UiPath Reviews

As consultants, we have implemented UiPath for clients when they have asymmetric workloads because of COVID and they want to scale up but don't want to hire new people. We've implemented automations for clients that want to decrease their workflows. And we've seen efficiency gains as well when clients want to complement the work that humans are doing with the help of automations.

A good example of a client use case is a client that does mortgage loans. When someone comes to a loan officer, there's a lot of information that needs to be provided. There's a manual process that includes inputting the information into the system. Once the information is in the system, they need to run a lot of services, such as lien and credit checks, location verifications, inspections, flood reports, et cetera, before a loan application can be approved. 

We've automated this entire process for them. Our automations, built on UiPath, run all these services, generate all the reports, and store them in a centralized repository that can then be eyeballed by a human. That way they can make a judgment call on whether a loan should be processed or not.

Our in-house use case right now is around structuring reporting with UiPath. We have a Power BI layer and we use UiPath internally to check employee availability, as well as who is charging hours, and how many, to our projects. Overall, we use it for HR activities. We go into our HR management system, generate and download the reports using UiPath, and then modify and massage the data depending on business rules. We then publish that data into Power BI and that's used as a centralized dashboard for reporting for the organization. 

We recently did an engagement with some leaders in HR management. That organization has two kinds of certifications that they give out. We automated those processes as well as the reporting and the revenue reconciliation around them. They wanted to understand how many people were doing re-certifications, and their demographics. They wanted to see what the pass percentage was. They also wanted to be able to give the marketing team data about whom they should be targeting.

The automations we built for them using business rules produce information on whom they should be targeting. They help them understand which part of the world is doing their exams and which part of the world is not doing their exams, and where they need to spend more on marketing.

Before we automated these things, they had a team of four people doing that kind of work. Now, there is one person managing the automations instead of managing the actual processes. That was a big win for them as an organization. They were able to redeploy three people to do other work inside the organization. And in terms of savings, if the average person works 2,040 hours per year, we saved them around 8,000 person-hours of work annually.

Internally, in our company, the reporting process that we have automated used to take 45 to 50 minutes for the HR team to do. Now, reports are generated automatically. It has decreased the amount of effort that the HR team needs to do to generate reports.

There is also a lot of benefit with respect to human error. The tasks that you want to automate are usually repetitive, mundane activities—the swivel-chair activities where a junior analyst might be processing 500 loans in a day. People tend not to concentrate and they make mistakes in that kind of situation. Automation is not going to make those mistakes. There's a great reduction in human error when you implement RPA using UiPath.

In addition, as a small company, one of the biggest advantages we see from using UiPath is that they handle infrastructure, maintenance, and updates with the cloud offering. That helps a lot of small and mid-tier companies implement automation, companies whose IT practices aren't as mature. That's one of the most important features and benefits of UiPath.

The cloud version does decrease your startup time. Where you might have spent four weeks provisioning a server or a virtual machine, installing things, and then securing network assets, with this solution you don't have to do those things. It's all available directly, plug-and-play from UiPath. The time to value is decreased. Cloud instances are, obviously, a little bit more expensive than what you would pay with an on-prem solution, but because UiPath gives it to you at scale, the difference is that great.

For SMEs, the effort to stand something up themselves adds a lot of work to the automation. The ROI is quicker for SMEs when they do a cloud implementation.

The only way you're able to show true value with an automation program is if you automate something end-to-end. UiPath does end-to-end automations and, among all the other tools that are available, UiPath is the leader in end-to-end automation. 

In addition, they're growing their platform. It's no longer just an RPA program. It's a platform that gives you capabilities like AI, Computer Vision, and chatbots. It's not just about task or process automation, it's about the end-to-end life cycle. Previously, if you wanted to do a chatbot integration, there was no end-to-end solution for it. Today, UiPath offers direct integrations with chatbot services and direct integrations to some level of AI analysis on your processes. No other provider today does any of that. If you get into specific, end-to-end scenarios, UiPath certainly is a platform that allows you to achieve that end-to-end automation.

UiPath's AI capabilities are pretty good. Computer Vision is their AI functionality that helps you look into images. If you're automating inside a Citrix environment, for example, you really can't access the usual selectors or data boxes or text boxes. It's all an image. We had to do an automation in such an environment, and we used the AI capabilities of Computer Vision to build dynamic selectors. That was beneficial. I don't think any other vendor currently has that capability. The way they've implemented AI is not just a buzzword. They've really applied it in the Computer Vision feature.

And when it comes to the UiPath user community, nobody would be able to do implementations without it. It's a lot like Stack Overflow, but for RPA. It's a very strong community and it helps anyone who is doing development, management, initialization, et cetera. 

They can certainly improve their Automation Hub, which is their centralized place to gather new opportunities. The improvement could be, in part, in the capabilities. For example, it would help if there were a centralized dashboard. Maybe they could combine Insights and Automation Hub into one solution.

And they also need to revisit the pricing model of Automation Hub. It is an expensive functionality that clients don't really want to pay for. They feel that it should be part of the program and available out-of-the-box. Because it's not, clients just do things using an Excel sheet.

I started doing automations back in 2015, and I've been using UiPath since around 2017. I work as a management consultant. The company I work for provides consulting services to organizations that want to use UiPath, Blue Prism, and Automation Anywhere.

I started out doing development with UiPath, and now I do a lot of infrastructure initialization. I've done development and implementations on the on-prem solution, although I've never set one up, and I've set up cloud instances of UiPath myself.

As a company, we also use the free Community Edition in-house so that we can build a point of view on solutions, but most of our implementations are for clients as consultants.

Scaling is a benefit of the cloud offering because you can easily add a new license without provisioning a new server virtual machine, and you can also or decrease licenses. This is only applicable to an organization that does not have high IT maturity and does not have virtual machines that can be spun up. If a client is very mature, Fortune 100 or Fortune 50, with a very robust IT team that can easily spin up virtual machines, the cloud solution is not going to be beneficial when it comes to scaling.

They have multiple tiers for technical support. I've used all of them. With the Premium Plus Support you get immediate remediation. You have a support representative available who is like an account executive and who is the go-to person for any issues. It's very easy and very quick. 

The mid-tier is Premium Support where you don't have a direct point of contact, but you still get priority service. 

We recently had a production issue with Orchestrator. I opened a ticket on February 2nd and we just resolved it this morning, six days later. It wasn't a big issue but it took them some time. That was with the free support. I didn't expect them to prioritize it

Overall, they are responsive. The top-tier support is a 10 out of 10, the mid-tier is about an eight out of 10, and the free support is about a seven or eight out of 10.

One of the biggest advantages of UiPath is the ease of setup. Their cloud instance is probably four or five releases ahead of what Blue Prism or Automation Anywhere offer right now. You can buy a license in 30 seconds and get your own automation instance set up on the cloud within an hour.

UiPath has made setting up and starting an implementation very easy because it's a service. If you're going with the cloud, there's no installation, no setup, and no server or VM initialization.

UiPath also has something called REFramework (Robotic Enterprise Framework). The REFramework is built-in and helps streamline implementations with some of the industry best practices for development. UiPath provides that to everybody as a basic template to start an implementation. Blue Prism or Automation Anywhere usually provide you with a blank slate and a junior developer might struggle a bit to actually understand how to do exception handling or logging. UiPath allows you to do that very simply with REFramework.

We have also used the UiPath Academy courses and they have been very beneficial. UiPath started giving all their Academy material free of cost to everybody. They were the first RPA vendor to do that. By doing that, they created a competency, globally, inUiPath. It certainly helps everybody. If I don't understand something about a new feature that comes out, I open the Academy and watch a video, or I read some material or a white paper that they have published, and I understand it better.

The material is really good. It helps you understand their platform in a very robust manner. There are walkthroughs where you can do implementations and developments while the course is going on. That really helps as well.

The Academy helps us build an internal understanding of new capabilities and then go to clients and tell them, "This is another new capability. It's available to you free of cost because you've already purchased the licenses. Here is what its potential is, and this is how you should implement it." As a result of the Academy courses, we can advise clients better and help them unleash that potential.

UiPath changed the way that they do licensing, starting in 2022. Any partner that has status with them is now allowed to sell licenses, because UiPath itself does not sell licenses anymore. They have a sales team that manages licenses and works with vendors like us.

They can definitely work on the way that they publish material about their licenses. Every year they change their license SKUs. They change the definitions and the naming conventions. They change capabilities and functionalities. It becomes very hard, as a user, to track it. We recently had to renew our licenses and the way that they defined the RPA developer license had changed. The RPA developer license is now called an automation developer license. The two capabilities are very different. We had to go through learning to make sure that we would have all the capabilities that we had previously, and understand what the new capabilities are.

There was no material available on their partner portal or on the internet to help us understand which licenses give you which capabilities. That's something that they need to make more transparent and not reinvent it every year. They need a level of standardization.

There is a tool called Power Automate which used to be called WinAutomation. Power Automate is available to everybody with an Office 365 license. The only other competitor to UiPath's community would be the WinAutomation/Power Automate community. It is a very community-driven solution, similar to UiPath. That community is as strong as the UiPath community.

UiPath recently got into the process analysis space. They've started doing things like task mining and process mining, but I wouldn't say UiPath is a leader in that space. They do have something called Task Capture that allows you to document processes for automation. But UiPath's process analysis piece is not yet as developed as much as something like Celonis.

The way we break down the process around automation is into three stages: advice, implement, and operate. The advice piece, which includes process assessment and building business cases is an area where UiPath is not great as a tool. It has the capabilities, but it's fairly new.

But at the "implement" stage, obviously it's a great product.

And the "operate" is where they have realized that the stickiness comes in with clients. There's always going to be a need for "operate" and they are getting into it. They provide something called UiPath Insights that gives you analysis about how your automation is running in production and to help you manage the automations. It gives you quick dashboards to present to senior leaders to show ROI and business case creations. UiPath needs to grow in the "operate" space and they are doing so. Neither Blue Prism or Automation Anywhere offers anything for process mining or task mining.

In terms of innovation, I don't think that the cloud solution helps me innovate. UiPath's integration functionalities can help me come up with an innovative solution, but the fact that it's a cloud instance or software as a service, does not really help me innovate as much. I could do the same innovation with an on-prem solution.

Most of our use cases come in finance functions, however, we certainly have use cases spread across all sorts of other functions. For example, in HR. We've had a lot recently in IT operations and then also in broader operations. Obviously, that depends on the company we're working with. We're getting more and more customer-facing automation that is running all the way through the organization, from front office through middle office and back, across all different verticals within a company.

UiPath has improved our clients' companies and the way they function. For example, overall, automating the mundane and the repetitive allows people to do people things. Things like invoice processing and using Document Understanding to do that, enable your accounts payable team to look at the exceptions and do exception-based processing, which requires human judgment. Keying an invoice and working out who to send it to for approval should be rules-based. If it's not rules-based, it's probably an error or a miscommunication between the vendor who's sending it. Maybe it's a mismatch to the PO, and that requires human judgment. Therefore, just getting it out to a human to do that at the right time is critically important. If you're giving your people more time to do the exception-based management, you also give them the time and capacity to stop that from being an exception next time. Whether that's expanding the automation to be able to handle that use case, or whether it's educating your vendors when they're sending you invoices.

We work prominently with unattended solutions and larger end-to-end automation. What we're really loving about UiPath is the number of ways we can now inject human intervention at different parts of those larger workflows instead of looking at a big workflow and working out what parts of it we can automate, aiming to automate end-to-end and only working out the bits that we really need the human intervention in.

UiPath is constantly coming up with ways, whether it's through Teams or it's through apps, there are all sorts of different ways to get the human in the loop and get the automation throughput as high as we can.

Our clients use the UI apps feature. We use that for quite a few different functions. It helped to reduce the workload of IT departments by enabling end-users to create apps. That said, we generally work closer to the business than the IT side. We'd like to see it as taking the work away from the backlog that IT is looking to implement. You don't need an IT department that is quiet and doesn't have a big long queue of work. Allowing the business to be able to build their own solutions based on their business process is very powerful.

The UI apps feature has increased the number of automation. It’s certainly increasing the number of things you can automate and also the amount of a given process you can automate.

It has also reduced the time of creation. Certainly with the app creation, having a single platform reduces the time. You no longer need to integrate it with other different web forms or things you create on the front end, which we did a number of years ago. Now, it's one solution. UiPath can do it all.

For clients that use automation cloud offering, it has helped to decrease UiPath's total cost of ownership. It goes a little bit back to the IT side. You don't need to involve them nearly as much. Having a platform that is always on the latest version really, really helps. It also closes down the handoff between business and IT within the COE.

UiPath has saved costs for our client's organizations. The IT costs are different for each organization. We have clients who have an outsourced IT set up where they pay quite large costs to spin up machines and to maintain and upgrade those machines and services. Having the one solution as UiPath and offering the cloud is critically important for that.

In terms of on-prem instances, clients have saved costs there as well. We're very, very excited about the automation speed and the one-button deployment to the whole environment. That's certainly a step in that direction with on-prem. That will certainly save our client and us a lot of time. That way, everyone can spend more time building automation rather than building a platform to put them into.

The product has reduced human errors. On the same note, it also allows humans to spend a little bit more time on those exceptional cases. When the pressure may be on to get an invoice keyed it allows them to spend the right amount of time getting that exception handled. Then, of course, everything that's going through the bot is pretty much zero-error. The way the bots work, if there is an error it's going to let someone know. It's not going to guess and it's not going to fat finger.

We increasingly use UiPath's AI functionality. We certainly do on custom models with Document Understanding. We're just starting a project now to look at pulling entities out of emails. This is an exciting use case and I’m excited to learn about the capabilities that are being expanded.

The ability to automate processes is twofold. One of them is, it allows us to start to create human decisions. The human decision is the bit that you really need to automate around and starting to build that human decision-making into an AI model is critically important. The other side of that is that, when you're running automation, you have the ability to create a huge dataset. Everything that's being done is rules-based and it's data-driven so you can map everything every bot does, every button press if you want. That's a huge amount of data and a huge amount of input to AI models. Having it all in the UiPath platform is critically important for our customers. It's great that UiPath has lots of partners and we use partners, technology partners, to do that when required. However, the more that comes into the UiPath platform, the better.

We’ve utilized Academy courses from UiPath. UiPath's academy is amazing. It's unparalleled in the industry. We traditionally have done a lot of training for our clients over the years. However, we find with UiPath, we just point them in the direction of the Academy. We're always there to support, of course, and supplement any training that's specific to maybe a client environment or a client business system. That said, it's a fantastic resource for partners and for clients of UiPath.

The quality of the training Academy is great. It's also a tool to evangelize UiPath in our customer base. If someone hears about UiPath or they come to one of our demos through our delivery life cycle, and they really want to know something about UiPath, or want to get involved, or want to become a part of the COE or become a developer, it’s very, very easy to send them in the right direction. They can do the training they want to do, and they can get as deep as they want. It’s great and offers a low-effort way to evangelize UiPath.

The time to competency has been lowered with those that go through the Academy. It's not only learning. Learning things off slides. It's getting in there, it's whether it's a community edition or a training install, it's building things. Through the certifications, users can submit those things to get reviewed. This makes sure that people who are certified through the academy really do know their stuff. They've got hands-on experience. There's nothing quite like doing it in a real process. With the UiPath Academy, new users get as close as they can to that.

There should be extra ways for humans to interact with automation.

From what I've seen, and it's very early, however, there's certainly the direction they are headed, which is really, really great to see. It's my belief that Document Understanding will continue to improve. I'd like to see more predictive-type stuff, which again, we are beginning to see.  We'd love to get Document Understanding continually improving and having it more improved by the SMEEs who are performing the processes rather than the data analysts.

We've been implementing UiPath for just over four years.

The stability is amazing. Years have gone by and obviously, the product has changed a lot, however, of late, the last couple of years have been great stability-wise.

The object repository and modern folders have been great for the scalability of the solution. From the platform side, it's certainly easy to scale. We're very, very impressed on the automation suite side. You can deploy everything very quickly and you can scale everything up. 

The focus on reuse from a developer level is great to see. That's really improved in the last little while. On the other side of it, the actual scale through the organization, in terms of evangelizing automation, and making our customers an enterprise that automates first, there are numerous tools that do that really well. Whether it's the workshops that UiPath will come and do, or that we facilitate or it's through the pipeline itself, the scalability has obviously been a focus for the last little while. It's really, truly great.

We very rarely need to reach out to UiPath support. If we do, we know we're going to get a prompt response, and we're going to get a good answer. That said, we rarely need it. It's very, very good in general when we do use it.

We've got a few clients that run multiple solutions. They've been legacy users of another solution for a very long time. Citizen Development through StudioX is unparalleled in UiPath. Attended automation is obviously a strong point and has been for years. There are also things like Document Understanding. Document Understanding is much stronger than any of the solutions on other providers. There are those value adds that come in for that full lifecycle.

The solution is relatively straightforward. We have a dedicated platform team whose role is to implement UiPath for our customers, whether it's integrating them into the cloud or getting their business applications on the cloud. Or, whether it's an on-prem solution where we'll interact with their systems and integrate with their CyberArk or AD groups or whatever they need.

Each deployment is very dependent on the customer. We've had them deployed in a few days and we've had some that have gone on a few months, unfortunately. We find that talking to the risk group, the security group, and the infrastructure group all at the same time on day one of the project will make sure everyone's aligned - and that is the best way to mitigate the risks. 

The last thing you want is someone from the security organization putting their hand up in week four and saying, "Hold on, hold on, start again. This doesn't comply with one of the controls in our organization." It's about educating and keeping everyone, all stakeholders from the IT side involved at all stages.

The ROI that our clients have seen is very process-dependent. We've seen some huge 300 to 600% on particular use cases. Some of them are very easy to calculate due to the fact that we're taking work away from manual users. We've also seen some really good ones recently that are actually increasing revenue. Whether that's giving the capacity to sales-type items or whether it's tasks such as processing refunds and all those sorts of things that shouldn't be taking time away from salespeople, it’s been helpful.

The licensing can get a little confusing. There's been a move recently to create personas around licensing. My feedback from customers is that it hasn't necessarily helped. Some of the new enterprise-type agreements, the per-seat arrangements, are interesting. That's likely the way it'll go. Even then, it's still a little on the confusing side at times. We do a lot of work with clients to get them to understand the licensing model.

We've been aware of other solutions, and in comparison, with UiPath, it's the breadth of the lifecycle that sets it apart. UiPath as a platform, from the moment the first person at an organization thinks about automating, to reaping the benefits of that and improving the day-to-day work of the business, there's a solution for all of that. Whether it's process mining and finding automation candidates, it's the way UiPath brings different users into the automation. Apps and insights make sure we're pulling the right data out to keep generating the business case to grow the UiPath account itself. Also, along with that, is the ability to provide the extra benefit and knowing what benefit we're providing.

We have clients across both on-prem and cloud deployments. We have about 25% cloud, 75% on-prem solutions. We use various versions of the on-premises model. We probably average about 12-month-old versions, however, we do have clients on the most recent as well. We also have a couple of clients who are lagging a little bit.

I'd advise potential new users to get in there and get started. You don't know until you've tried. You don't have to look very hard to get started, however, it's important once you get going to start to think about how you scale and how you build an operating model around it. Maybe start small, and think big, and make sure you plan accordingly.

I'd rate the solution at a nine out of ten.

I've used the solution within the healthcare system in the past. At this time, I use it for mortgages. 

I use the solution to automate any digital processes that have specific rules and steps to follow and can potentially save the company a lot of time and money.

The Studio is extremely user-friendly.  All of their products are user-friendly. I use the Orchestrator a lot as it's so simple. 

My assessment of the ease of building automation using the product is positive. The UI of the application itself is very easy to use and navigate. It's very easy to debug. The fact that they're constantly listening to the feedback from the customers and the developers in the developer community is great. They're constantly pushing updates to fix things or add new features based on that feedback. They are really a company that listens to their users.

I have done automations for good causes. It was for responsibly disposing of medications. I didn't stick around to see the positive impact. I implemented it and then left. This was for a Fortune Top-Four company. There were a lot of people who ultimately received the notifications that came out thanks to this robot that let them know how to dispose of medications and the requirements. It also went as far as to locate the two nearest facilities based on their physical address within the closest driving distance. Hopefully, it caused a lot of people to be able to easily know where they could take those medications to dispose of them.

The solution enables us to implement end-to-end automation. It's extremely important. If you're going to automate something, you need to go all in. It's not necessarily black and white. There are exceptions to that rule. However, if it can be automated and it makes sense to automate it, then it should be automated. There shouldn't be human intervention if it's not absolutely necessary. Otherwise, it defeats the purpose of automating.

The user community is great. I see several people who are very trustworthy in their responses. It's very, very active. Everybody's helping each other out as far as giving them solutions to their issues, so it's something that I turned to quite a bit. 

We've seen large time and money savings. As you start doing more and more processes, other people talk to other people, and then you get other people coming to you saying they have processes that should be automated. It's simply a matter of knocking down those walls and getting people to understand that we have this tool at our fingertips. And once they understand that then the opportunities are limitless.

I've seen some minimization in the on-premises footprint thanks to UiPath. In some companies that I've worked at, yes. In others, no. Where I'm at right now, they're still on-prem there, however, they are planning to go to the cloud next year.

Whether it is essential or not for customers to go to the cloud to reduce this on-premise footprint depends on the customer. Some customers, especially in the healthcare space, are afraid of the cloud for security reasons even though there is a lot of documentation to prove otherwise that it is very secure. The healthcare industry is always behind when it comes to that stuff. It takes a lot of building up of trust. The same is true with the government. However, there are others that embrace leading-edge technologies, and those are the ones that are using the cloud.

I've used the Academy courses. I was able to get my advanced RPA developer certification. It allows me to stay current on all of the updates that are being done across all of the products. It's very easy to filter and find the course that you want to watch depending on the product or your level of expertise. The actual format of the courses is very well done. The person who speaks is very clearly spoken, and easily understood. They do a combination of reading, videos, and hands-on in all the courses. It is a little bit for every type of learning style, and I've gotten a lot out of it.

I do not use the solution's AI functionality in our automation program much. I have used document understanding, which is one of their AI products. It opens up a whole new world of possibilities. There's already so much that can be done very easily and there is nothing that's too difficult to implement. Once you do understand how to build processes that use AI, it opens up many other possibilities that could get even bigger in terms of the value that it brings to a company. I gained a lot of knowledge and new skills from going through the process of building out a document understanding process and understanding how to learn all those new tools. It also integrates with the action center and a couple of the other UI top products as well. It's a really good learning experience. 

It has enabled me to automate more processes. It can contribute to the end-to-end automation that we implement. It just depends on where the company is at and their automation journey if they have processes that would be very high returns in terms of value and require more AI integration.

The product can help speed up digital transformation and reduce the cost of the digital transformation. Having these tools in your toolbox allows you to do a lot more so long as you have the digital input.

We no longer require any expense, complex application upgrades, or IT application support. It's very easy, especially with the cloud. I did have some difficulties recently at a company that goes through a proxy on their VMs, which made it a little bit more difficult to install the machines and get them working. However, overall, when you have to install what is needed to build and run the automation and you're on the cloud version, it's simply an executable that you download. You click through a couple of screens that are very self-explanatory and well-explained. And that's it. There's nothing special to do as everything else is hosted in the cloud. As long as you have the wherewithal to set up a VM with the basic requirements that are needed, it's extremely easy.

I've seen a reduction in human errors while using UiPath. A robot is programmed to do what you tell it to do. It's not going to make the same type of mistakes that a human would make. It would make mistakes only due to the way that you program it. Therefore, it absolutely should and does reduce the errors that you would see otherwise from a human.

The solution has freed up employee time. The most recent report that I got from some automation that has been done in the past shows that, over the past five or six months of automation, that I have built there have been two full-time employees at 60 hours a week who were let go, and then there were at least two other people that were are now spending at least half their time doing manual inputs. Now, they are doing other things. There's a direct impact that I've seen just from recent automation.

The money saved from manual labor is a clear cost savings. Other times, it's more about cost avoidance. Sometimes there is some additional value that it brings that's almost unable to be calculated - such as customer satisfaction, customer retention, or customer acquisition. Those things are a little bit harder to calculate. For the most part, it offers a clear time equals-money type of cost-benefit.

Unfortunately, I used to be a lover of their Slack channel and people don't seem so responsive there anymore. Unfortunately, I've gotten away from using their Slack channel. That would have been a really good way for me to get some help from the community, yet I don't find it helpful anymore.

They're working on integrating their version of a chat. They're starting with Studio Xpress or StudioWeb. I don't use StudioWeb and I don't use StudioX, however, I would love to have that type of feature in Studio. I could use it across the board, not just in Studio, but in Assist. 

Their error messaging could use some improvement. More times than not an error that you receive is accurate or not clear.

In terms of missing features, I can't think of any. They are always ten steps ahead.

I've used the solution since 2018.

The solution is stable and reliable. 

The solution is 100% scalable. 

It's very easy to open an issue with support. I've learned over the years that you don't need to necessarily say that you have a high-priority issue in order to get a quick response. They are very responsive. They are very clear in the steps they need you to take to give you what they need in order to fix your problem. If they're unable to fix it by requesting that information. They get on a call with you to troubleshoot. They follow up with you after. They give you a survey to make sure they did well. Every part of their support process is great. I have no complaints at all.

Positive

I have only scratched the surface of RPA. With Blue Prism and Automation Anywhere, I've only worked with them enough to see where they are in comparison to UiPath. I also fully trust the reports that Gartner puts out, and UiPath has been on top for so long now and always is and always keeps that spot. I don't want to waste my time on anything else. I want to stay in this lane with a product and a company that I know and love - one that has done an amazing job - and be an expert in that rather than go around and only know a little bit about a lot of things.

It's very easy to implement the solution and I've done it multiple times. I'm not somebody who typically installs software. I'm not a hardware person. I'm not even good with other types of software necessarily, and yet I find the installation process to be very simple.

I didn't need a lot of staff to handle the deployment process. There are companies that I've been at that have to follow certain protocols for auditing purposes and have to have somebody that's designated DevOps in order to do the deployment. In which case, it requires a little bit more hand-holding or documentation to explain how to do that to somebody who's not in the position like I am who knows how to do it, and you have to explain it to them. I don't think that it's needed or necessary, and it actually hinders the process, especially when we deploy something to production. It doesn't work quite the same in production as it just did in development, and you need to make changes, and it really hinders that process when you have another set of hands to go through.

Maintenance has the potential to be a little bit difficult. That said, I've done big upgrades twice now. For the most part, things have been backward compatible. I haven't had an issue. I didn't need to go back and fix any previous processes that were deployed. I just started using the newer versions of things on new processes going forward and the old ones still ran with no issue whatsoever, it very clearly states things that have been deprecated or things that will be deprecated by a certain date. 

With the cloud version, there is not much maintenance required. However, they did just do an upgrade on the cloud. I was not aware that it was coming, and it would have been nice to at least see something on the site to catch your eye, some type of scrolling banner or flashing to tell you, "Hey, this is updated. Click this link to see what the updates are." In the cloud, if you're not using the automation suite, it will just update without you knowing about it, which I'm not a fan of. I understand that's how that works. If you don't have an automation suite, however, I would like to know. Don't make me go search for it. I'm on Orchestrator every day. I'd prefer if they put something there, or put something in Studio so that I know it's coming since the changes did affect us. They had some role and permission changes that affected my developers, and they weren't able to publish anymore, and I had to figure that out. Ultimately, you do have to make sure that you're staying up to date with your studio and assistant.

The pricing is very fair. They have adjusted their pricing model so that several variables and volume base could be one of them. I'm not too sure. A lot of times I'm cut out from those conversations. The company itself has to sign off on contracts or make the decision on that. That said, it's my understanding the pricing is very fair for what they give you. You see your benefit and the return from it quickly.

I'm a developer and an architect. 

The ease of usability and implementation for UiPath as well as the wide array of products that they have to support their automation journey make it a great product. The amazing support they have is great. The community that they have is bigger than all the other options, so you're going to find more resources when it comes to needing help with any type of issue. I'd advise those considering the product to look at the ratings and pertinent reports to get an overview of who's the best.

I'd rate the solution ten out of ten.

We've used it to automate most of our processes. Our organization is completely technology-driven and we have been able to automate a lot of our processes with UiPath. The main thing that we are using it for is document creation with multiple fields and approval processes.

We're using it to automate daily tasks, using small bots for multiple processes. In the long-run, they're actually connected together. A lot of people have left our organization in the past couple of years and, instead of hiring new employees, we actually try to build a bot for whatever the work those employees were doing.

By not replacing employees who have left, we have been able to achieve our aim of running a lean company. We are able to save a lot of money on HR costs as well as on the costs of hiring new employees.

In addition, our document-processing time has been reduced for every customer that we are catering to, and that has resulted in great ROI as well as customer satisfaction.

We have compared the performance of humans with the bots who replaced them as they left the organization. The humans were making a lot of errors compared to the bots. The bots are not perfect and they do make their share of errors, but they are quite different from human errors. Everything is logic-based, and everything happens with triggers, so the possibility of an error is minimalistic when something is being handled by a bot. That is especially true for a bot that is created with UiPath because it's so mature. Overall, there are hardly any errors that come out of the bots made with UiPath.

Another benefit comes from the UiPath Academy courses. It saves us on training costs because we don't have to develop the content for training new employees. We're not product experts when it comes to UiPath and the Academy delivers training in a fashion that is easy to understand. There's a lot of support provided with the training courses as well. Not only does the Academy help in terms of training-development costs, but it has minimized the duration of training for each employee who starts to use UiPath. The results are great savings for the organization, both monetary, through automation, and non-monetary when it comes to training.

The AI and machine learning that are built into these bots really help us to make bots at a mature level where they're able to track with real-world customers. They also help with employee engagement and business productivity and take them to a whole new level. Obviously, we cannot develop such technology from scratch. We used built-in processes and automations in the past, but once we found, first when we were using Automation Anywhere, and now while using UiPath, this type of technology, it really took over the technology suite that our organization had been using previously and replaced it completely. UiPath is a complete suite that can handle most of our needs by itself.

Document creation is one of the most important features for us. As a healthcare company, we have a lot of documents with complex fields. For example, if a treatment is booked by a customer in another country, a lot of paperwork has to be completed. That paperwork first goes to the healthcare provider and, once accepted there, it comes to the company to be approved by the management. Then it goes back to the customer.

In addition, the process has been integrated into mobile apps. That way, a senior manager gets a request on the mobile app and to approve the transaction they just have to press the "Accept" button and everything else happens on its own. All of that happens in a matter of seconds.

Also, the UiPath Academy courses are very user-friendly and enable us to achieve a lot more. Those courses have taught us a lot, especially for our new automation employees. Once the basic courses are completed by any new employee, we actually recommend that they complete the certifications that are available via UiPath, and some of them are actually free of cost. Only after completing certification do we allow them to work on the floor. We have found the Academy content to be really amazing in terms of design as well as its functionality. We have made use of all of the courses there are.

The UiPath community has grown quite a bit, but it's still not on par with the kind of support that you would find with Automation Anywhere. That is still missing because UiPath is a relatively new entrant in the market. The community support is growing, but that is definitely one of the areas that can be improved.

Also, sometimes there are failures in the cloud during migration. Say you're migrating it from one instance to another instance. There are failures and there's not much support for such cases in the UiPath documentation. While it is a rare instance that we need to migrate, whenever we do have to migrate, we generally face some issues. I feel that there are bugs in that area.

We've been using UiPath for about three years.

The platform is really stable. There's never been a point when it's been unstable or has had runtime issues. There have been really minute server crashes, unexpectedly. But I don't think that is due to the platform. It is more due to the server environment and the hosting environment not being configured properly. There are no problems whatsoever in terms of the stability as well as the performance of the product.

The product is very scalable. It is meant for scalability. It is specifically meant for a situation where there are a lot of tasks that have to be completed by and it automates everything. Even if large volumes of data and tasks have to be completed with lightning speed, that is exactly where UiPath fits in. It does the job beautifully. That is the reason it was able to replace the whole technology suite that we were using, a suite that consisted of different products.

The technical support has been great. The only issue that we've had is that there aren't enough specialized support people who can help with the server issues. Configuring Google Cloud Platform with UiPath can be challenging. There were some errors that we were not able to figure out on our own. There are two support teams that we could reach out to, either the server support or the UiPath support. Sometimes both of them were confused about what was causing the issue. And sometimes, it takes more than the anticipated time to resolve the issue. But overall, UiPath provides great support.

Positive

At first, we were using a completely in-house technology system. After that, we used Automation Anywhere for a couple of years. But once we started using UiPath, we were able to replace that completely.

The initial setup was fairly easy. We've been using the Google Cloud Platform to host the entire automation platform and there isn't much documentation for deploying it on GCP. There are a lot of settings and configurations that are location-specific and that relate to the load and the number of bots that you are going to make with UiPath. There are a lot of things that come into the picture and the documentation is not up to the mark.

To sum it up, it is a little difficult, but not impossible to deploy it initially.

It only takes a few days but it depends on the complexity of the kinds of bots that you plan to run with the platform. Certain bots could take time. For that situation, there are consulting services. Also, there are certain bots that are already there as a template and you can customize them. But if there are processes that require a custom bot to be built from scratch, that could definitely take time. That could take from months to a year if it's a very complex bot and you're creating it with an in-house team.

Our implementation strategy was to take one step at a time. We had designed a complete project deployment roadmap, in which we had certain milestones that we planned to achieve within a few months. There were then more milestones that we planned to reach within a year. We did have to take on some consulting services from UiPath partners for the customized bots, but that resulted in the development costs being reduced, as it went a lot faster than it would have gone without the consulting support. It has gone pretty smoothly.

Apart from the consultants for the customized bots, the initial deployment was completely handled by our in-house team. There was a fair bit of documentation provided with the system itself and we found it sufficient to take care of the initial deployment.

The ROI has been really excellent. We're able to save a lot of costs that were previously paid for subscriptions to multiple suites of software. We were able to save all of that and invest it into one product, UiPath, as well as into development of the bots.

The ROI has been very positive for us. The main issue is that there is an initial investment that you have to make. Once you do that, the ROI keeps on growing year-on-year. For us, it has only been three years. If we compare our costs and ROI over a longer period, I'm sure we'll see a lot better ROI.

The costs are related to infrastructure and development and, of course, at a later stage, include monitoring and maintenance. If you compare all of that over a longer period of time, you'll see savings of anywhere between two and 15 times compared to an equivalent system, over a period of about five to seven years.

Another area with room for improvement is the pricing. Initially, the pricing was a lot more affordable. Now, it seems a bit excessive.

Get an estimate of the cost from UiPath sales representatives. Don't just include the UiPath cost, but also the consulting costs that you might have to pay, and the number of licenses that you might need as an organization. The third thing to consider is the development cost of the bots. All of that has to be considered well in advance.

I don't think there is anything that UiPath bots aren't able to do. But be aware that the budget could become excessive by using UiPath because there are so many different costs that come into the picture. You could require trained employees, people who have previous experience with UiPath, to develop bots that are a custom fit for your organization.

Cost would be one of the things that I would recommend that other organizations consider in advance to see if it suits their budgets. They should also consider whether they have the resources that can deploy and design bots that are able to automate the tasks and the processes that they want to automate.

Apart from UiPath, we also used Automation Anywhere. The reason we use UiPath far more than Automation Anywhere is because we have been using it for some time and we have some resources who are quite well-trained on it. It suits us pretty well. It has automated most of our processes and really kept our system moving. Whatever issues we have had with the product have been very well resolved by the customer support team in a very timely manner, and that is another reason we prefer UiPath over Automation Anywhere.

You need to have resources who are trained in UiPath. You could take the initiative of training employees, but you need some senior resources who have prior experience with UiPath who can be project managers and guide the development and analyst teams on how to reach the goals that the organization is trying to achieve.

UiPath was a fairly new product when we started using it. They were giving a 60-day free trial and were also providing free certifications for that initial period. That is how we started with it. Over the years, we've seen that the UiPath community has grown quite a bit. From being a new entry in the automation market, it has grown into a very mature product and it has now taken over as the main system that our company is using. We rely on technology to support our backend processes and we need a system that is very reliable in terms of delivery. UiPath has turned out to be a system that works out very well for us. The UiPath community really helps whenever there are bugs or glitches that our company is facing. You can reach out to the community where there are very senior developers as well as analysts and you can get a lot of help there, apart from the customer support.

It runs in its own private cloud in the Google Cloud Platform. We have some projects that are run on UiPath that are given to independent contractors to work on. We give a contractor a license for the system and they have to install UiPath on their computer and complete whatever work they have to complete on that. But for our internal organization and employees, we have a private cloud over which UiPath is running.

The biggest lesson would be to just take one step at a time. Make use of the partner support at the beginning. Initially, we tried to build everything ourselves and that cost a lot more than it would have if we had used consultants. There are companies that provide consulting support and there are companies that will actually build your bots exactly to your requirements. That way, you can just deploy them from day one. They also provide maintenance and support for the bots they have developed for you.

Since we are a healthcare organization with HIPAA rules, we're on-prem. Our use cases boil down to claims testing and membership testing. It'd be institutional professional dental claims and making sure our membership is loaded correctly.

We have to configure our software to pay claims and pay providers. What we're realizing is that, the more claims that we can run through the system, the more accurate we can get, the faster the payment on the claims, and the faster the payment to our providers.

The only features we're actually using are the orchestrator and 32 unattended bots.

The value of that is the power to be able to run our thousands and thousands of claims and membership to make sure that everything looks correct.

The solution has saved costs for our organization. I know it's over a million, however, I haven't done the exact numbers.

UiPath has reduced human error. We’re finding out that what we've built for configuration in the past, we're finding mistakes that we did a year ago. Now, the bots are proving that and we've been able to correct those past mistakes. This way, we don't have inaccurate payments or recaptures.

The product has freed up employee time - and it's not just the employee time. We do have some triggers that run. Some jobs are run that people use to manually do at night and weekends. We also don't have to hire additional people just to learn 80 different types of things in a claim and identify correctness manually. The robots will go through and then they can identify if there are specific things that are wrong. That part will go to our experts and they'll review those exact issues.

This use of bots allows for employees to do higher-value work. We also have been able to up-skill some of those people to sometimes a leadership role or a different role they would normally never get due to the fact that they were always manually looking at the claims and membership. This has definitely affected their level of satisfaction at work.

I don't know if we have an accurate estimate of how much time we are saving. I just know we do volume and we do thousands and thousands of claims a day, and therefore, it really helps.

We use UiPath’s Academy. That's how we learned the system. We actually learned it in six weeks and then started the development after that. It's very powerful and I continue to use it today.

It’s helped employees get up to speed with the product. This is especially useful when we get newer versions or we onboard other people. That's part of our syllabus. The first thing a new user has to do is go to the Academy and take some of the classes that we recommend. Then we identify, “okay, did you like it? Is this for you? Is it not for you?” et cetera. It’s a quick win where we don't have to take our time as we've got other work that we have to get completed. It acts as a filtering system for us. Both us and the employee can see if it’s a good fit very quickly. We can find out at an early stage instead of a year later.

The biggest value of the Academy is just knowing that we can do so much more volume and get in some more accurately without human error, or having people working nights and weekends. That has always been a really big push and we've been able to slowly work away from that.

Obviously, we’re not in a perfect world yet, however, getting rid of the manual aspect has been great. People just get burnt out. You can only look at things manually for so many hours. If you've been doing this for 10 years, it's got to be frustrating for those people who are always afraid they’ll get their job taken away. At the same time, for them, it’s so much easier as they don’t have to look at 80 things. They can look at five things that failed and then enjoy time with family and have a work-life balance. That’s big.

We've coded up to like 80% of what's possible. We really cut our pain points and said "this gives us our value, our bang for our buck." What we're doing now is saying, "okay, well, how do we improve it?" We've got another area or we've got another part of the software that we use our application that UiPath interacts with. Right now, our main concern is what else we can do to make it even more accurate or get more information or test more information to make it a solid pro program.

I'm a developer and I'll move things around and they'll change order, or I'll try to save something and it won't save the first time. I'll have to open something twice, open something three times. I've got a list. I'm working out quirks with UiPath. There are just UX things where if I copy this and put it here, it should look the same as it was, and I don't know why it doesn't. It could be my machine. It could be my local machine and it might just be that conversation with the premium plus to say, "why is this doing this?" Or maybe there could just be a setting, where we didn't check that box when we set it up. 

I've used the solution for two years. 

We actually had to spend about four months of maintenance to make sure that we got the solution to how we wanted it. We brought in a contracting firm and they didn't know the company and they just kind of said, "here's what bots can do." 

What we did is we did an assessment program for two months. During those two months, we looked at what they built, which was great. This got us up and running and showed us what's possible. 

Then, we took those two months to identify, for example, if the database maybe should have been set up a little better to interact with our other databases. Or if the coding should have had different paths of risk that they didn't know about. If you don't know the business, you don't know the risks, and therefore, you don't know how to set it up. That's why we did all of that assessment and then we spent four months fixing it to adjust to what we thought was a better path or a more stable path in order to support the robots.

The scalability potential is astronomical. We've got so many areas in the company, including finance and pharmacy, and there are all kinds of different areas and authorizations that you can actually go down and say, okay, now we have time. Let's put it on our calendar. 

The next piece we're looking into is the citizen developer angle. We know that has some power potential, however, we have to have regulations and audits. We want to be careful if we do start moving in that direction to really understand if it is right for the company and is helping people versus if we build something wrong what that would mean to manually have to correct that. That's time nobody has.

Technical support has been great. We usually get answers within hours of a request. I thought we were on the premium support plan and now we're going to go to the premium plus, I believe they call it. That starts up here for us in November.

We've had some challenging solutions where it has taken us several weeks to work through it. They tell us "here's what we recommended". That said, we know our system. It's just like any other contracting firm. They don't know your system and your solutions, however, they give you the recommendations. At this point, we've been able to work through everything that we've had technical issues with. We decide to do some of them a different way. Technical support has been supportive of this approach. It's like a partnership, and that really makes a big difference.

We started with Rational Robot in 2005. I actually developed that. I've been with the company for over 20 years. I started with Rational Robot and then we moved to some C Sharp and some coded UI.

We tried Test Architect for a little while. We've used different RPA methodologies and UiPath seemed to fit a little better with where we are and the robustness we wanted.

We switched when we moved over to new healthcare software. The old one was just COBOL and green screens, and it was hard to automate it. We did, however, it was very difficult. When we moved to this new application, we needed to make everything more quality controlled, and the only way to do that was with the robots.

I was not a part of the implementation process. 

The deployment process took about eight or nine months via our vendor. 

We brought on some contractors to do our initial setup, including a proof of concept, and they built part of the system and after that, we took it over. They were what we called a vendor tracking firm.

We have definitely seen an ROI.

The biggest ROI was in the configuration. We're realizing we may be setting some things up wrong and that's not how the customer should have been set up. When we see things fail, we ask why is this failing? And then we go upstream and find out that we didn't even build a specific thing and realize that it was a mistake, a key entry, a mistype, et cetera, and the bots catch that on the backend.

We're able to do that quicker. It's manual labor and it's tedious. Now, manual labor's fine if you want to go in and manually check this, that, and the other thing, however, when that's your day job and you're checking the same 80 fields compared to a spreadsheet over and over, it's just got to be frustrating and employees feel it. You hear it on the call.

With UiPath, we can ask the question "what can we do to support you?" We're not going to replace people; we want to get them to a better place. Our employees understand that. It took them a while, however, they do understand that now and think the solution is really cool and are thankful for the support. It's a tool, not a human being's replacement. 

I don't write the checks. I don't know what the actual cost is. That's always on leadership. My understanding is it's a reasonable price for the value that we're getting out of it.

We did look at the Power Automate desktop. It doesn't have the orchestrator to control things, and it has some other limits. When we do formulas and try to validate what the value should be, they are very difficult or impossible to set up on the Power Automate. At some point in time, I'm sure we'll be able to do that. In today's world, what we need right now is UiPath.

We're just a customer and an end-user.

We do not use the solution’s AI functionality in our automation program. We just do some checks and then just make sure via verification that everything matches in the configuration to the actual claims from the inbound files to the outbound.

There's an automation hub, test, capture, process, mining, all of these other features we haven't been able to purchase yet, due to the fact that we want to make sure that our bread and butter, the claims of membership, is solid. Once we have that in a good place, which we're hoping will be in 2022, we've already talked to our sales rep about the next steps. They've talked about the other features and offered recommendations. We'll go down that path next year and it'll be really exciting to see what else we can do to bring on the other areas of the company.

I'd advise potential new users that they definitely want to do some kind of proof of concept against other systems. I have heard other companies here that have said, okay, we're going up against four other automation tools. That's great. However, do your homework. You need to go and present everything to your leadership and showcase the solutions. 

As we get some of the demos of software, we can kind of compare them to what our system's needs are. A new user can say, well, maybe these are our top two. When you get to your top two, that's your time to bring somebody in, an expert to discuss what you're trying to do.  

If you do choose to go with UiPath, that UiPath academy is so valuable. That's a big asset. If you do the premium plus care, they will support you through and help you get things set up and running or make it better. We've been up and running for two years. Their goal and my goal is to see how to make things better to continuously improve the system and make everyone happy.

I'd rate the solution at a nine out of ten. There are just a few system quirks I'm trying to work through. 

We typically solve for any use cases that falls under different business functions within our company. That includes finance, supply chains, services, IT by itself, and a little bit of engineering.

UiPath has improved the way our organization functions. The flexibility with which the business processes get changed is great.

A lot of times we know the method of operation, however, certainly it'll not be the same after a few months, a few years, or longer. Our dependent script or whatever is in place (that is dependent on that business process) has to be adjusted. The flexibility with this tool has enabled us to adjust those workflows quickly and deploy them so that our business can continue using those applications or the workflows that we’ve been using before, even after changes to the underlying system.

The most valuable aspect has been the workflows. They have helped to deal with legacy applications. We have a lot of legacy applications in place, which we cannot get rid of. The processes around these legacy applications are something that cannot be automated in a typical way. The RPA is helping us to automate the business processes that have to work with legacy applications.

The ease of building automation using the solution is great as it is a low-code solution.

I'm able to create workflows. By the time I'm familiar with one process, I'll be able to automate the next one. This is the case especially with tools like task capture; I'm just working through the process. In the end, it will be a skeleton workflow and it can be used for deployment once we are done with the cleaning. It has reduced the development life cycle by about 30%. It’s done this by making use of the features that are enabled by task capture and certain other features within the Studio.

Overall, we’ve seen the solution has saved costs. That is our value realization.

Our first target metric is to bring up the number of processes that we can save. We have a formula to convert inter-dollar values in terms of the user experience we are benefitting from. That’s the user experience that is enabled by automation. Those are direct savings which can be calculated by multiplying the number of dollars that we have spent for one resource per hour. Indirect monetary benefits can also be calculated by looking into the user experience factors and adding them when we do the value realization. In the last four years, we would've saved $3 million.

The human error rate has been reduced. Initially, when we targeted some of the business use cases, they were straightforward. They were linear in nature and there the accuracy had the upper hand 99.9% of the time. The reason is that the process by itself is quite linear. It doesn't have multiple branches or exceptional routes that it has to take to complete a particular transaction. We have good accuracy, however, we have had challenges with the accuracy when the business processes get complex. If there is any human intervention or if the quality of the data is not proper, or if the user errors are low, that is where the accuracy rate used to be low. It's better now.

Due to the fact that all these are role-based bots, if there is something that is getting changed, the bot will fail. Down the line, I can see that, for linear processes, accuracy will be great. However, when it comes to some of the complex processes, that is where we have challenges that we are facing with accuracy and we are continuously fine-tuning the process in such a way so that the accuracy can get better. It's great we can continuously tweak.

The solution does free up employee time and allows for the employees to focus on higher-value work. We have a lot of examples within our organizations where they have to deal with some kind of manually intensive task, such as just reading something from the document and putting that into the financial system.

We normally take up the customization portion that comes directly from customers. Those kinds of customizations have to be updated back into the financial system in order to make sure that they are appropriate. These updates take a while as they have to do with talking to the customer, understanding what changes are needed for a given order, or based on specific correspondence from the customers. With automation, employees can focus on talking to the customer to understand what changes they have to incorporate. And they can offload all the data entry tasks to a robot. This way, they can focus on how they can engage more with users to understand the pain points faced by the customer rather than spending time taking all those inputs and then doing the data entry job. They can be more client-facing.

I’m not sure exactly how much time is saved with automation. I could say that we have around 150 purchase processes that we have automated. We don't trace back how it has replaced a team or member of a team. We always go with the number of hours saved. We go the route of checking and saying “okay, so we have done this, but it needs a constant involvement from them in order to make sure that someone is owning the process.” We still own only the work.

We have started to use the solution's AI functionality in our automation. We started it recently and we have finished the proof of concept on document understanding, which involves AI, of course.

In terms of AI automation, we will be leveraging this tool for all business functions. There is no limit with any of the business folk that we talk to. Whatever the process is, as long as we feel that it is feasible to automate, and there is a value in automating it,  or as long as we feel that we are automating the right processes, we will just take that up into our pipeline.

AI does help us handle complex and involved processes. We include a lot of use cases where the sole core RPA capability would not suffice as a purely role-based automation. We often encounter a lot of use cases where they say, "Hey, this is something where there is no logic in doing it." If there’s analysis or natural language processing, et cetera, we are making use of AI. However, the process isn’t in use yet. We’re just starting.

We have used UiPath’s Academy courses and we are also encouraging our implementation partners to refer to those materials so that they can be approved.

It’s kept us up to speed with the solution. We refer to the Academy daily. Of course, we get help from UiPath whenever we face any hiccups; we normally ask them questions and they're able to sort it out for us. That said, the materials are great for trying to sort out issues or problems on our own.

It's been four years of practice and we've matured with the traditional RPA candidates. We have a strong foundation with what we have showcased to our business folks, and we are good with the healthy background that we are building. However, when it comes to the roadmap of what's next, that is where we are not clear. While we get the concepts, bringing them to reality is looking to be quite a challenge. We are unsure as to if UiPath can actually bring our vision to life.

UiPath is very clear in defining items such as this is what the high automation needs, this is what the process planning needs. We are getting clarity into those concepts and we are able to explain that and take that back into leadership to get other approvals. They are able to understand what UiPath is talking about within these different concepts. Really, it's just figuring out whether we have the right arrangement at this point and if UiPath can get us there.

I've been using the solution for four years.

I'm impressed with the version that we have today. 2019.10 is a version that is quite stable, compared to how we did with 2018. A lot of pieces that are enabled as part of the new version, 2019, are stabilized. We have zero downtime with the tool.

Today, ith X number of bots, if we want to reuse the same solution, and if there is an appetite for consuming those kinds of robotic solutions, of course, buying more bots is going to solve the problem.

If you think in terms of scaling this platform by itself or the other business functions, that is where the discovery piece will come into play. We have to constantly talk to businesses to understand where the opportunities are to scale in the correct manner.

Scalability is possible in terms of reusing existing automations. It's related to the number of bots that we are going to purchase. When it comes to the number of business processes that we are automating, during the discovery process, twe have to engage with our customers and constantly follow up with them. When we understand more about how they're doing business, we're able to locate the kinds of tools that are going to help them.

Currently, we have eight bots in production and 150 processes are automated. I’m not sure how many users are actually on UiPath currently.

We always follow up with our business to build our pipeline. That goes hand in hand with the implementation. We off-load all automation ideas and requirements to the pipeline, to our implementation partners, so that they will be able to implement our vision.

Traditional support for the RPA is great. In terms of the help that we are getting, if we end up with some issues, running operational issues, it could be better if they can propose some fixes. It's not that automation is going to solve every other problem that the underlying system is having. However, we expect some kind of expertise from the tech support when we face issues that are related to the system. We need to understand if there's an ERP error, if it has to do with the underlying system, or if automation has to solve the issue. Often, technical support will say "Okay, so this is your error, go and solve it." Yet, due to the fact that support has seen more issues like this, they should have more insights and they need to be able to share those inputs in a way that is going to help us.

While I didn't use a different solution previously, the finance team has used Blue Prism before. They implemented Blue Prism and they engaged Blue Prism to automate the processes that they have added for automation. Now, we have aligned on a single platform. It is UiPath now, however, they initially had around 50 processes that they automated using Blue Prism.

We proposed UiPath as the one solution based on Gartner ratings.

The initial setup was quite straightforward as we understand how RPA works and we understand how UiPath is going to help, how UiPath is a tool to help us to automate things. It's quite straightforward in terms of that. Whenever we are doing some kind of initiative, like document understanding or data capture, it is quite straightforward.

However, with process planning, we didn't understand the documentation right away. That is where we used to get help from UiPath.

The pricing was great at the start, and so, down the line, we have been enhancing all these features. We are seeing that, as we are looking for opportunities to grow, the number of robots that we need to purchase and the software cost is going to go up.

UiPath has increased the cost. We feel that it's good, however, based on all the new features, which we are pursuing. That said, we expect that whatever robots that we have purchased or whatever the standard platform that we have from UiPath should continue with the pricing that they had earlier.

There will be an offset, however, when it comes to the existing platform like Orchestrator or robots, and we are expecting that the margin should be less.

Back in 2017, we evaluated three to four products. Blue Prism was already used by the finance team, however, we evaluated WorkFusion, UiPath, and Automation Anywhere.

Of those other three, we evaluated WorkFusion and UiPath extensively.

The two reasons that we went with UiPath were, one, the learning curve, and, two, the community edition of UiPath, which had everything we needed to dig into the solution. Whereas with the other companies, there wasn't that option. With Blue Prism, for example, we had to buy a license in order to check whether the tool was going to work for us. In 2017, we were not sure whether this was going to work or not. At that stage, UiPath was the only company that gave us the entire set of tools to try and it worked really well.

We are customers and end-users.

While we're using the on-premises deployment, we are open to moving to the cloud. There are a lot of cloud solutions that we already use in our organization. However, with UiPath, we have stayed on-prem out of concern for security. We don't have clarity on if a cloud solution is going to work securely.

The other concern is around how we are augmenting the capabilities of core RPA. We know that process mining is going to help us, however, whether process mining is already added into the RPA, do we have any solid use cases that we can start with.

I'd rate the solution at an eight out of ten.

Some of our use cases for UiPath range all the way from development to operational support through to business enablement. Our biggest focus internally is to enable a business to do what they do best. We generally provide solutions through the use of UiPath to cater for streams, e.g., Procure-to-Pay, Hire to Retire, and quote-to-cash.

We are using it to build solutions that can heal themselves. So, we make sure that our operational team is aware as soon as something fails with the processes that we have built. If one of the use cases or failures has already been listed, we note the fix and try to implement that. If that doesn't work, then we hand it off to a human to look at the task. 

In terms of some of the use cases that we have in the business, we do quite a lot of ERP automation. So, we work with SAP quite a lot. We also have a lot of back-end data that we need to bring in and process as well. So, we use our SQL databases to perform tasks, e.g., allocating payments to bank accounts in our ERP system.

Because our development team is rather small, we try to create as many reusable components and solutions on the UiPath platform to make our day-to-day jobs a lot easier.

What has helped us the most from UiPath is that they haven't just provided us with a toolset or range of products, but actually provided us with a framework and hyperautomation lifecycle that we could use as a guideline throughout our own journey in automation.

UiPath has definitely assisted us in speeding up our digital transformation journey. We have been able to create a whole bunch of different components that we reuse throughout our solutions. This means that when we have great, new ideas that we want to implement into our solutions, we have now found ways to do it in such a way that we spend less time trying to implement the fixes or cool new enhancements and more time actually realizing the value. In doing so, we have also seen a reduction in cost and an increase in FTE savings.

From a development point of view, one of the most important, useful features in the deck is definitely some of the offerings that UiPath has in terms of UiPath Studio. Having the components for the Object Repository and Data Service available make your solution reusable and decrease your development time so you can go to market more quickly for products that you are offering clients. That has been really useful in our landscape. 

UiPath has gone a very long way to make sure their tools are easy to use and the products that they have in their end-to-end hyper automation lifecycle are easy to learn and teachable to people that you work with.

UiPath has a wide range of features that they have brought into their ecosystem. If I look at something quite specific that we would like to see going forward, that would be the integration between Data Service and Insights. It is great that we are able to visualize our return on investments using Insights. We can see a whole bunch of metrics and how our processes are performing. I think what would give us a lot more power is if we could link that to Data Service and actually pull through some custom information.

We have been using UiPath at the company internally for roughly just over five years. 

We have been a reseller of the UiPath product to our clients for roughly three years.

UiPath solutions are definitely very stable. It is very easy for us to build quality solutions and put them into production, then be able to trust the solution that we have put into production. For any automation center of excellence, that is quite important. You need to have a level of trust in your organization, inside of your environment and inside of your solutions. 

This also is attributed to the quality of our developers. We have strong, skilled developers. Without a product like UiPath, stability would not be such a great factor, especially if we had to go with a different approach or tool sets.

We have had a lot of experience trying to scale our solutions. Because of our automation journey, when we started out, we created processes that were very specific to the problems that we were trying to solve. They were actually quite static. The processes that we developed were aimed at addressing a problem specifically. As time went on, we started changing our design-thinking approach and our approach to designing and developing solutions, in such a fashion that we now try to create our solutions to be more dynamic. 

Because of the life expectancy of automations, and specifically RPA, a lot of experts would say that you need to go back after 6,12, or 18 months to reevaluate your solution and see if it needs to be redeveloped. What we have seen in our landscape is that if we try to make our solutions more dynamic, and actually cater for more than what we set out to cater for, having to enhance our solution later on takes a lot less development time. So, scaling out the solution has become immensely useful and our way of work.

We have roughly about 100 people within our organization directly communicating with our UiPath environment, either through our robotic assistance or bots, right down to the granular level of developing solutions. Some of the roles include our developers, operational support, and business users.

I would definitely say that the UiPath technical support is quite proficient. They help us quite quickly. Their responses always direct us to the answers that we are looking for. If they don't know the answer or can't assist us, they give us that feedback. They go ahead and find the answers or make the needed changes. They then come back to us and provide feedback. 

We have really enjoyed working with the UiPath team quite closely throughout our partnership. It has enabled our journey further. I would definitely rate them as 10 out of 10.

Positive

If I look at some of the other technologies and tool stacks that we have used to do RPA or automation, the adoption rate is a lot less. This is because of the way that developers need to struggle in some cases to get through the learning and usage of these tools.

I was not directly involved in the setup of the applications and ecosystem. From what I have been able to gather, we did have quite a lot of support from UiPath and the setup was quite straightforward. It took four hours maximum.

UiPath has definitely helped us realize some of our full-time equivalent savings (FTE savings) in regards to some of the reusable components that we have and have placed specifically in the business. With the offerings that UiPath has, we are able to easily see what our return on investment is, how we have structured and deployed our solutions, what we have deployed, how long it has been deployed, etc.

If we take a look at the last six months, we have about 105 processes that we have in production at the moment. If we single out a specific process that we have been working on and has been in production for quite a while, then measure that over the last six months, we can see that we have saved roughly about 380 hours on that process. Or, we have saved 380 FTE hours. That equates to roughly 77,000 rand. That has been quite a big savings. If you take the time saved across our 100-plus processes, we are looking at close to 2,100 hours that we have saved in the last six months. That has a financial value of between 500,000 and a million rand. 

UiPath definitely has reduced human error for us. Because a lot of our processes are quite focused within the financial space and we integrate it with our ERP systems, we have seen a reduction of human error come into play. We have also seen that the provisions made for human error have also been reduced.

In the RPA industry at the moment and in automation in general, UiPath's pricing model is the most consistent. So, if you are looking at year-on-year growth and pricing, or even if you are comparing solutions, each vendor has their own take on how they are going to generate profits and expand their return on investment. By far, UiPath is the most consistent with their pricing. They make it quite clear what they set out to achieve with their pricing and product. That makes their product so much easier to design for, as you don't need to change your pricing and go back to clients every time that you introduce a new aspect into the solution.

If I did have any advice or extra information that I could give surrounding the UiPath product, one of its strengths is that you know upfront what everything will cost.

We found that UiPath Academy courses that they provide, as well as the help through the forum, have greatly enabled us to more easily use this platform. Compared to other vendors and other tool stacks, it is a lot easier to use as well. 

If I look at the UiPath offering and compare it to Microsoft Power Platform, and while Microsoft Power Automate has definitely come a long way and done a great job of making its way into the market, there are still key differences between the two platforms. Because Power Platform is still relatively new, the resources and support are a little bit more tedious to get around than with UiPath. With the UiPath community, because of their extensive work that they have done within the community to build developers, you get a lot more support on forums. 

In terms of usability of the platforms, UiPath has been doing this for a lot longer. So, the user interfaces and all around user-friendliness of their platform definitely show, in the time that they have spent working on the product. 

If I look at some of the things that Power Automate offered before the latest updates in the UiPath offering, Power Automate was able to allow you to trigger processes completely differently to the way that UiPath does. UiPath has since taken a step up and released their integration services, which has helped bridge that gap quite a lot. Being able to link to a process is a lot easier than it used to be.

If I compare scalability, development time, and ease of use of Power Platform to UiPath, specifically around the RPA components of the solutions, there is definitely a noticeable difference. 

As an organization, we took Blue Prism, WorkFusion, Automation Anywhere, and those types of vendors and platforms into consideration when selecting our platform of choice when our center of excellence was formed. When making the decision at that time, the stakeholders involved decided to go with UiPath, mostly because of what they had to offer and their consistency.

The advice that I have to customers who are looking to start off their automation journey, or essentially take on a new vendor like UiPath, I would definitely say one of the challenges for us was getting our governance and standards right. As soon as we got that right, and we fixed our design-thinking approach, we realized how we could make sure our solutions were scalable. We then started seeing a higher return on investment. My advice would be to focus on the small things, make sure that you understand your processes and what goals you are trying to achieve, and then start with the beginning and end in mind. So, know where you want to end up and see how you are going to break your solution up into phases to be able to get there.

UiPath has had a very interesting impact on our environment. We have found it quite difficult to find RPA developers within our country, specifically those who have the skills that we need and can do what we do. So, we have had to rely on upskilling people as much as we possibly can to be able to deliver the solutions that we are delivering. In doing so, UiPath Academy has been quite helpful and handy, specifically because it is a lot easier to onboard a new employee or somebody who has less experience with UiPath. The training is free and easily available. If there are any issues or questions, the Academy team and the community are always around to support and answer any questions. 

What is quite impressive about UiPath is that they followed the same trend of having two major releases a year. I think those are the two most anticipated events that we have within our team as well. Because we have a roadmap, we know more or less what UiPath is planning and hoping to do. Our partnership enables us to have a closer view at that information. UiPath Insider Program allows us to see some of the previewed items as well. 

For those who aren't quite sure where they want to go just yet, keep an eye on the forums, blog posts, and UiPath in general. Look at their major releases before making any huge decisions. UiPath has a track record of consistency, and they have got some great reviews and implementations that I think we could really all learn from.

I would rate the UiPath platform as 10 out of 10.

We primarily use the solution for operations processes in our corporate investment bank. For example, screen scraping, querying from databases, or any transactional processes. Those are what we're really looking at the most.

The orchestrator is very valuable for us. The ability to have processes, especially transactional processes, be fed into and triggered from there is excellent. I really like the ease of use that allows not just typical developers to use the Studio version, but also StudioX, which allows citizen developers with little to no coding background to be able to automate their own process. Studio limits a lot of the coding you would generally do in Visual Basic and offers a pretty easy use case for people who want to get into development, who might not have that background.

I’d rate the ease of automating within UiPath at an eight or a nine out of ten. Maybe even a perfect ten. They make it very simple. It's a really good platform and for everything I've used it for so far, I can't think of how I would do this X, Y, or Z differently. I really like it.

In terms of our adoption of it, we just started using it this year. We haven't had a large volume of bots delivered and put into production, however, with what we're using, we have a lot of proof of account sets and use cases that are getting pushed along that are going to save the company time in man-hours.

It's going to save the company a lot of potential risks in terms of manual error. It's also something that can be used to automate processes that are very heavily related to compliance procedures as well, where you don't want as much manual touch for the same reason and you don't want to risk, even if it doesn't take that much time for a person. With automation, you remove the risk of somebody making an error.

We don’t have a crazy amount of metrics. We're really in the process of adopting it into the organization. I'd say within the next year, we're really going to be seeing a very large adoption of it.

We have seen direct savings in costs. Every project we deliver in time save has an associated cost reduction to it. If you're saving, for example, four hours a day on a manual process, you're saving that money. You’re also saving on anything that's related to risk. I don't have any hard numbers on the amount of time that's been saved, however, it’s been positive.

Our teams have used the UiPaths Academy courses. It’s helped make the process of getting employees up to speed with UiPath very straightforward. It's one of the better learning platforms I've seen. Between them and Alteryx, they both have very good learning platforms.

What's really important is that you don't need to wait for instructor-led training, which is infrequent. We have it sometimes, still, even when we’re having it a few times a year it gets expensive. The online training, which covers most of the same material, is a really good way for people who don't want to wait for the instructor-led training and want to immediately get their own feet wet.

The Academy is very comprehensive. It's well structured and training is easy to follow. I've used other tools that have been much harder to follow online. This one I really like.

The biggest values that we’ve seen From UiPath Academy are ease of use and ease of scalability. The solutions you make based on the infrastructure that's built around it can be made to be very scalable. There's so much that depends on other terms, such as the data that we have on our own processes, that it's going to be the yes or no, whether or not a process we build can be scalable automation for other teams. As long as we get the data and the processes lined up in the right way, we can make very scalable processes, which is good as that's more cost savings for fewer bots and that's really like what we want to see.

There are some external dependencies. When we have APIs available, UiPath does have that option that we can hook into APIs. That's really where I'd like to be down the line, more like hooking into APIs, data warehouses, so that you don't have to worry too much about the screen scraping functionality, even though that's a great big part of what it does.

I would really like the ability to bring OCR connectors into StudioX, if possible. Right now we're only using OCR and Studio as that's where the plugins are available. I don't know enough about the back end of what makes this feasible versus not feasible. However, at the moment, with StudioX, you can only really read and digitize PDFs. If they can bring in the OCR connectors, they'd allow citizen developers to be able to read in a larger breadth of documents that they would generally need Studio to do.

I've been using the solution for about ten months. 

The product is as stable as it can be for the processes we use to expand on that. We do a lot of screen scraping and web scraping a lot. I want to move away from this in the future. However, the stability of those bots is going to ultimately be reliant on how that webpage looks.

We're looking at very specific parts of the website, such as the HTML tags. If those stay stable and we build our identifiers on those sites to be relatively dynamic, the process will be fine. 

We do plan to increase usage.

The idea is to train up more citizen developers. We need to strike a balance between getting the tool out to the citizen developers and making sure that they're following the governance procedures as well. There's also a little bit of risk of it due to the fact that you give people licenses to build and then they can build something on their desktop. They can just, without going through the proper governance, run it. Therefore, you need to make sure things go through the correct governance. That's why we're trying to make sure we have a very good system in place so that when we grow and are training system developers, everything they do goes through the correct controls and governance process.

We're planning to keep building the users over time. We really want to start looking in the next year from more of a top-down perspective, across larger organizational issues where we can make more scalable bots rather than strictly or mostly automating one-offs. We're looking for where there's more commonality across different businesses that do similar processes, and maybe access similar data sources.

I'm not sure exactly how many people are using it across the organization currently. My guess would be at this point there are 75 to 100 users. However, I could be completely wrong. I'm just guessing, as I don't know all the citizen developers, and who in the operation's teams are using it.

I have not used technical support, however, some people who work for me on my team have. I manage a small team of developers. They have worked with UiPath consultants who are on contracts with our COE. They've been extremely helpful with working out some kinks that they've come across in their projects. 

I haven't used blueprints on my Automation Anywhere. We used to use Automation Anywhere and we are moving off it in favor of UiPath, though I never used those other tools myself. I use ALteryx and it has some RPA abilities, although I use it much more for just basic data transformation workflows. I have coded RPA bots and Python before. What I like, with UiPath, is it's still a tool that's based on code - Visual Basic, VB.NET. However, the coding is really for the most part restricted to your data manipulation, working with variables. The control flow that you normally would need to code in Visual Basic is all drag and drop. I really like that versus straight coding. It still gives you that flexibility of a lot of development environments, however, you can have that drag and drop canvas that allows you to really not need to program as much of that control flow. 

We moved towards UiPath as it's cheaper per bot and it enables more of a citizen development model as well. Automation Anywhere bots were only developed by our COE at the time and UiPath COE's going to use them also, however, they're allowing users in operations to use both Studio (if they have the taste for it) and StudioX. It gives a lot more citizen development capabilities for more advanced functions and automation-type stuff, whereas previously, you would normally need somebody on your team who happens to know BBA to do it. 

In the past, if you have someone from the team who knows BBA and makes something, and they leave and their code breaks, you're screwed. However, if you have a StudioX bot, if it breaks, it's going to be much easier to look into the issue and fix it. It's also supported by our C0E's tech infrastructure. Those are the main driving points for shifting off as well.

I was not involved in the initial setup. I've interacted with UiPath only as a user. I was one of the first users, however, I had nothing to do with deploying the tech infrastructure and developing the governance and controls. I'm just a developer.

We have seen a return on investment. Every project we've delivered that has some sort of time savings to it has had an intrinsic ROI. I don't know the total ROI across the organization, however. I work in one specific part of the company and it's been adopted in a few places. I don't know the total ROI that's been delivered yet.

It's my understanding that it's delivered close to a full headcount so far, in terms of productivity of capacity. There are approximately eight hours a day of time-saving for every workday of the year. That's where we are right now, as we've really just begun adopting it. We're not really deployed into production, and the larger-scale projects aren't in place yet. So far, the projects have been smaller tactical builds that we've been using and it's been delivering up around eight hours of time saving a day. 

I don't know the pricing enough to really comment on it. I know we're getting a better deal in automation than what we had with Automation Anywhere bots, at least per bot deployment. However, I don't know what the licensing costs are.

We do not yet use the Uipath apps feature or their AI functionality in our automation processes. That said, with AI, we're bringing it in and we're definitely planning to use it in the future.

I'd advise new users to make sure you have the controls and governance structures, first and foremost, and you want to make sure those controls are going to be in place and understood before you start deploying licenses to users. I make sure that everything is going to be done and compliant with the audit. As somebody who works in financial services, which is a very heavily regulated industry, that's something that really needs to be kept in mind. You don't want to develop what are essentially just user tools that are not going through the proper controls and treat it like a lightweight software development lifecycle project. You need to make sure those controls are in place, and yet, don't do it too much to the point where it's going to deter the users. At the end of the day, we're not making software, however, we still need to strike that balance.

I'd rate the solution at a nine out of ten. Nothing is perfect. I know you UiPath wants to improve the stuff that has not been perfected. I'm not going to say it is a ten out of ten, even though I'm struggling to think of what I don't like. Something that would be very helpful for UiPath is to go back to try to build OCR in StudioX. That would be ideal. Also, being able to implement different types of loops in the Studio would be great. Right now, you can only do a four-loop in a repeating loop. If we could implement wall loops, that would be nice.