UiPath Platform Reviews

We are using Orchestrator, Studio, attended and unattended robots.

I am on the business analyst side, so I do not have much experience with Orchestrator.

We are using this solution to automate processes for our clients. They typically have mundane processes or something that's super repetitive, that we're able to quickly automate for them and see that return. We did do an attended bot with them as well, to improve their call center.

With respect to how easy it is to automate our company's processes, on a scale of one to five, I would say it's a four. This is a rating from the business side, as opposed to the development side. We understand what the features are, and when new releases come out we have an understanding of what's feasible. I am not rating it a five because sometimes we do not know whether a use case is feasible or not. It means that I may have to speak to one of the developers to see whether it can be done with the tools and the features that are out there.

We host the UiPath Academy RPA training every other month for our clients. I have not taken the full course, but on a scale from one to five, I would rate it a five. This is based on the number of people who sign up for it and look forward to attending it, just to learn the basics of RPA.

In terms of how long it takes from purchasing a UiPath license until having the first robot, the average is probably four weeks. It depends on the complexity of the process. 

We have helped our customers to reduce some of their manual work, but they also benefit by freeing up their time to use elsewhere. Some of the processes we have automated have people spending hours locked up trying to finish.

It is also that we are improving areas such as the production line, or even automating some of their dashboard reporting to get more accurate information a lot quicker. We've been able to help cut that down but then also provide accurate data, and faster as well.

With respect to saving time, this fiscal year we were at seventy thousand hours saved across the enterprise. That is significant and has been across different departments and different regions, as well.

In terms of eliminating human errors, we do not have an exact calculation. We do get a lot of good feedback about the bot's performance doing well.

The most valuable aspect is the different capabilities and features that can be applied to different processes. I don't consider one particular feature more valuable than the others because they are all relevant to what the need is.

I would like to have a guidebook of examples that help me to determine the feasibility of specific use cases, based on the tools and the features that are out there.

With respect to the stability, on a scale from one to five, I would rate this solution a five. I haven't had much in the way of negative experience with it.

There are approximately two thousand people working on RPA across the firm. On my current project, we are a team of about sixteen people at our client's site.

I cannot say for a specific client, but I do know that our clients are constantly looking for what's out there. Whether it is from banking, automotive, or retail, they want to know what they can do to improve their firm or their company. RPA has been on the rise in the last three years, so I would say they want to be able to get hours back and save time so that they can allocate resources elsewhere. They are always looking for a tool out there that'll save them money and time.

In regards to ROI, we track it upfront. We have asked for the information to assess if a candidate process is a good use case. Then we track it in our dashboard throughout the year just to ensure that we are actually calculating the hours correctly. We'll then follow up to make sure that they are seeing those changes and they are receiving those hours saved. We have found that over the year, they are seeing a return on investment.

We track data in terms of money savings that the tool provides. I don't have the dollar amounts, but I can say that there are some processes where we have saved $50,000 USD just on a single process. It really varies on the complexity of the process and the time it would take to complete without automation.

I have worked with other tools and I see them as pretty similar.

My experience is with Blue Prism and Automation Anywhere. I'm not developing, so I don't have any details on the tool itself. My preference for UiPath is based on what seems to be the goal, and what is easier to understand. It rolls out more features and newer features, faster.

I am looking forward to trying the new UiPath Connect feature. I have seen the demo and it seems like that would be helpful for my role, specifically being on the business side. It is able to assess the use cases and determine what percentage they are RPA-able. I think that it will be super helpful.

My advice to anybody who is researching this solution is to try UiPath Academy Live first before they invest in the tool. This will allow them to get a better understanding of how it works, and get familiar with the services provided.

Sometimes I have questions. If I didn't have any questions then I would rate this solution a ten out of ten.

Overall, I would rate this solution a nine out of ten.

We are using Orchestrator for both development and production. We are using attended and unattended bots, and we are using Studio to develop them.

We use this solution for front-office processes, back-office processes, IT processes, and automating anything that we can.

We run our automations inside a virtual environment. We use Citrix and Citrix Server. We have sixty-seven processes that we've automated to run in the virtual environment and its very straightforward. It's deployed out of Orchestrator, and for attended processes, it's as simple as going in, opening a UI robot, and clicking the start button. It's phenomenally easy.

With respect to how easy it is to automate our company's processes, on a scale of one to five, I would say that it's a five. It's very easy. I'm a software developer by trade and I was able to automate several processes in a very short time span. In two weeks I can automate an entire process, end-to-end, which is incredibly fast for the ROI.

One of our processes was extremely complex, which was our customer onboarding process. The complexity was, in part, because it is handled by six different departments. The PDD for it was one hundred and forty pages long. One or two we've done were simple automations, and the rest have been medium to high complexity.

My first robot went into production within a month of me being in my position. That included going through all of the UiPath training, getting familiar with our IT systems, and then actually vetting out a process and automating.

On a scale of one to five, judging how beneficial it is, I would rate the training a five. It was very informative and very detailed.

We are using the unattended robots more than we are the attended ones, and we're trying to continue that drive. We understand that there's a need for some processes to run attended, but if we can, we do process optimization to make it work and be unattended.

We have definitely seen savings in time. I can only speak to one particular instance, which is one that I automated. It was taking a product marketing team roughly an entire month to process, so they were always a month in arrear processing invoices for orders. When we developed this quote-to-order process, it saved us something along the lines of seven thousand hours per month for the one group. I was able to shrink down what a team of twelve people was doing in a month's time, to about seven days.

Unattended robots are my favorite because it allows us to completely remove a process from a person's day. The process can be fully automated and scheduled out of Orchestrator to run. Whether it's several times a day or once a month or whatever it may be, that user no longer has to worry about whatever that task was.

I would like to see support for native C# capability. I have a .NET background, so it's easier for me to write in that language.

With respect to the stability, on a scale from one to five, I would rate this solution a four. There are some issues we've run into where we just can't exactly figure out what is causing the problems.

A robot would run through a process two to three dozen times with no issues and then on the very next run, it will stall in the middle of the process. When we tried to debug it, we can actually replicate that stall but clearly, it's not throwing an error. There's no rhyme or reason to why. It just stops and it just kind of hangs. I would say that it may be a stability issue.

The technical support for this solution is great. They're responsive, and always willing to help. We got infrastructure support to help us through an upgrade so I could actually migrate everything from our on-premises server into Azure. I would rate their technical support a ten out of ten.

This solution started as a homegrown operation by one of our satellite offices that downloaded a trial license and started using it. Once our IT department found out, we hired Deloitte to come in and talk us through the whole process. Then, Deloitte left and we started our own kind of homegrown development. The did not actually deploy it with us.

Prior to choosing UiPath, we evaluated Automation Anywhere and Blue Prism. There may have been one more, as well. We are a very large SAP shop, and UiPath was the only one that touted that it was integrated well with SAP. For the most part, it did.

For anybody researching this type of solution, I would suggest that they try this out and they will instantly see the value.

I would rate this solution a ten out of ten.

We are using Orchestrator and Studio and we are using both attended and unattended robots.

We use this solution in the compliance space to manage risk.

We do not run our automations in a virtual environment.

With our first process going into production just last week, we are just new to RPA. The RPA involvement across our organization is very small given our stage of development, with less than ten people. These are both developers and business users.

With respect to how easy it is to automate our company's processes, on a scale of one to five, I would say that it's about a three. The software itself is relatively straightforward and easy to use. However, the task of automating processes can be challenging. Each company is going to be different than others. My experience tells me that process automation perhaps is not as straightforward as businesses may think it is.

On a scale of one to five, judging how beneficial it is, I would rate the training a five. I found the training at the UiPath Academy really good and easy to understand. We were able to download trial versions of the software and apply our training to the trial versions. It is very straightforward and easy for .NET developers to actually use the tools. They felt comfortable, and there was nothing new, just a different way of doing what they do.

My company is probably not a good example of judging how long it takes to build your first robot. We implemented the system and did the process at the same time. So, combined, it took several months. Going forward, because we're no longer putting a system into place, I expect that timeframe to shrink significantly.

Given that the processes were just implemented at the end of last week and the beginning of this week, we have not yet seen the benefits in terms of cost-saving, time-saving, or a reduction in human error.

Enhanced capability in the document management space would be a huge benefit to our organization. As part of our business process, we receive a high volume of returned documents. Managing that high volume, in the millions, can be a challenge. If we had inherent, out of the box tools to drive document manage principles, that would be advantageous for our business.

With respect to the stability, on a scale of one to five I would rate this solution a five. We have not incurred any stability challenges as of yet.

We did not use another RPA solution prior to this one.

I think that the industry as a whole is going in this direction. Knowing the industry as well as we do, we thought it product to get involved with RPA.

The initial setup of this solution was straightforward. The underpinning technology is familiar to us.

We performed the implementation ourselves.

I was not involved at this stage, so I am unsure whether other solutions were evaluated.

My advice to other companies who are looking into UiPath is to document how you do what you do. Document your processes first.

I would rate this solution an eight out of ten.

We are using attended and unattended robots, Orchestrator, and Studio.

We are in the financial services industry. A lot of what we do is background data processing, and we use the unattended robots for a lot of it. We do have some attended robots as well, but most of our processes are unattended.

I am a developer, so I primarily use Studio. I write the instructions for our Orchestrator Application Manager to do everything we need in Orchestrator. 

We are currently operating an on-premises deployment, but we're in the pilot group for Cloud, so as soon as we get a date on that we'll probably be migrating.

One of the primary processes that we've automated is reporting. Prior to automation, our users were only able to run a few of the reports, a few times a week. Now, we're running every single report that there is to run, which is probably four or five times what they were able to do, every single day. Every morning they receive a summary of that work, so they're able to just get on and look at it, rather than during the close of the day. In financial services, the close of the day is crunch time. We work really hard to make sure that everything is done within a set about of time because there is a domino effect. One person has to be done before the next person can finish, and they're not having to dig back and try to figure out when these issues happened. We're providing it to them upfront. We can say exactly what happened, which account they need to look at, and on what date. This means that we're ahead of the issues, rather than trying to backtrack and find them.

We are not currently running in a Citrix environment, but the only reason we're not is that our sister company hosts our Citrix environment, so we can't install any of the services that make those environments much easier to utilize. For example, we can't install the computer vision component because we don't own it, so they won't let us.

Our team is really small, there's only six of us on the actual RPA team. However, we work really hard with the business to get buy-in in every department. We're trying to roll out at least one automation in every single department. Our company's goals for the next year, I believe, every associate of the company is supposed to have proposed a task that they are doing, whether it's daily, monthly, yearly, whatever, that could be automated. Then our team will ingest that, prioritize that, and work through it. But, we're really trying really hard to get our whole company involved, and we're getting ready to kick off this campaign to try and get more attention to it and to try and get people using it. We want it to be more than just a buzzword. We want it to be something that everybody's talking about regularly, and using, and excited about.

When it comes to getting people interested, I think it's probably a combination of education and sharing the experience of those projects that we have rolled out. When people are really seeing that with the projects that we've rolled out, our close is shortening, they become interested. What we say is happening, or will happen when we're rolling these automations out, is happening. Getting that to be shared from process owner to their team, to the teams that they're working with, it acts like word of mouth for those that are affected. We don't like it to just all come from us, the technical team. We don't want to simply tell them that it's going to do something. We want others to talk about what it has done for them and suggest they should take advantage of that too.

With respect to how easy it is to automate our company's processes, on a scale of one to five, I would rate it a five. We don't struggle with it.

I took the UiPath academy training, and I love it. We are looking at an unrelated tool right now, and we found no comparison between their training and the UiPath Academy. We were spoiled with UiPath Academy, and we didn't really realize how good that training really is.

The thing that I love about the developer training; the level one, level two, level three... level one really does walk you through it. It gives you, literally the walkthrough, so when you don't understand, you can go back, you can look at, and see exactly how to do it. But by the time you're in level three, it's not doing that anymore. The requirements are a little bit looser, you have to figure out how to interpret the words or the requirements, and it becomes more challenging, but I think that that's important, because, by the time that you're actually working real projects, it's not a walkthrough anymore. You have to figure it out on your own.

From the point that we purchased our UiPath license until we had our first robot was approximately three months. It did take us a little while, but we knew that we purchased our licenses before we were really ready to hit the ground running. We function out of such a small team, and we were still working with UiPath trying to figure out which partner we wanted to bring in for consultants because we wanted somebody with experience. We didn't want someone who just finished the training just run in and try, and I think we learned a lot working with that consultant.

We did work with a second consulting group, Machina Automation, and we loved working with them. They're great. They're just so supportive, and they really want to make sure things are right. It's never just sending them the requirements and pounding it out to get it into production. We work with them really deeply to try and make sure that they understand the process, we understand the requirements, they express their concerns to us, we express our concerns to them, and we work together. It's not like we just send them the documents and they send it back as a project. The whole way through we touch base with them every single morning. They're always asking what more they can do and how they can help. They ask if we're happy with what we received.

We do time card reviews, so the time that they spend with us we're actually able to go back and validate, based on that, what they've said they did, that indeed it is what they did. We had received some scrum and sprint training from them. We've had actual developer consultants, we've had mentoring hours for our developers. So we've had a lot from them, and they've been able to help us with everything. Anything we ask, they try to accommodate us. For example, we asked if they had any experience with Kibana. They did not but said that they would find somebody who does.

With respect to saving time, I don't actually track that because I am a developer, but I know that our goal for next year is twenty thousand hours. That's the big goal that we're working towards. With one of our processes, I think we're going to hit about thirteen thousand hours if we can just get that one process done. That's a statement review. We sent out tens of thousands of statements, so we'll be able to review every single one of those. This would be a huge saving in time.

I think right now we have about one hundred and thirty-six processes in production, and a lot of what we've done so far is in the finance section of the business. As such, a lot of those are only run on a quarterly, or monthly basis. We have some annual processes, and we have very few daily processes, but those daily processes add up over time.

In addition to the hours that we have saved, one of the big things we're working on is accuracy, control, and staff avoidance. Staff avoidance is the work that couldn't have been done otherwise because we would have had to hire someone to take on all of the work. So, we're able to do more than what our current staff is capable of doing. We add that into our time savings.

But, more than that, we really do focus on accuracy and timeliness. We're able to speed things up. We're able to ensure that things are exactly as expected. We spent a lot of time in the early stages of our planning, really trying to optimize our processes, so we get our original documentation, we take it, and our team works with the business to optimize that. After we get sign-off and we've optimized the manual process and got it documented and signed off, then we do a developer review and discuss ways that it can be made easier. Then we do a review for development and optimize it. Finally, once we get that signed off, we actually start our development.

We spend a lot of time on the front end of the process, making sure that everything is accurate and reliable, and we're going to be able to deliver faster as expected, and it's going to be able to handle all of these different errors or use cases. Following this process has worked well for us, so far.

I think the most valuable feature is being able to run processes in an unattended way where we can schedule them, and then have the report sent to the process owner's inbox in the morning. The is great for us, and we use it a lot. It saves the users a lot of time, and we're able to do a lot more for a user than they were ever able to do on their own.

I would like to see a biweekly scheduling option in Orchestrator. We've actually built into our automations a roundabout way to process every two weeks but it would be really nice to front end a biweekly schedule. Being in the financial services industry, we do have a lot of projects that run on weird schedules. We've kept some of our automations attended just because they're ad-hoc. They might need to re-run them. We don't want to have to wait for Orchestrator managers to kick those processes off. But, outside of that, there is no need for this one to be an attended robot. It's a perfect candidate for unattended automation, just the scheduling is the problem.

With respect to the stability, on a scale of one to five, I would rate this solution a five. We haven't ever had any issues with it.

We did not use another RPA system prior to this one.

When I first started at the company as an intern for my department, it was only myself and my boss, who's now our COE manager. The very first thing that we did was meet with all of the different functional departments of the company, and we explained to them what RPA is. We explained the types of processes that it can help take off your desk and asked for ideas from each department about what could be done to help them.

We took that, and we built this huge backlog of perhaps three hundred different items, prioritized them, and worked with others to explain that it was needed. At this point, we did PoCs with UiPath and Automation Anywhere.

I found the initial setup to be straightforward. They had me sit in on it and I don't work infrastructure, so there were some things that kind of went over my head. They did a lot of planning. After some help from UiPath, it went really fast.

UiPath helped us with the implementation. We worked with them to really figure out what our infrastructure needed to look like. 

We evaluated both Automation Anywhere and Blue Prism in addition to this solution. We ruled out Blue Prism pretty quickly. Our sister company uses Automation Anywhere, but we liked UiPath, primarily for the reason of our experience working with them and the sales team. To me, it was so much more than just working with the sales team, they're our friends now. We still talk to them and we have relationships with these people. We actually just ran into one of our developers for our PoC. It's a culture you want to be a part of.

In comparing with Automation Anywhere, one of the big reasons we went with UiPath was the support that we received. Any question we had was immediately answered. If they didn't know the answer, then they would search to find the right people in the company who did. I think that that's more valuable than just saying that they'll find us an answer. You always got the feeling that they were going to follow through, just by the conversations that we have had with them. I think that really sold us, a lot.

Also, watching the road maps for both companies at the time, initially it seemed like Automation Anywhere was ahead, and that UiPath was catching up. Then, when UiPath started releasing what they were going to be doing, as opposed to only what they were working on right now, we realized they were really going to be moving ahead. I think that kind of sold us too. Just watching what's on the road map, and how it fits in with what we see our company doing in the next few years, they aligned really well. I think that was the point where my boss really realized that it's going to be a good fit for us.

When I was in business school, they taught us that the things that users like the most are the things they didn't know they needed. I think UiPath does a great job of anticipating the users' needs, and they meet them before we knew that it was what we needed. I am excited about the next release.

I recently had a discussion with my father, who works for one of the energy companies in my state. He works at the IT level but on the infrastructure side. When I explained to him our savings in terms of hours that we have had since adopting RPA, he was very excited and is now heading their RPA initiative.

RPA is making a difference and it's really changing the way the workforce works.

My biggest advice for anybody considering this solution is to get their quality improvement, and Six Sigma teams involved because I think it makes a huge difference in terms of understanding processes. When you can get your processes understood, you can get people on board early, at every level.

I think it's really important to have proponents for automation, just in general. You want to have the automation mindset at every single level. Of course, it's important to have your C-level bought in, but it's important to have the people who are doing the work bought in too. If you don't get their buy-in, it's going to be much more difficult because a lot of the work that you're automating is at their levels. You're working with them on a day to day basis to understand their process, to understand all of the rules behind what they're doing. So, buy-in, and process understanding, that's just critical. You can't move fast without those two things.

We have nothing bad to say about UiPath. We have regular communication with them and all of the concerns we have are always addressed. They're addressed quickly and they're addressed well. They really listen to what the customers want.

I would rate this solution a ten out of ten.

We use unattended robots and the Orchestrator module. I am most familiar with the Orchestrator. We are very new to this solution and just getting into it.

We are a financial insurance company and we do VoW, Verify on Web. We have a bunch of different insurance carriers.

We run automations in a virtual environment, VMware, and I haven't seen any problems with it.

With respect to how easy it is to automate our company's processes, on a scale of one to five, I would rate it a five. For my part of it, this solution seems very useful. I have limited exposure to it because I do more of the installation, the configs, etc. I don't really work with the workloads, although I see what is being worked with. We have our in-house developers who are doing the integration into our in-house programs, so I watch what they do and it just seems that it's very easy to pick up on.

I have not used the UiPath Academy, although I think that the developers have. I did not get any feedback from them about it.

I was not involved at the time, but I think that from the point that we purchased our UiPath license until we had our first robot was approximately three to four months.

In terms of eliminating human errors, I would say that we have a twenty-five percent reduction in the number of them. However, it is hard for me to say because I'm not that clear with it prior to the incorporation of the robots.

With respect to saving time, because of the commitment to the development and the installation and the bringing things onboard, at this point, we have not saved time. In daily operations, we do save time. I would say that we save between twenty and forty hours a day.

Our organization has improved because of the time savings. We've got robots now taking ten seconds to do what people were taking four to six minutes to do. It's a whole department of people that are now free to do other things.

I like Orchestrator and how easy it is to manipulate and get your data, to see what's going on. My job is to make sure that the system is running, so it's very easy to go to the Orchestrator through the dashboards. If it's not running, you'll see through the logs what's not running and what has caused the problem. At that point, normally, I escalate it to whoever needs to work on it.

The company likes this solution because of scalability.

One of the things we're struggling with it how to project how many robots we need to do these processes, so better documentation or assistance in this regard would be useful.

With respect to the stability, on a scale of one to five, I would rate this solution a four. I cannot give it five, yet, because I have just not had enough exposure to it.

We have about twelve people working with this solution, from developers to the business side to the IT side.

The idea of RPA was brought back down to me from our VP of IT, but I'm not sure where he got it from.

We have already seen a workload that has been moved off of our employees. It was within the first two months of the bot being developed. It is not my place to say the amount, but I can say that it is substantial and six digits. 

From a cost perspective, the unattended bots are going to be a major saving for us. We have a lot of mundane, routine tasks that need to be done. I have not done very much with the attended bots, so I'm not sure how we might benefit from using them.

My advice to anybody who is implementing this solution is that knowing what it is you want to automate is the most important thing. We were kind of blind walking in on that. We had one process we looked at and now it's throughout our company. People have all kinds of ideas about what we can do with automation.

I would rate this solution an eight out of ten.

We are using the unattended robots and Orchestrator modules of UiPath.

We have built close to fifty processes in the three years that we have been a client. Our primary use case, the one the gives us the biggest relief, is the processing of premium border rows. The robot will pick up Excel files with between four hundred and a thousand rows of data, and then does the data entry into our policy issuance system.

All of our automation runs in a virtual environment and we do not have any problems. At the start, of course, there were a few bumps in the road, but we got it figured out and now have no issues at all using the VM.

When we began working with automation, I was the leader and I had three BAs and three developers offshore. When our company decentralized, we created three other robotics divisions. There are now twenty-eight of us including the project manager, the BAs, the testers, and our developers. People are spread across four different divisions within the corporation.

With respect to how easy it is to automate our company's processes, I will consider the individual components. With the Orchestrator, on a scale of one to five, that's easy, it's a five. It is very evident how to use it. The Studio, I am not a developer but I got six developers up and running on it in a very short period of time. It has a very short learning curve, so on a scale of one to five, I would rate it a four.

My rating of four is because I know that we had some challenges with using the recorder. Things would shift and there were a couple of things that had worked and then stopped working. We found a little instability, and it was hard for us to know whether it was us, or the application, or the studio. Ultimately, we were not able to get a final answer on the root cause of those problems.

We are no longer experiencing these problems. When we upgraded, a lot of that went away. Also, when we went to Orchestrator, a lot of that went away. Exactly as UiPath had told us when we went to them with the issue, they gave us some solutions and once we implemented them, the issue was corrected.

I did not attend the UiPath Academy, but my Business Analysts took the BA course and my offshore developers all took the Academy. On a scale of one to five, judging how beneficial it is, I would rate the training a five easily. Before the Academy came around, they were kind of self-taught. When they took the Academy, it closed some of their gaps.

When we started with this solution, we did a PoC with the help of a UiPath developer. In two weeks we built a PoC for a bank reconciliation, which was pretty fast. That helped us decide whether we wanted to go with the product, and of course, we did. After that, we took the code, which really didn't have a lot of bells and whistles in it, and we gave it to one of our developers to really soup it up and make it more robust. That took them about a month to do.

Orchestrator has given us a huge boost in terms of efficiency.

In addition to the resource-creating benefit that we get from this solution, it has given people the opportunity to move away from those mundane jobs and into something more challenging. Rather than sitting there doing data entry, they're able to move up, re-skill themselves, and add value to themselves as well as the organization.

We have been able to eliminate one hundred percent of human errors. We found that the robot was better than the human because when the human was doing some of the processes, they were supposed to be checking into another system. While testing our robot, we found that the robot's state was different from this other system that it's supposed to check against. We thought that the robot was wrong; however, we found out that the humans were eliminating that step. They were cutting corners. This stage of our development raised a flag to inefficiency on the human side.

In terms of the time that this solution saved, it equates to the equivalent of four full-time employees a year. At two thousand hours per year times four, that's a savings of eight thousand hours.

The Orchestrator is great because you schedule it, and that's it, you don't have to worry about it. It will tell you what passed and what failed if it had any issues. We don't have that dependency on someone needed to schedule tasks.

The code in Studio is easy to follow. I am not a developer, but I am able to read the code. When we have problems, the developer will display the script and I'm able to read it and follow it. Several times, I have been able to see where there was an error and the developer was able to fix it. It looks like it's easy to code.

We had some issues with instability for which we were never able to determine the root cause.

On a scale of one to five, I would rate the stability of this solution a five.

A UiPath consultant assisted us with our PoC, and the experience was incredible. They were really wonderful.

The technical support for this solution is excellent. They're very responsive and we never wait more than twenty-four hours for an answer. The developers have more contact with support than I do.

We did not use another RPA solution prior to this one. Our former CFO went to a meeting where they were talking about robotics, and when he returned from the meeting we had a discussion about it. I was working in Internal Audit at the time, and with his prompting, I left Internal Audit to head up the robotics process. From there, it just took off.

The initial setup of this solution was straightforward. To me, it just made sense.

In our first year, the development was a little bumpy, which is to be expected. I would say that it was fourteen to fifteen months before we hit a smooth path. Even with that, things go smoothly for a while until you start doing more challenging and more complex things, then you're back to a crazy path, then you correct yourself and things go smoothly again.

One of the issues is bad user requirements. Simply put, we don't know what we don't know, and we're dependent on the business to tell us. Even if you ask the same question in a variety of ways, if the business can't articulate it or tell you about it, then we can't build for it. Getting the right user requirements was our biggest challenge.

After that, we were trying to build for everything, instead of just building for the straight path. Trying to build in all of the exceptions and allow room for an imperfect world is what took us down. We've since learned that we're going to build for the straight path, and then look at the exceptions as we start to gather data on them. When we find exceptions that occur at a high frequency then we'll build for that. Failing is fine, and it is expected, as long as you can learn from it. Our approach is based on what we have learned from our mistakes.

From just one of our four divisions, A&H, we saved approximately $390,000 USD. You can multiply that to include the other three divisions (Estimate: $1.5 Million Dollars).

This past July, I completed a cost-benefit analysis and we determined that in the three-plus years that we have been using UiPath, we created the capacity to the equivalent of four full-time employees and have cost-avoidance in that we didn't have to hire five other employees. This is where the value is helping us utilize resources better.

Overall, we are giving ourselves a two year ROI.

We did not evaluate options from other vendors.

We went to Swiss RE because they offered to show us what they were doing. We saw their process and we were impressed by it, and it was a pretty nominal cost to buy the package. We thought, instead of wasting time, which could take months, and management wanted us to hit the ground running, we would try it. If we didn't like it then it wasn't a big loss of money. So, we totally circumvented the traditional route of purchasing and we are happy that we made the right decision.

From what I have seen recently, I'm excited to try the Community and start building my own robots because it just looks like it's gotten a lot easier.

I am looking forward to one of the upcoming options, the dashboard. It will give us the productivity of the robot, which is something that I do myself right now. I record everything on each robot that runs and we keep metrics on it. These include how long it took to run, how many transactions it processed, and what the error rate is. Then I have to figure out ROI. So, the dashboard is huge and at the top of my list of things that I want to see.

We have a process for obtaining the right requirements for someone to follow. We go and observe the business and we record the process. That way, when we have to sit down and write the requirements, we can refer to the video and don't have to keep going back to the business because that is going to annoy them. We include the video when we send it to our developers and that way they have a visual for it, as well. When we put together formal documentation we show screen prints of where to click. After doing it a couple of times, one of our developers had this great idea to make things configurable so that we're not hardcoding a lot of stuff in there. With that configuration file, we just keep improving.

From a cost perspective, I can't speak to the advantages of attended robots because we do not have any. When I look up the pre-automation cost of doing a process versus post-automation, we give ourselves a two year ROI. We're not going to automate everything immediately, so we give ourselves a two year ROI and if it's going to be a positive ROI, we'll go with it. Of course, based on what it is, we'll prioritize. If it's a nominal ROI it will probably go to the bottom of our pipeline, but that's what we do when trying to evaluate initiatives.

My advice to anybody who is researching this type of solution is to try UiPath. Use the free version. I have a friend who does this as well, and I encouraged him to use the free download and do something simple. After it worked, they would up going with the product. With respect to the cost, you're going to recognize the savings immediately for the cost of the tool.

We are very pleased with this product.

I would rate this solution a ten out of ten.

We are using the attended, unattended, and Orchestrator components of this solution.

Our primary use case is developing automation around revenue cycle management in the healthcare space.

We run automations in a virtual environment and we are very happy with that ability. It is much more time-consuming when compared to running it directly on the server, but it is very reliable and it is a great way to create automations that you wouldn't otherwise be able to create. Of course, we prefer to go directly to the same environment.

With respect to how easy it is to automate our company's processes, on a scale of one to five, I would rate it a four. In order for me to give it a five, it would have to be such that a user could go in and develop it easily with a point and a click. I think it would be extremely difficult to build a platform that was that simple for the end-user, but I think UiPath has come a long way and is very good at making it easier and easier as we go along.

We have at least ten developers who have gone through the certification training with the UiPath Academy. On a scale of one to five, judging how beneficial it is, I would rate the training four and a half. The training is wonderful. There are certain elements of the training platform that are not keeping up with the product though. Also, some of the things that are in the documentation are not up to date. Being a little outdated, it can be kind of frustrating for the people that are going through it. But, it's a great way for people to get a good understanding of how to use all of the elements of the process.

From the point that we purchased our UiPath license until we had our first robot was approximately three weeks. 

In terms of eliminating human errors, they are one hundred percent gone. When we build the bots we build them right, and there are no more human errors.

With respect to saving time, for the processes that we have built, it saves at least ninety percent of the time that humans were taking. We have to have somebody that monitors the bots. In case they stop, they have to start them up again.

We are a development shop for UiPath, so we use the Studio all day long.

We really like the Orchestrator and how I'm able to see what's going on with all of the different automations.

On the development side, more documentation on how to structure the setup for different environments would be helpful. Our biggest struggle had to do with questions like:

• Do I need to have fifty monitors to run fifty different bots?
• Do I need to have fifty separate computers around fifty different processes at the same time?

There was no really good documentation to teach us how to do that, so there was a bunch of trial and error involved in figuring it out.

We know that we didn't want on-premises computers, but we didn't have any documentation to explain how to set them up in the cloud. We went through several different iterations before we finally got that right.

Ultimately, it took us about three months before we decided on the structure that we wanted, so better documentation on infrastructure would be very helpful.

The product, itself, is generally very stable. On a scale from one to five, I would rate the stability a four. We do have situations where we've run some updates and then ended up with some OCR things breaking on us. But overall, we build automations for our customers and they don't really know that there are any problems whatsoever, because they're generally pretty easy to resolve.

We have approximately twenty people involved in the automation side of the business, but it's growing rapidly.

I have not used technical support other than the online forum.

This was our first RPA implementation.

The initial setup of this solution is straightforward. It just works. You download it from the cloud and install it on your computer. You might have to update your .NET framework, so make sure that it works. It is very visual and very intuitive, so you're up and running in no time with Studio. With Orchestrator, it takes a little bit of getting used to in terms of matching up Orchestrator with the computers that it's linked to but it took hardly any time for us.

We deployed the solution ourselves.

We have seen benefits, but I would say that it took us longer than most because initially, we were building through an RDP connection. We were also connecting to a software platform that is inherently slow. Between these two things, it took a lot of extra work to get it running and recognizing all of the images and stuff like that.

I can say for sure that we've seen savings on efficiency and labor for performing the tasks that we've automated. As a result of that, we've invested a lot more in training developers and building their skills. We're cash negative on the deal, but it's because we believe in the product. For the processes that we are actually doing, we are seeing savings right away, which is why we're investing more in UiPath.

For people who are researching this type of solution, I would suggest that they test all of them out. All of them give you an opportunity to try them. We initially made our decision to go with UiPath after looking at Automation Anywhere and Blue Prism. One of the primary factors that drove us to UiPath was developer feedback. Asking developers what platform they would choose to develop on, all of them said UiPath because it's very flexible and very intuitive. A lot of people are familiar with the .NET framework, so it's easy.

My advice for anybody who is implementing this solution is to first speak with people who have already deployed it in a similar type of target environment. Once you know how to set it up, it's easy. It depends on the infrastructure that you want, or need, for your organization. Otherwise, it's just going to be a bunch of trial and error.

From a cost perspective, the unattended bots are obviously much cheaper than the attended bots. However, to build a bot to automate a process where an unattended bot can run it is also more costly for the end-user. For us, it makes more sense to have attended bots. We also have access to a very low-cost labor pool. Because of that, it's cheaper for me to just have somebody monitoring the bots, running them manually.

Overall, this solution is awesome. I'm very excited about all of the new things. We've been doing automations for about eighteen months, and with the product from that time, to where we are today, many new things have come in. I mentioned the problems that we had with the RDP connection but Computer Vision comes out, and it makes things much easier and much more reliable. Fortunately, all those have now switched over to running directly on the servers where we're running the software, so the need for us has gone way. At the same time, I have used Computer Vision and it's great.

I would rate this solution a ten out of ten.

We are using this solution for a POC and Pilot stage for RPA deployment.

Ease of deployment means that business benefits can be developed quickly and easily.

The most valuable feature of this solution is the Studio.

Additional help with ROM and approach would be an improvement.