UiPath Reviews

We started with a pilot for our payroll department. It essentially takes the transactions that come into our payroll department on Fridays and Mondays, and sorts through those transactions. If there are any discrepancies or errors based on the defined criteria, it notifies the payroll department, and they can rectify those. Otherwise, paychecks don't process. 

Other than that, we have some data migration between Excel spreadsheets that we do, and we have contracts that we host on a web server that, if they don't have transactions for the same period of time, we have the automation go in and close those contracts out so the transactions can't go against them.

This was pretty much our first experience with automation. There wasn't anything prior. As far as UiPath is concerned and how automation has transformed the agency, we've found that hundreds of thousands of hours are being saved every year now, thanks to these processes. On a division-by-division basis, hundreds of thousands of dollars are being saved every year.

The wide variety of activities that are available for third-party applications has been quite useful when it comes to APIs. It's allowed us to leverage the other applications that we use within the agency. We can actually utilize the UiPath Suite over things like Microsoft Power Apps, Blue Prism, or Automation Anywhere, where they didn't have the capability to really interact with a bunch of third-party applications. 

UiPath helps save taxpayer dollars, which is a good, socially responsible, cause.

The UiPath community is very good. Eight to nine times out of ten, if I have a question or I'm stuck, I can go to the forums, and I can find experts, or I can find YouTube videos, and I can talk to other people. The contractors that we've worked with in the past were super helpful, and everybody's cooperative. Everyone wants to share ideas. At the end of the day, we all want just to make everyone's lives easier.

I've used the UiPath Academy's courses. I was thrown right into the fire. This was thrown on my plate, and they said, "Hey, you're going to be working with the contract; you got a month to spin up an automation." 

I learned while I did; however, as our center of excellence has grown within the agency, we've decided to adopt some new developers into the program, so we don't have to run into that same issue with new people. With the two or three that are coming up to be trained for the end of this year, it's definitely proven a lot of value, since we don't have to sit around and have people sit over shoulders for projects. It allows them to take their time, go through it, and practice. For me, going through some of the advanced courses, for the most part, I found them very well run and have been satisfied with them.

One thing that I would really like to see is some migration processes between environments. Right now, we either rely on a very rough CI/CD pipeline and/or manual efforts to transfer packages from one environment to another. Having some in-suite migration process would make our lives so much easier. 

The education aspect is probably the hardest part of getting people on board. Our server administration is separate from the rest of our CoE. We have to rely on them, and they're not necessarily privy to the UiPath Suite in general. Making it easier for them would make our lives easier, thus making our customers happier.

We've used UiPath for about two and a half years. We adopted it in late 2019, or early 2020.

We host on-prem, so I can't speak for the cloud support, though I've heard only good things. As far as stability is concerned, in terms of everything that we've moved into production, the only reason anything's ever broken, the only reason anything has ever not worked in general, has been due to agency oversight of people changing things without notifying the proper teams. As far as the UiPath's concerned, I would say it's pretty close to 100% stable.

The scalability question is hard to answer. The bottleneck is the fact that we are in the public sector, and we're dealing with a lot of state bureaucracy. We're limited in scalability, due to constraints that are outside of UiPath. I will say that as time has progressed and the more this technology's been adopted - including education and business awareness - the technology itself is very scalable. What's holding it back is general knowledge and public knowledge.

Most of the technicians I've worked with have been very helpful. Even if they don't have the answers, they're usually pretty good at getting back to me within two to three days and have relatively good answers. Or, if they can't answer it, they might steer me in a direction that will help me. 

As far as our accounts are concerned, we actually just received a couple of new tech advisors that deal with our agency. The team has been nothing short of fantastic to us. There have been times when we'll have our weekly meetings where they won't have the answer for us, and they'll say, "I'll get to you by next week." There have been times he gets back to us an hour after the meeting, and have detailed everything, or scheduled a call, so we can work on something together. That's been fantastic.

Positive

I did not previously use a different solution. 

I did the development, and I worked with our administrative team to deploy that automation.

It was straightforward. The education part and trying to have our center of excellence be centralized and having people all on the same page takes time. It came down to that whole migration where we are either working with a third-party application or system, like GitLab or some CI/CD pipeline, to get those packages migrated, or doing it manually led to a lot of hiccups throughout the course. 

What could have been done in a matter of hours or maybe a day or two, ended up taking, for almost every one of our automations, about a week or two, thanks to meetings, communication, and lack of education.

We have two environments. We have our Test DEV, then we have our production.  Once the developer completes the testing, it's sent over to our BAs; our BAs test it, then they verify that information with the customer to ensure the results are satisfactory. We then contact our server administrators, migrate the package over, and discuss the run time with the customers. 

Also, all of them, up to this point, have been unattended, so they're able to select a time and a date, whether it be daily, or weekly, or whatever that case is, and a time. We settled on a Thursday implementation date, no matter what, and the server administrators above the back page, then it goes on from there.

As far as consultants were concerned, they worked with us on the initial pilot. Everything else was done in-house. We have taken a step back to readdress our statement of work and how we plan on governing RPA going forward. We are working with a consultant company now to deal with more of the administrative overhead that was involved with this. However, we do plan that moving forward all development and deployments will still be held in-house by our developers and our administration.

My understanding is we are expected to hit the ROI that we're projected to hit next year. Even this year, with only three automations running for the entire year, we were able to cover our costs in that aspect essentially.

There are no more than five automations in full swing, and we would like somewhere between 15 and 20 next year. Likely, the ROI will continue to snowball. 

One of the automations that we put live essentially monitors updates to vendor contact information and conversations that are held with the vendors in our agencies and uploads that to a web database. Then, those conversations are logged in an Excel Spreadsheet that managers like to keep updated. This is roughly saving, on average, about 40 hours a week. Multiply that by 52 work weeks, and it's a lot of savings. It's roughly the cost of two full-time salaries that we are saving.

I am not super privy to pricing information. 

In the beginning, we were choosing between Blue Prism and UiPath, and keeping Microsoft Power platforms on the side burner to possibly automate things that were specifically within Azure and AD. 

While those three were being measured and worked through, we had to go through the bureaucratic chain of state government. It turned out that the UiPath suite, in general, was covering the bases we needed to cover with the third-party application integration. At the same time, the ease of getting everything up and running, the fact that we had a one-stop shop, and we didn't have to buy all these extra additional components just to make simple automation was worth it. Then, just talking with different industry leaders, contractors, and consultants, everybody suggested UiPath when it came down to Blue Prism and UiPath. That was the route we went.

We have yet to use the AI's functionality.

If you were a company looking to expedite as well as remove the monotony of a lot of the work that gets done, especially in the public sector, this is a good option. You likely have the same thing written down probably five times in 16 different places. Getting rid of that workload to free up people for doing other things, is the way to go. 

The most important aspect of all of this isn't having an amazing developer. It isn't having your great server admins or whatever the case is. It's making sure that the people you want to work with are educated and on board before it even starts. Making sure that people understand what RPA is and what UiPath can do for them is the most important thing. Our biggest roadblocks and the biggest things that have sprung us forward are all based on that educational aspect.

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

If you asked me that question two years ago, I probably would've been closer to a six out of ten. The product improved, and the overall competence in the industry, and within the company in general, has improved across the board. The people I've worked with, including our tech advisors or sales rep, are great. There's a lot more confidence and stability. It's definitely given our agency a sense of confidence, and it's much easier to see where this is going. The results are what we've imagined. Everything seems to be much more real at the tail end of 2022. We're hoping this will be stable for our agency in 2024 as well.

Currently, we're doing digital transformation in finance. We expect to expand that out to operations based on our test case of five robotic implementations and to get those in the center of excellence and understanding, and then go further. In fact, in our naming conventions, we're trying to make sure that we leave room for HR, Operations, IT, et cetera. Right now, we're just in finance.

One of the best benefits is that it just gets people to think beyond what they're doing and how other things impact them. Instead of just their single task.

For instance, with PO distribution, we can ask larger questions, such as: Where are our suppliers lists? What do the people do out in the field? I've never been as exposed to that as I am now due to the fact that I’m trying to automate it. What you find is the challenges aren't just in the robot. It's what you do before you get to the robot that is critical. If it forces us to fix other exterior items, we've been a success. However, if you can add to the task, what the robot does and then pull it through, that's where things get interesting. My job is just going to expand and I foresee I’ll be so busy with so many ideas.

We do use the UI apps feature. We are working with consultants. They actually know more of the technical details and they're supposed to be transferring data. I'm more of a functional person that understands the design and the processes, not the programming, coding, or details. I'm learning that as I’m in training for the RPA. I'm about 70% through training. I've been taking that through UiPath

Getting up to speed with UiPath has been tougher due to the fact that the programming that I learned in school is very different from the programming done today. The younger people, I'm sure, pick it up much faster.

It is helping our onboarding process and is useful in getting me up to speed.

The biggest value I get from the UiPath Academy is the ability to connect the software to the processes that we’re trying to automate and being able to understand the functions in terms of where you would go to get an even better understanding. I do find that their online help is very beneficial as it offers solid examples. In fact, sometimes that's better than the training itself.

There's so much out there and there's so much to learn as it's not one software package. UiPath Academy provides us with the ability to use all software packages and interconnect with them. The opportunities are amazing and also intimidating.

The automation cloud offering helps to decrease the total cost of ownership of UiPath by taking care of things such as infrastructure. We have gone and moved many more things to the cloud. We have a Hyperion solution in the cloud that we use for consolidation.

The most valuable aspect of the solution is the ability to follow what the robots are doing. Currently, I've been working on the automation hub. That's the next step. You can use the orchestrator to see how they're doing, for example.

We’ve realized some efficiencies in our current processes due to UiPath. That said, I'm a novice. We've just begun with these five processes. That's why I want to do the reporting and figure out the analysis as I want it to basically sell itself.

In terms of the ease of building automation within UiPath, that's something that I need to discover with the IT team. What I do like is that once you do something, you store it in a library. And then you have plug-and-play automation that you can add to others. You don't have to keep redoing the same work over and over again. That's going to be a huge benefit.

In terms of reducing human error, inherently, it has to improve accuracy. Now that we’re focused on it, we’re testing it, and if it's not a hundred percent accurate, it's not going to production. We absolutely anticipate a great reduction in human error.

In terms of payroll processes, HR processes, onboarding, operations, filling in maintenance on equipment, and doing the routine things out in the field will require adoption and interest. You can't get the response that you want until the people in the field decide that they want to change and adopt it. That will be the challenge. Managing the change is huge for us. It's always an obstacle. It's not that, can you automate something, it's more of a question of, internally, will they let you automate something?

I'm looking for more of the analytics to make sure that we can properly report on how they're doing. That's what's going to make management invest further into this. I actually come from a reporting background. That's what I focus on in the other financial packages that we have.

I've been using UiPath since I started training in July of 2021.

I'm not worried about the stability of the product. If others are using it in the cloud with much more complicated processes than we are automating, it's not really a concern of mine.

In terms of scalability, right now, it's way too big for me to even understand it. It's like I'm in a county and you're asking me about the universe. I'm just trying to get directions. I still need time to absorb the entire scope.

Right now, just accounting and IT use the solution. Finance is learning it as well. They're taking the same training that I'm taking. They're probably 10% to 15% the way through that journey.

I have not really had to use the support. I will, due to my training. I've gone back and forth and I've lost some of my training. I have the diplomas and different things and the degrees that I kept, however, I've lost some of that initial training. It all has to do with version release. I'm a tenant I'm just in the training phase. What I'm trying to do is be the guinea pig and learn the systems and get comfortable with everything.

We didn't use any other RPA solution previously.

The reason we adopted UiPath was due to a move from our finance leader, the controller. We had automated many financial processes with planning and reporting, et cetera. However, the accounting group was continually skipped over. We had a controller that came in and they wanted to take many of our repeated processes and really took and created an agile group to create the digital finance vector. 

There's a team of five members that went and looked at the processes that we were doing and said, which ones can we change or do better? Between the controller and the consultants, there was an analysis performed. They wanted to lead in the digital finance transformation. They looked forward five to ten years and what they were projecting looked really nice.

I didn't directly handle the implementation. I will learn that more as we go. From what I saw, the workflow was nice. The implementations that we have are being done in baby steps, and so far, the steps are relatively easy. It is intimidating to see how much it takes to do some very small processes. It helps you understand more about the decision points and whether they're objective or subjective. That will help us with the reporting. We'll be better able to understand what things are best to automate and what is easiest. That's what I'm hoping to get from these five implementations.

Our consultant assisted us with the implementation process, and they really did a sprint on the implementations.

The sprints were such that it was really a six-week turnaround time. We actually had to go backward and do the assessments from those implementations. I wasn't in this role at that time. Therefore, I'm now doing the cost benefits backward to see if we can set them up correctly and then see what we can do ourselves going forward. The key will be not how quickly they were able to do it, but how quickly we can do it ourselves. 

Also, we'll have to assess how quickly the people in the field can adopt the product and have a robot actually be their assistant. We want to figure out how quickly we can deploy citizen developers. 

The solution is pricey at the beginning, however, we'll have to see going forward with what we get for the tools. It's always expensive to buy a really nice car and then not drive it very far, very much. It's all about the utilization. If we use it fully, the cost won't be as high.

The company did evaluate other solutions, however, they liked UiPath the best due to its differentiating reputation, experience, and level and quality of tools.

UiPath has not yet saved costs for our company. However, we're just in the investment phase. That's why I want to do that reporting so that we can see the savings if any. The decisions we make now affect the next 10 to 20 years. Everyone gets too short-term-focused. We need to instead think about where we want to be five years from now and go backward. We need to ask: what are we doing today that's going to make a difference in five years? It's an investment in the future right now.

I'd advise those considering the solution to give it a try. It can't hurt. Even if they didn't go forward, the basic principles that are revealed can probably fix other things. Some people just have bad processes. Once you get your processes aligned and make them to the point that they're standardized and understood across the different units using them, it will become easier to automate.

I'd rate the solution at an eight out of ten. In order to rate it higher, I need more experience. I've got to learn, got to understand it better. Then I've got to utilize it. Like many software that I've dealt with, there are always three ways to do it, however, there's the best way. I always wish we'd just teach the best way. That said, I understand that you want to make people agile and to understand fully by exploring different ways. When you learn, learning all the different ways is very cumbersome, and yet, better in the long run.

Our primary use case with UiPath is to create automation software for the HR and the accounting department. Some of the automations that we do are automated attendance tracking, billable hours calculation, work hours calculation, expense reimbursements, et cetera. We have also completely automated our sales processes, such as contract building, invoice creation, etc. We do all this through UiPath automation. Earlier, all this was done manually, and it consumed a lot of time for us, but now, with automation, it's super-quick and efficient.

We are using a public cloud model. We host it on AWS.

It helps us to do end-to-end automation. The accounts and the HR department have a lot of employees to manage and a lot of queries come up. Previously, most of the tasks that we had to do were very time-consuming. For example, just attendance tracking and expense management consumed two days of the entire week, but after the end-to-end automation with UiPath, we hardly spend four to five hours per week on the same tasks. That definitely helped us.

Time-saving is the main benefit that we have got. The Build a New App feature helps us create our applications in a very quick and efficient manner. We can also share them with multiple stakeholders, which has saved us a lot of time. We used to spend two days per week on a manual task, but now, it's just four or five hours a week. A lot of time has been saved, and efficiency-wise, by introducing automation, very less errors are happening. That's one of the biggest bonuses of using UiPath.

It has definitely reduced human errors. With the end-to-end automation that we are doing, in addition to a lot of time savings, efficiency has been improved in terms of the number of manual errors. It has reduced about 95% of the errors. There are still minor hiccups here and there, but that's expected. With fewer manual errors, we are able to do things in a much quicker and more reliable fashion. Earlier, unnecessary time was being wasted on this, but now, we are completely dependent on automation. Automation and robots take care of everything for us. We just need to oversee things. That has made our life much easier.

We use the platform on the cloud. It has definitely reduced the on-premise footprint. One benefit of having a cloud product is that we need to do very little maintenance from our side. We just need to do the regular updates and install the patches that they give. It's on the cloud, so it's very easy. We just have to keep our application updated. It's very useful, and it saves a lot of time. With an on-premise model, a lot of maintenance is required.

It definitely speeds up digital transformation. We deal with a lot of employees or internal customers, and with automation, we are able to design applications that are very user-friendly. They are able to give us the data we need in a much quicker fashion. It has definitely been on the positive side for us.

For this digital transformation, we did not require any third-party or costly applications. Everything was there in UiPath itself. We just needed to subscribe to UiPath. It's a one-stop solution.

It has freed up a lot of employee time. The tasks that previously required two days per week now require just five hours per week. It has saved us that much time.

It has definitely saved costs for our organization. With the saved time, we are able to concentrate on different aspects of our work, and we are able to clear up most of our pending tasks. So, the efficiency has improved, which has been good for our business. Around 30% of our overall expenditure has been reduced because we are able to put in that much more work.

There is a feature called Build a New App in UiPath. I found that to be very good. It makes our job much easier to know how to build applications. There is also the Studio module. I am from a non-technical background. So, for me, designing and creating applications was very tough initially, but with the Studio module and the activity tab that they have, it's easy. Most of it is just drag and drop. I found that very valuable.

It's straightforward to build automations. The UiPath Studio has a lot of in-built templates to choose from. Most of the functionality is just drag and drop, and it can't get easier than this. It's really straightforward.

UiPath's user community is very active and very useful. The answers to most of my queries are already in the community. It's very user-friendly, and we can also clarify our doubts and have conversations with the UiPath community.

UiPath's academic courses on academy.uipath.com are also very useful. In case you have any doubts or you want to do any certifications, you can just log in. It's free of cost. You can just log in there and do your certification. You'll learn a lot. Both UiPath Academy and the UiPath Community are very good.

I'm from a non-technical background. For me, getting my head around designing and understanding RPA processes was very tough. UiPath Academy basically dumbed it down to my level. It has made it very easy for me to know and understand RPA. I have started designing and developing applications with UiPath. So, even a person from a non-technical background, like me, can produce reliable and very useful applications with UiPath.

The reports could be improved. They could be much more in-depth. 

There are some selector issues when it comes to web automation and desktop automation. There is a robot selector. When we feed the data, it tries to fetch the UI elements from that particular data, but that's not happening 100%. That could have some improvements. Apart from that, everything else is fine. I have not faced any other major hiccups or issues with UiPath.

In terms of additional features, some integration and API connector services need to be added, especially with the CRM software. Currently, they have a limited set of API connector services. They could increase that for the CRM software.

I have been using UiPath for nine months.

UiPath is a very stable application. We haven't faced any hiccups or any major downtimes. Being a cloud platform, it's very good. The only thing that we need to take care of is our internet and our system. Apart from that, I haven't faced any downtime issues or performance issues with UiPath. 

It's scalable. It definitely has all the capabilities for scaling up, but for our department, we most probably aren't going to scale it up because we currently have a sufficient number of users. We have been able to extract the best out of UiPath from the current usage, but it definitely has all the features to scale.

Currently, in our organization, it's deployed across multiple departments. There are 15 departments in our organization, and eight of those departments use UiPath. In our department, seven of us use this application. We have seven user logins for UiPath, but I am not sure about the number of users in other departments. The majority of users are non-technical staff and developers. There is a 50:50 ratio.

I have been in touch with their technical support, but my involvement is very less. They are very friendly, and they are very knowledgeable. They could solve most of the queries within 24 hours, and for most of the queries, they also had help documents that they shared with us so that we could learn, and the next time it happens, we are able to resolve it ourselves. So far, their support has been very good. I would rate them a 10 out of 10. I don't have any complaints so far.

Positive

We did not explicitly use any other product for RPA. 

I was not involved in its deployment.

We got some training from UiPath's third-party team on how to go about using the software because we didn't have any clue. For initial installation and deployment, we did not require anyone else. We did it ourselves. We just required some training on how to go about using the software.

In terms of maintenance, it requires minimal maintenance. It's a complete cloud product, and its maintenance involves downloading the latest release or updating to the latest release. That's it. We just have one person who takes care of all of these aspects. We don't have an extensive team to take care of the maintenance of the product. It's very easy for us to do maintenance. One thing that we like very much about UiPath is that it requires very little maintenance.

We have definitely seen a return on investments on UiPath. Basically, a lot of time was saved for us. We were able to concentrate on other aspects of our work. Tasks that previously required two days now just require four to five hours. There are about 30% cost savings with UiPath. 

The return on investment is quicker with UiPath. Earlier, the output that we wanted from a task took around 15 days, but now, it just takes around a week. That's the return on investment that we are getting from UiPath.

It's fairly priced. It's not too costly, and it's also not too cheap. When you bundle it with the UiPath Academy courses and the great community that they have, it is worth the price. 

We did try out Automation Anywhere. We did a trial of that software, but that was not reliable for us. We didn't like the performance that it offered. That's why we went for UiPath, and we have been using UiPath since.

Non-technical people have this misconception that automation is only for people with a coding or development background. I would definitely suggest trying UiPath because it breaks that barrier. Anybody with a little bit of computer knowledge will be able to design simple-level applications.

You can try the community version of UiPath. It's a free version of UiPath. If you are interested, I would also recommend trying out the UiPath Academy courses that are being offered by UiPath.

I would rate UiPath a 9 out of 10. If they can bring the integrations and the API services, it would make the product the best in the market. All other aspects are very good.

We have two use cases.

One is for our claim accessing process, for which I have developed a process for logging into the client's application. It includes launching the browser and getting logged into the application by entering the username and password and handling two-step verification. Handling that requires some logic. Once logged in, it navigates to the claim status feed and selects the organization's and payer's details. It then enters the required details of the patients. These details are given by the client in an Excel document that the process reads. It searches for the values, one-by-one. If there is no record for the patient whose details are entered, it will throw an error stating that there are no claims present. It captures such exceptions and records them in a separate Excel file.

If that person's claim is present, it fetches 25 to 35 key details from that record and they are written to an Excel document. Once the process is done, the Excels will be sent as email attachments to the client.

The second process that I am currently developing is one where I need to get the data from Google Sheets. This process involves four or five practice management systems. It has to log into each practice management system and, for each one, it needs to schedule appointments based on the data present in the Google Sheet. The process involves navigating to the respective screens, filtering the details, and entering them in a CSV file. Based on that file, we have all the data related to patients' records. The process checks the patients' payment records. There are exception-handling routines and any errors are noted in an Excel sheet. Once all the patients' records have been completed, it closes the application and sends the data to the respective clients. It produces a log file in Excel as an attachment, as well.

Automation has definitely saved us time and money. For example, for data entry, if a person takes around eight hours per day to complete and upload about 200 sets of data, a bot can easily upload around 3,000 to 4,000 sets per day. It reduces the amount of time to get data uploaded. If a person uploads one record in three minutes, the bot can upload the same data in about 30 to 40 seconds. The bot provides much greater time- and cost-efficiency. It speeds up digital transformation.

It has also reduced human error. Among those 200 records that a person can upload per day, mistakes may happen in 10 to 15 records. Bots don't do things incorrectly at any point in time. Values are entered correctly in each field.

As a result, it frees up employee time. If a bot runs for eight hours, a person only has to look at it for a little while, because a bot will definitely do the process perfectly. That means we don't need a human to dedicate much time watching something run end-to-end. If the bot does the process properly for four records, it will definitely do the next 4000 records correctly as well. So there is not much time required of a human to watch the bot.

On the basis of costs in India, where I work, if a person earns 30,000 per month, the cost of the process they work on is 360,000 per year. A bot for the same process may cost 150,000 or 200,000 only. Automating is more cost-efficient than hiring a person to work on the process.

Among the most valuable features is the ability to read Excel and Word documents with API calls.

In the Google platform, I need to generate security-related things like an API key and an API secure code. That enables me to get the data into UiPath. The product is built such that only if all the security requirements are properly done am I able to get the required data.

UiPath is also the best tool for a beginner or someone who has no knowledge of programming. It is easy to learn quickly and to understand. You can get working in it much more quickly than if you had to acquire a programming background.

I would rate the ease of building an automation at 3.8 out of five, as I have only been working in UiPath for the past 11 months. I am now able to understand everything and can design the kinds of processes I need to build. There are many courses available on their website in the UiPath Academy where they completely show you how to do things. Within a short period of time—I spent the first three months in the UiPath Academy—I was able to understand things clearly, including descriptions of the Properties panels and every field. I understand the uses of these Properties.

Also, many of the Activities are pre-built, but if any activities or logical processes are not available, I can get them through third-party packages that are in the UiPath Marketplace. I am able to build automations quickly. In the worst-case scenario, if it's a large project, I can develop that project within two months.

I have used the AI functionality for PDF automations. In these processes, the bot is able to capture the data properly about 70 to 80 percent of the time. But if a document is not proper or it isn't handled the right way, the bot struggles to get the required data. UiPath has to work on this aspect so that the bot will be able to completely capture the data.

There is also room for improvement in the area of third-party integrations. In the last week I have gone through a video for an integration service, but it did not show things end-to-end. Rather, they just explained the connection details only. After performing the steps they showed, I was not able to get things working properly in my process.

I have been using UiPath for around 11 months.

The stability of UiPath is quite good. In some particular areas, the bot struggles a bit and we have to implement Human in the Loop. Those cases are where the bot can't do certain validations. But overall, the solution is stable and accurate in the results.

The scalability is a four out of five. 

At a certain point, we needed support from UiPath. The solution can be integrated with ABBYY. Getting an AABBYY license doesn't happen just like that. You need to get a trial license and it's a long process. We needed support from the UiPath team to get it done.

You can try to get a solution from the UiPath forum or from the documentation sections, but the UiPath support is the best. I have raised three or four support tickets over the year and they have helped me through each issue, completely, to the end. They respond within 24 hours. When you explain your issue to them, they create a step-by-step process to sort it out. And once I solved the issues, they inspected what I had done.

Positive

I used Microsoft Power Automate. I switched because Power Automate is not very user-friendly when compared with UiPath. And when it comes to integrations in the Microsoft product, most of the connectors are still in the preview state. In UiPath, all the integrations are active and enable you to get the desired result. Also, the Microsoft community does not have many active people handling it. With the UiPath community, you get an immediate response for any issue you have posted.

I use the UiPath forums if I have an issue and I'm unable to find a solution or develop my process. If I post it on the forum, in a maximum of two minutes I'll get an email response from other UiPath users, as well as from senior users who may have two or three years' experience. They politely answer my issues. I have also provided solutions to questions in the forum over the past two months. UiPath's user community is absolutely the best one.

The initial setup is completely easy and straightforward. It is just like installing software in a system by clicking "next, next, next." At the end of it, you have Studio in your system. 

If you need to allocate a particular system to Orchestrator, even that is a very simple process and there are videos available on the internet that show you how to set up the process quickly.

Instead of giving a monthly salary to a person, you can get a bot on a yearly basis. It is cost-efficient and will save you money. You'll also get a more accurate and stable result than if you had a human work on it.

Pricing is based on your process. If your process is fairly simple, it will not cost much.

UiPath has enabled me to build automations much more quickly when compared to other tools. If you go with Blue Prism or Automation Anywhere, you need to have some programming language skills to implement things. But UiPath is completely drag-and-drop.

I looked online at which is the best tool. I looked at many details, what each product provides, and decided that UiPath is a better solution as an automation tool.

Overall, UiPath has the best user community and the best, detailed videos. It is easy to understand, there is no coding at all, and even a beginner can create a process in a short period of time. It is also easily integratable. These are the points where it stands out against any other tools.

For us, in some use cases, end-to-end automation means a need for Human in the Loop. There are certain points where the bot is not able to validate things and a human is needed to verify whether the bot has done things properly or not. But bots are able to process 90 percent of an end-to-end process. For monitoring, UiPath has Orchestrator. If any error occurs, the data is immediately updated in Orchestrator and you can easily see the error and the cause, and you can easily resolve it.

In the UiPath Academy, UiPath offers the best content for each module and, after each video, there is a quiz so that we can show we have understood what we have learned from the video. There are also activities and a practice session where we can implement the use cases by practicing them in Studio. If we are stuck at any point after the practice, they have a solution area where they explain the steps you need to implement in Studio to get the desired results. They give sample workflows as well. I don't think any other software tool does this. They even provide detailed, step-by-step videos for third-party integrations.

I own the robotics process automation program for our life safety segment. I also own the mergers and acquisitions project management for our life safety segment. We've started out by using UiPath specifically for mergers and acquisitions when migrating customer data from the acquired companies to our standard ERP. We're also implementing sales and use tax, filings, and things like that as well.

With our most recent robot, we transfer information from acquired companies to our ERP. Typically, it would take about six temp associates for about four to six weeks to clean the data and move it into the ERP. About three weeks of that would be actual data entry. With this product, we took that three weeks of data entry, times six people, and rolled it down to 12 hours of robot running. It was a pretty significant amount of savings for us.

Citizen development is great. With it, it's easy to develop or have self-developed robot intelligence. For example, instead of having to hire a developer, you can make the robots do what you need using the UAPs studio tool. This has been the most valuable aspect. StudioX specifically for our newer citizen developer is useful and I really like using Studio for myself.

We have seen a reduction in, for example, time, and not necessarily in human error. For example, we did an interesting analysis. We wanted to see what the human error rate was for entering data, and, due to the fact that our ERP is Microsoft Dynamics 2012, capturing some of that data is a little bit harder. We structured error rates based on entry. What we did was we created a robot to go back and check all their entries to see if they were missing anything. Oddly, the errors that people were making were nominal. I don't see any data that showed that we necessarily reduced error rates. It was really the people aspect of the process where there were time-savings based on the needed amount of human input. We've been able to reassign workers to more valuable tasks where we can't assign robots yet.

We do about four to five acquisitions a year and those are typically six-week processes for each one of them. We could say that we save about 25 weeks of labor in a year, and that robot will be about a week's worth of labor. Therefore, we save about 24 weeks of labor.

We've been taking some UiPath Academy courses. We've actually found it more helpful if we chose UiPath South American Developers to teach us to build as we're building. For my team specifically, it's been really helpful to have an expert involved to say "this is the use case that we want to do" and have them walk us through building a specific robot. That way, it's real-life experience versus a video-based session. While the academy is helpful, hands-on experience is just much more valuable.

UiPath Academy courses affected the process of getting employees up to speed. It affected it a little bit. It probably more affected our decision to use UiPath over Automation Anywhere, or even the Microsoft RPA program. Just the fact that there was so much available content that we could lean on if we needed to was huge. The others had content, however, not anything close to UiPath's capacity.

The on-prem orchestrator was an issue for us. When we bought it, it was a mistake. Our IT team thought it would be the best option for us, however, it's way more complicated to use. Out of the box, it feels more complicated. That said, once you get to know it, it's fine, however, it was incredibly hard to set up on our enterprise systems. Whereas, with the cloud deployment, we were live and up and running in an hour.  The initial setup took us about two weeks. That was a little bit of heartburn. It would be helpful if UiPath could offer some sort of support outside of a ticketing system.

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

I've been pretty impressed with the stability. We've had a couple of minor issues that our developers helped us figure out. It's programming and nobody on my team are programmers. Some of it could be just user error, however, overall it seems like a very stable platform.

The scalability is really unlimited. It boils down to the organization's ability to implement a governance model quickly and successfully. I know UiPath has a governance tool or some kind of a framework, however, it is one of those pieces where it's way more expensive than us using our regular service channel tool that we already have implemented to do those submissions and approvals, et cetera.

In our organization, the users include two developers - me and then one of my assistants.

The only interaction we've had with technical support was during installation. The ticketing system and not being able to physically talk to somebody were difficult to deal with during the implementation process.

The on-premises implementation was a bit difficult. We knew that we were going to have to pay developers to help us develop the robots, however, getting stuff installed, our only method of support was submitting a ticket and the turnaround time on that took a while. Our UiPath rep helped escalate what she could. It would be ideal if there was a setup hotline or something that we could call right away. Sometimes it's just easier to talk to somebody than emailing back and forth. That's probably the biggest area for improvement.

We handled the initial setup ourselves. We do almost everything internally. We have our own IT team, including myself. Our solutions architects set it up with us. What we ran into in terms of problems was that the instructions were really not very good. We weren't able to appropriately install it as the instructions that came with it just weren't comprehensive enough. In terms of the instructions that were published online, we found a couple of instances where they were saying to use functions that didn't exist. These might have been a little out of date. Eventually, the ticket team was able to help identify that. I would grade the setup probably a C-minus, and everything else an A-plus.

We're so early into the implementation, the ROI is a wash right now. That said, our one robot has paid for our development time, and then someone will be able to use it on future acquisitions. We will likely see ROI within a year.

You can buy enhanced support, however, it's an additional $30,000 USD a year or thereabouts. That's just too expensive, honestly. The competition didn't charge for that. We also felt pretty confident in our IT team's ability to be able to dissect the instructions and install it. However, the instructions just weren't that good. We had one of our top engineers working on it and it took a lot of effort to get it installed correctly.

The pricing, in general, is fair. It's a little bit more than some of the competitors, however, it's a little bit more flexible than some of the others. There's value there. The OCR pricing is out of market. We need it, however, we're actually going to use some third-party bolt-ons due to the fact that UiPath is way too expensive.

We looked at Microsoft and Automation Anywhere. We also looked at help systems and Brick is one that we currently use and one of our segments, however, they're only a five-person company, which is pretty small. I wouldn't even put them on the same level. We were looking for shared services. We were looking for the best in class so we could take a solution enterprise-wide. In the end, we boiled the options down to Automation Anywhere, UiPath, and Microsoft, and UiPath was the winner.

In terms of Brick, they don't have a citizen developer model at all, so their developers have to do it. They are less expensive and they're a little bit more turnkey where they do it for you, however, they're really novice. The methodology that we've really bought into it was the community developer, as we want to empower our associates to figure out what works for them to improve their work-life balance. Using a service like theirs takes that away as we have to do the due diligence and figure out what fits in the bucket, what doesn't, as opposed to just empowering the person to do it. That was the key to why we chose UiPath.

The sales process was way better with UiPath. Our UiPath rep was far more knowledgeable about the product than the other options in that we ultimately had more confidence, knowing that whatever we needed, UiPath would help take care of, which was huge. My organization's a little bit disjointed. We try to go after what we feel is going to be impactful without a whole lot of due diligence. That's why, with UiPath, having that resource to lean on was helpful.

We use attended automation right now. Primarily this is due to the fact that the ERP system that we have really can't function unintended. It's a Citrix space environment and it has some odd security protocols where it'll shut down or refresh out for so many hours and it's not planned refreshes. It's hard for us. It's almost random. It's hard for us to build an unattended robot to deal with that. I'm sure we could, however, right now, we want to start with attended robots as we know what functions we need. We decided to go that route and eventually we'll add unattended.

I'd advise new users to make sure they have team buy-in for the concept. That doesn't mean necessarily getting the team to know exactly what they're going to be automating. You just need to make sure that they understand it's not about replacing people. Rather, it's about making their jobs easier. That was key for us. That said, most of my team was overworked, and they were glad to take on the project of lightening their load. Most organizations would benefit from making sure the communication is solid in that regard, however. 

I'd rate the solution at a nine out of ten. With better technical support, I would give them a perfect ten.

Our primary use case is creating automation for day-to-day activities for our internal use, especially for performance management and reporting. Apart from that, we create some automation applications for our clients as they're using UiPath. That's another use case.

We prepare database reports where a lot of product data is consumed. Creating reports or reporting used to take a lot of time and effort for us. UiPath has been very helpful for us in quickening this process and making it efficient.

It enables us to implement end-to-end automation. With our data and reporting tasks, there were a lot of repetitive tasks that needed to be done, which sometimes can be irritating. UiPath has completely taken over this process. So, right from the input of data to the extraction of reports, the complete end-to-end process is covered by UiPath. I don't have any complaints.

With UiPath, our automations are getting better and better. UiPath is driving performance, innovation, and growth across our entire organization. With report automation being our main use case, we saved a lot of hours, and we have also reduced a lot of overhead costs with UiPath. With automated data processing, errors are minimal. The error rate is almost zero, and the time taken is pretty quick. Our efficiency has improved, and that has been a major benefit for us.

We have been using the cloud version of UiPath. So, our on-premises footprint has definitely been reduced.

It has helped us move a lot closer to 100% digital transformation. Our reporting is automated, and we are almost 100% digital now. There is also an overall reduction in the cost and employee time.

It has reduced human error. The error rate is minimal or nearly zero. It's 100% smooth for us. In the past, we would have overlooked or missed certain data points, and during our final report collaboration, a mismatch would happen, but that is completely reduced with UiPath. 

It has freed up a lot of employee time. It has also made our work much more efficient. Earlier, if seven employees were doing a particular task, only three employees are required now to do that task. So, other employees can focus on something else now. 

It has saved about two working days or 16 hours a week. With the amount of data that we work with for reporting, it was a very hectic task for us. We had a lot of data sheets, Excel files, etc. UiPath has saved us two days of manual work per week.

It has saved costs. We were a team of seven who were handling reporting. We were taking reports and consolidating everything, whereas now, only three of us are required to do that. The remaining four can focus on something else. That much time and cost have been saved. This has resulted in us focusing on some other aspects of our business and bringing in more revenue for us. These are some of the overheads that have been completely saved by UiPath.

One feature that is particularly very likable is the My Workspace option under the Orchestrator menu. We can easily arrange and/or segregate all the folders there. The My Workspace option has been a very big positive for me. I've been able to streamline my work and do structured work with this My Workspace option. It's one of my favorite features. Apart from that, I like the integration services offered by UiPath. There is also the Studio option with good features, but I have used Studio very less. It's basically used to design specific automations and applications.

UiPath is very straightforward for creating automation. Especially in the UiPath Orchestrator and UiPath Studio, you can just drag and drop items to create an automation flow. It's that easy. For example, for the reporting automation, I designed the automation flow by using the in-built features. I did not type any command or code. I just picked a feature and dragged and dropped it to create and implement the flow. It was that easy for me.

The UiPath community is very vast, which is a very major plus for us. Whatever doubts we have and whatever knowledge transfer needs to happen can happen pretty quickly with the UiPath community. I find it very useful. Apart from the UiPath community, there is an Academy option where we can take up some courses, and we can do some certifications. That is also very good. I have personally not taken any courses, but I'm aware there are courses because my teammates did the certification courses. So, in terms of value, UiPath is an all-rounder for us because apart from doing automation, we get a whole lot of other things. It's very good.

They can improve the in-app guides and in-app tutorials. One instance where I faced a challenge with UiPath was during the initial week of using UiPath. It can be a little complex to understand at first. The in-app guides or the in-app tutorials could be much more elaborate and detailed. That would have made my entire journey smooth, but that did not happen.

The AI functionality could be improved. We used its AI functionality as a base for our reporting automation. It's not 100% perfect. It's still evolving. We used AI to predict the data modeling and report structure, but it wasn't accurate all the time. It's an evolving functionality, and I hope that it gets corrected over the course of time. The basic functionality is on par with any other software in the market, but it's not helpful for simplifying complex workflows and modules. The AI functionality has also not been helpful in increasing the number of automation, but UiPath, in general, has been very easy to use and helpful for doing more automation.

I have been using UiPath for about eight or nine months.

I haven't faced any issues so far. It has been smooth. I would rate it a 10 out of 10 in terms of stability.

I believe that any automation software, including UiPath, is scalable. It's a cloud-based solution, so it's definitely scalable for us. With UiPath, we have been able to do more automation and reduce our overall manual work. Our manual work now is very limited. It has definitely helped us scale up in terms of revenue, efficiency, and performance.

They're definitely very knowledgeable. Until now, I haven't had any complaints about them. Whenever we have any doubts, we just email them our queries with certain documentation, if needed. They get back to us immediately. They are also patient. It's not like they're in a hurry. They're very patient. They make sure that our query is completely resolved before moving on. I would rate them a 9 out of 10.

Positive

In my previous organization, they used a software called Freshworks. It was for automating our reports and sales processes, but I personally did not like that software because it was a little bit complex for me, and it was also costly. There were very few integrations that were offered in that particular software. We were not able to get the results that we needed. So, we looked into different solutions, and that's when I recommended UiPath to my team.

In terms of performance, UiPath has been very reliable. It's a complete cloud solution. The Freshworks software was not a cloud solution. We used it on-premises, but UiPath is a complete cloud solution for us. It's a very reliable and stable solution. We hardly face any downtime, server errors, or something like that with UiPath. That has been a very noticeable difference for me. Apart from that, in terms of complexity, UiPath is not at all complex. It's a structured solution. You choose A, and you can come to B, and you can come to C. It's very structured, which is something that was lacking in Freshworks.

I was involved in its implementation. It was not a complex process. It just required me to sit with the UiPath team and get it implemented. We did not need an elaborate team or effort. Within 15 to 20 days approximately, we were able to set up everything and get it running completely. The implementation process was very smooth.

Its maintenance is also very easy because it's a cloud-based solution. We just need to keep it updated all the time. That's the only thing. We have employed just one person to take care of the maintenance.

It was a combination of the in-house team and UiPath specialists. Their initial training team was very knowledgeable, and they were very pleasant in addressing all our queries with respect to how to design applications, how to create automation, and things like that.

We have definitely seen an ROI. Four employees are now not needed to do reporting. We have been able to transfer them to other projects. It has given some returns within four to five months. We have reduced our overall work time by around 30%. We have been able to use that saved time for other things helpful to bring in more sales, automation, etc.

Our inbound revenue is going up. We have seen a 20% increase in our overall revenue after the introduction of UiPath, but I cannot directly pinpoint that to UiPath because there are other factors as well.

I was not involved in the pricing negotiations, but as far as I understand, my team was happy with the pricing. So, I assume that its price is moderate and competitive. It isn't highly-priced.

To anyone looking into getting this solution, I would advise getting UiPath instantly and integrating it with your business to proceed further. If not UiPath, I would definitely recommend trying any other automation solution because that is the need of the hour. We are humans after all. Manual work is prone to error and less efficient. An automation solution can definitely help you scale your business quickly. UiPath is one of the top ones when it comes to automation. It's a tried, tested, and trusted solution. So, I would suggest going with UiPath, but if you have any concerns about it, you can definitely try other solutions.

Considering the UiPath community, UiPath Academy, and UiPath's all-around capabilities, I would rate it a 9 out of 10.

We have around more than 300 bots that are active right now. All the automation we have is based, basically, on Oracle and Oracle ERP. We have other automation as well, however, for now, I am focusing only on Oracle-based automation.

We have so many other use cases that we want to implement within our organization. We try to look at how we can save time for our employees so that they can spend their time on other valuable things, and not waste their time on unnecessary time-consuming tasks. 

Our employees use Oracle ERP, so they have to process so many invoices at one time and it takes a lot of time to consume a single invoice. I'd estimate it would take at least 5 to 10 minutes. But with the automation, we can process one invoice within a minute, or maybe less in some situations. It saves a lot of time - likely hundreds of hours for each employee. It saves manpower for the company and saves you valuable time for the employees. They don't have to do the same things again and again and waste their time on that.

For example, if they have to download an invoice and process that for some reason. They have to go to some ERP tool, log it onto that first, type in the information, and then download the invoice. It takes a lot of time. They don't have to do this once or twice, it's hundreds of times due to the fact that they're not for the same couple of invoices. Therefore, this is one of the best use cases that we have for now. We are still looking for other future use cases, but for now, this is the one we have.

UiPath is saving employees hours of time and has also been able to dedicate their free time to more valuable tasks.

The most valuable feature of UiPath is the time-saving employees get. It's definitely sometimes complicated for the developers when they are automating. However, from a business point of view, I would say this is one of the best tools that every organization should have, to help save time and work hours.

Sometimes if you are doing the same task, again and again, we do make mistakes. Automating those tasks removes that human error. Also, with those types of tasks, a human gets annoyed very, very soon if they keep doing one thing again and again. With the help of robots, we can fix it. There is no error with the bot. The only error would be if there is an exception if something is wrong. That said, from a business point of view, when I'm working on a bot, I make sure that it is not throwing any errors and making sure that there are no mistakes. From a development point of view, we can always fix that, however, we don't want our bot to have an error on the production level.

The ease of use and building automation using UiPath is pretty straightforward. It's not complicated. Even a person who is non-technical can become a citizen developer and use StudioX to automate some of the tasks that they think are time-consuming for them. Otherwise, from a developer's point of view, I don't find it complicated. Initially, when a user is learning and at the initial stages of learning RPA, it's definitely complicated, however, once you get used to it, it's pretty straightforward. I love working as an RPA developer.

UiPath has saved costs for our company. I don't have any metrics on the spot, however, I would say it's a big amount of saving. Our organization is very happy that we are using UiPath. We have a few complications right now, however, in a few months we'll fix everything. By next year, when everything is all settled down within our team, then we can start looking at exact metrics in terms of cost savings.

Our teams have used the UiPath Academy courses. I have been using UiPath Academy for a long time. I tend to keep on checking what's new at the Academy. If something new is there, I always try to learn it as soon as possible. If somebody were to ask me "How can we learn UiPath?" The first answer I’d give them is, "Just go to UiPath Academy and follow the learning path over there." That's what I always recommend to any new person.

UiPath Academy courses have positively affected the process of getting employees up to speed in UiPath. It’s helping employees and companies to learn, and I would say it's a one-stop place for anything related to RPA. You don't have to go to other places. You will find everything at UiPath Academy. Sometimes it doesn't have too much detail on the advanced level of things. However, it provides enough information that you learn by experience. If you need more information, you also have access to the UiPath Forum for that.

The biggest value of the courses is that they definitely save time for someone who wants to learn. I don't have to read a book and I don't have to go to any other place or learn from multiple sources. Everything is in one place and I can just follow the learning path and it's a good education in the tool.

Sometimes we don't see what processes can be automated. When we think that, "Okay, we can do that. It's not so time-consuming," however, we can figure it out with the help of UiPath apps and we likely will use them in the future to automate even more.

In terms of improvements, to be honest, I don't have anything I'd want to be added right now. If I have any problems, UiPath is always there. It's easy to find everything. I don't think anything can be improved. It's going very well. It's working for us.

They could always continue to add new features, however, I don't have anything specific in mind right now.

We have been on UiPath for almost more than a year now within our organization.

I'm satisfied with the stability of UiPath. It's good.

UiPath is always there if you want to scale over UiPath-related items. It is scalable.

In terms of who uses the solution, on my team, it's only me who is an RRP developer. That said, every person in the team knows what UiPath is, and they are joining bots onto the system on a daily basis if they have something to do. In the finance department, there are almost 40 to 50 people using UiPath. It might be more. We have more than 300 bots active right now, and I'm not working on all the bots. We definitely have other developers and other people who are working on it in other divisions within the company. 

We also do have plans to create more bots. We are going to use the UiPath apps in the future to see what kind of automation we can do there as well. for example, the Task Capture is a good tool. We haven't used that yet, however, sometime in the future, I would love to set it up for everyone on my finance team and run that application in the backend so that we can see what processes might be automated.

UiPath support is amazing. We talk with someone on a weekly basis. They suggested we use UiPath technical support as we were having a few technical support issues with UiPath and we couldn't figure it out. When I submitted a ticket at UiPath, they were able to answer within a few hours. At maximum, we would get a response in one day. Not more than that.

They also answer with a solution, and the solution always works. I'm very satisfied with them. We don't have to search on the forum and do our own research. We just submit a ticket and once they get back to us, implement the suggested method and after that, it's all good. I'm really, really satisfied with UiPath's level of technical support.

It's my understanding the company did not use a different RPA tool before UiPath.

That said, there are so many automation tools and I do know a few. There's Blue Prism, Automation Anywhere, and Microsoft has their Power Automate. I'm not familiar with all of them as my focus is only on UiPath for now. I haven't used others. I wouldn't be able to compare them. UiPath does seem to be one step ahead, however, as others do not have a free learning academy the way UiPath has. They do not offer a free trial version initially either. That is the best thing UiPath has done from a business point of view.

I was not present for the initial setup of UiPath.

While I do not have an exact ROI metric, it's my understanding that we have saved way more than the solution costs.

For example, if we are spending, for example, $300,000 on the licenses in a year, and we are definitely saving more than $1 million, or maybe more than that. due to the number of hours that we are saving, it's a huge amount of savings we're receiving. 

The pricing is worth it. It's definitely expensive, however, I wouldn't say it's overpriced. The services that we are getting from those licenses help us to save way more than what we are spending.

My managers were telling me that they were comparing which tool to use before choosing UiPath. While I'm not sure what they were looking at, they said they liked UiPath from the first day and that's why they're sticking with UiPath now.

Maybe in the future, we might switch to the cloud, however, for now, we have an on-prem deployment. We're using the most recent version of the product.

We do not use UiPath's AI functionality in our organization yet. We are not using all the UiPath apps right now.

My advice to potential new users is that the first thing that they should do is they should go to the Academy just to get familiar with the tool and how they can use it. Then, move through to the next steps.

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

Currently, we're doing the digital transformation in finance. I'm more of a functional person who understands the design and the processes but not the programming, coding, and details. 

I am using their automation cloud offering.

One of the best benefits is that instead of just doing their single task, it gets people to think beyond what they're doing and how other things impact them; for instance, for PO distribution, we had to think about where our suppliers' lists are and what do the people do out in the field? I've never been as exposed to that as much as now because we are trying to automate it. What you find is that the challenge isn't just in the robot. It is what you do before you get to the robot that is critical, and if it forces us to fix that, it has been a success. It helps you to realize some efficiencies in your current processes.

The automation cloud offering helps to decrease the total cost of ownership of UiPath by taking care of things such as infrastructure. We have gone and moved many more things to the cloud. We have a Hyperion solution in the cloud that we use for consolidation. We have FCCS cloud from Hyperion.

I anticipate that there would be a reduction in human errors and also time savings within these five processes. Inherently, it has to improve the accuracy. That's because now you're focused on a particular thing, and you're testing it. If it is not a hundred percent accurate, it is not going to production. 

The ability to follow and orchestrate what the robots are doing has been very valuable. I've been working on the automation hub because that's the next step after our test case of five robotic implementations. So, it is orchestrated to see how they're doing.

UiPath Academy is helpful in terms of the ability to connect the software to the processes that you're trying to automate. It has been helpful in understanding the functions, and it is where you would go to get a better understanding. I do find that their online help is very beneficial with examples. In fact, sometimes that's better than the training itself.

I'm learning it for the training for the RPA associate, and I'm about 70% through there. UiPath's academy courses have been helpful in onboarding or being up to speed with UiPath. However, it has been tougher because the programming that I learned in school is very different from the programming done today. I am sure the younger people will pick it up much faster. There is so much out there, and there is so much to learn because it is not one software package. It provides the ability to use all software packages and interconnect with them. So, the opportunities are amazing but also intimidating.

I started with UiPath training in July 2021.

I am not worried about the stability. I may be naive, but if others are using it in the cloud with much more complicated processes than what we are automating, it is not really a concern.

It is being used by accounting and IT. Finance is learning that, and they're taking the same training that I'm taking. They're probably 10% to 15% on that journey.

Currently, we're doing the digital transformation in finance. We expect to expand that out to operations based on our test case of five robotic implementations. In fact, in our naming conventions, we're trying to make sure that we leave room for HR, Operations, IT, etc, but right now, we're just in finance. Payroll processes, HR processes, onboarding, operations, filling in maintenance on equipment, and doing the routine things out in the field that they do every day will take adoption and interest. Raising four kids, I realize you can't get the response that you want until the people in the field decide that they want to change and adopt it. So, that will be the challenge. The challenge is not whether you can automate something. It is more like will they let you automate something.

I have not really had to use the support, but I will. I've gone back and forth, and I've lost some of my training. I'm a tenant who is just in the training phase. So, everyone has had issues with getting in, and it's more whether they're using Google or Explorer, and how they're accessing it. I am getting that standardized and having them do that. I am also a victim of the same thing that I'm teaching them, and what I'm trying to do is be the guinea pig.

Before UiPath, we didn't use any other RPA solution. We went for UiPath because it was really a move from our finance leader, the controller. We had automated many financial processes with planning, reporting, etc, but the accounting group was continually skipped over. We had a controller that came in, and they wanted to take many of our repeated processes. They took Rally and created an agile group to create the digital finance vector. There is a team of five members who went and looked at processes that we were doing and then told us about which ones we can change and do better with. By using his experience in other companies and having discussions with other people, along with the KPMG group, they did an analysis. They wanted to lead in the digital finance transformation. They're doing that by looking forward to five or 10 years and then coming back, which is really nice.

I will learn more about that. The workflow was nice, and the implementations that we have are relatively easy, but it is intimidating to see how much it takes to do some very small processes. It helps you understand more about the decision points and whether they're objective or subjective. With reporting, it will be helpful for us to understand which things are best to automate and which ones are the easiest. That's what I'm hoping to get from five implementations.

We are doing consulting with a collaborative effort with KPMG. So, they actually know more of the technical details, and they're supposed to be transferring data. 

KPMG did a sprint on the implementations. The sprints were such that it was really six week turnaround time, and that involved actually going backward and doing the assessments from those. By doing the cost benefits backward, we can set things upright and see what we do going forward. The key is not how quickly they were able to do it, but how quickly we can do it, and how quickly the people in the field can adopt that and have a robot actually be their assistant. I believe you call that the citizen developers.

Right now, it is way too big for me to even understand it. I feel like it's a universe. I'm just trying to get directions. The area that I'm looking at right now is analytics to make sure that we can properly report on how they're doing, and that's what is going to make management invest further into our idea. I come from a reporting background, and that's what I focus on in other financial packages that we have with PeopleSoft, Hyperion planning, and the FCCS cloud. In many of these automations, the need part of it is that you're not stuck within the software that you had; for example, a macro within Excel can only help you with what you're doing in Excel. It can't help you with an email. It can't help you with a PDF form, but you can bring these together, so the automation opportunities are endless.

So, at this time, it hasn't saved us money because we're just in the investment phase. That's why I want to do reporting so we can see. The decisions you make now affect the next 10 to 20 years. Everyone gets too short-term-focused. You should go to where you want to be five years from now and go backward. What you are doing today is going to make that five years strike. So, it is an investment.

It is pricey at the beginning, but we'll have to see going forward what we get for the tools. It is always expensive to buy a really nice car and not drive it very far and very much. So, it is about utilization.

I believe my company did evaluate other solutions, and they definitely liked UiPath best. The primary differentials were reputation, experience, and the level and quality of the tool.

I would advise others to give it a try. It can't hurt. Even if you didn't use it going forward, with the basic principles, you'll probably fix things and then come back to it. Some people just have bad processes, and it would be very frustrating to use them because they haven't fixed their processes. You have to get your processes aligned first and then take them to the point that they're standardized and understood by different people using them, and then you can automate across different software packages.

In terms of the ease of building automation within UiPath, that's something that I need to discover with the IT team, but what I do like is once you do something, you store it in a library, and then you have plug and play automation that you can add to others. So, you don't have to keep redoing the same work over and over again, and that's going to be a huge benefit.

I would rate it an eight out of 10. I'm learning it, but have to inject experience. I have to learn and understand, and then I have to utilize t. Like many solutions that I've dealt with, there are always three ways to do it, but there is the best way. I always wish you'd just teach the best way, but I understand that you want to make people agile and have an understanding of using it in different ways. However, learning all three ways is very cumbersome. You really want to learn the way you're going to use it.