pulling the data and the amount of time it takes to do that. So, people want to be able to automate their processes, as well as have my reports.

When I heard about UiPath, it addresses the initial problem of having to constantly pull data, get updates, consolidate the data, then model it in Excel or other sources, like databases. Being able to speed up that process, then connect it to automated reports, can fully lay out that entire pathway. 

It has a simple user interface. We used to have the training onsite Friday and Thursday, and while I personally have a computer science and web development background, a majority of the people there were finance and were procurement who didn't have any technical background. Yet, they are able to learn it because of the GUI and hotkeys, because it is just enter, drag this there, and do that. 

You don't have to write any code. You simply click function, open an Excel file,  and open web browser, then you just grab and drag it. This makes it easy to understand what you have to do and where you have to put fields.

It could be a little more aesthetically pleasing. 

I would like it easier to find things. How it works now: 

1. You look up all the different built-in functions that they have. Most are pretty straightforward. It is click in an open access web browser.
2. If you don't know the name of what you are looking for, but if you want to be able to do something, then you have to scroll down the page and click it, if it's found.

I would like a better way to find the little things that aren't simply named.

I haven't found any problems specifically using the tool. I have only had a few errors, but that is because of personal mess ups when I'm creating processes and a field is messed up or a variable is incorrect. I haven't had any crashes or faults with the free Community Edition and the bot that it has come with.

I have talked with the UiPath training staff who came to our site and worked with them. They helped us out with any problems that we had learning things.

I haven't communicated directly with any of their support team members.

The initial setup was pretty straightforward. It was easy for us, and we are government contractors. We had to get all the approvals, but once that was done, it was very simple to get it installed and set up. Then, you just have the desktop client right there. 

I assume going through any of the training on the UiPath Academy that you would have an understanding of how to work through installation issues.

I see the potential for ROI and how much time it can save me on cutting down weekly and monthly reporting. It will probably save me five hours a week and another 15 hours a month.

It is a tool, which does what you need it to do.

I went through two non-technical training course to get an understanding of using robotic process automation because I didn't know much about it before I started using the tool. That set me up well before the UiPath Academy to get an understanding of robotic process automation and where it's been going, because I didn't have much knowledge beforehand. However, I plan to go through the Academy training courses. I've heard that it's what UiPath uses internally to get ready for certifications.

RPA overall is about routine, mundane, structured tasks. We use a number of them at my client's work in terms of how do we do back office reporting for general deliverables, contract compliance, etc. 

We had a few different reports that we had to do every month. We have to hand-jam them into a very poorly-formatted database which had weird drop-downs. Instead of entering them manually, and spending a day or month just punching in titles and numbers, we compile it onto an Excel sheet and have a bot run and dump all that information. 

All I have to do is tweak what information has changed from month to month. This has made my life a lot easier.

When I was first introduced to UiPath, I stated that I am very adamantly not a coder. I hate code, lines, and missing that semicolon somewhere in there. Being able to understand that your path is structured as a process flow, you are still able to declare variables, and ensure the background logic is sound. You are also able to really visualize what the process needs to do and the paths that it needs to take: true, false, etc. So, it has been very useful in terms of crafting it.

To exceed the expectations, it needs to be easy to debug, not only easy to craft. You need to be able to make it truly do what you want it to do. As a user, you have an idea of what you want it to do. However, when you hit run, it doesn't always do it, then you have to figure out why. That ends up being the majority of your development time. UiPath does pose a bit of a challenge in terms of easy to understand errors, where it's getting stuck, or what was the logic behind the process that we were trying to do from a UiPath standpoint. Making improvements to these would help out a more in terms of being able to make it more user-friendly.

Looking to go from structured to unstructured data, then UiPath needs to be able to handle understanding natural language and scanning of documents which are not well-written or visible, in terms scanning quality. These are probably the easiest target areas to improve on first.

If I'm using it as an attended bot, it's pretty stable. When you discussing unattended bots, anything could go wrong in the entire stack. We have found times, if I run UiPath for a week, and it needs to simply loop a PowerPoint presentation, come back in a week, then sometimes the PowerPoint will be dead. It is harder to understand if it was UiPath's fault or if it was because the device decided to do a random Windows update and restart itself. It could be a litany reasons, but even then, I can't be 100% confident that the unattended bot is going to run forever.

It would have been hard to set up without some basic training and basic use cases to practice through first. After some familiarity with the product, it is not hard to set up.

We have seen ROI across the board.

It has limited human errors within the confines of how bots were constructed on what we needed them to do.

My specific process that I use it on went from a day to about 15 minutes (time savings).

All the RPA tools are good for different things. For my very simple process, I didn't go with Automation Anywhere because setting up the Orchestrator and turning on the server is a pain. I have had any experience dealing with Blue Prism.

We use UiPath primarily for our financial operations.

We use this solution in a virtual environment called VMware Horizon. It has allowed us to get started without investing a lot, which was good for us. We need to go to the enterprise solution using Orchestrator as soon as possible. That said, I wouldn't do it differently, because if we were counting on the enterprise environment to get started, we wouldn't have deployed anything in the past year. Because we had this virtual environment, we've been able to deploy 16 bots so far.

We were able to automate a lot of data entry into our financial system. We've automated spreadsheet manipulation in the area of financial management.

We knew that our process was very inefficient, so we had to invest in a solution like UiPath. We hadn't used any other solution before UiPath. Our processes are manual and error-prone and we have mid-level people who are highly skilled who are doing this non-skilled labor, which is a problem for the workforce.

The most value we got from UiPath is the ability to automate manual tasks, reduce labor hours, and shift people to higher value work.

We found the solution easy to use. We wanted to train our staff who were not IT and we were able to do that. People who worked in financial operations were able to learn the software and have successfully developed bots.

We used UiPath Academy RPA training to train 14 people. It was good. I think UiPath needs to do a better job of setting expectations and defining the skill level required. That wasn't very clear to us. We couldn't get a good answer. Therefore, it was trial and error. We were told that people just have to be motivated, but learned that that is not enough.  The trainees need to have some demonstrated technical ability.  We found that some people dropped out because it was too difficult for them. Other people picked it up very well because they had somewhat of a technical background. That would be my message for UiPath, to give better guidance on qualifications in the background needed for training.

One does not need IT coding to learn this, but something within business operations that's somewhat technical. For example, writing Microsoft Excel macros, writing business objects reports, and SQL queries. People who can do those things, they can use UiPath.

I'd like to see the ability to operate in a non-persistent environment. Other than that, I'd like to see more intelligence being built in. We aren't using any intelligence yet, but we'd like to.

It's stable. We haven't really had technical issues.

It's scalable. We're not scalable now because we aren't using the Orchestrator software yet. We have successfully tested Orchestrator and will begin using it for production soon, giving us greater scalability.

We really haven't had to use technical support much. Most of our issues had to do with configuration and the environment, more than the software itself. It's just been one configuration issue related to this software, so far - operation in a non-persistent environment.  I was told there's an enhancement coming, but I don't think we have the enhancement yet.  However, we will not have this issue when we migrate to our enterprise platform with Orchestrator. 

The level of support we received from their technical support was good.

The initial setup was medium complexity. We were using a virtual desktop environment and had to configure it for the software. It took a few months.

We used an integrator to deploy UiPath. Our experience with them was good.

We have definitely seen a return on our investment. It took less than a year to see a positive ROI because we had a very small investment to begin with.

This solution has absolutely helped us to eliminate human errors. Most manual processes have 1% to 3% errors, some much higher. One of our processes has a 25% error rate.  The bots eliminate those errors. 

This solution also saves many hours of manual work. We have measured the number of labor hours automated to be 25,000 hours a year, so far.

We pay $3,000 per license, annually. We're using attended robots, but we will move to unattended as quickly as possible.

We chose UiPath because we simply followed NASA's lead. We wanted to move quickly and we talked to NASA. 

We're driving hard to automate as quickly as possible. Traditional IT is not able to automate all the manual work. A lot of manual work unavoidably accumulates between and around core systems.  RPA needs to be part of IT strategy to automate this residual work.  

I would rate UiPath a nine out of ten. The only reason it isn't a ten is because it lacks the ability to work in a non-persistent environment. Effectively when you log in, you have to download the software every time.  However, this is also due to our choices in configuring the environment.