UiPath Reviews

We have 12 bots in production right now. I can't speak exactly to all the bots. My role is in process mining. With process mining, we're using the PDP process and we're building out a model for sales orders.

The most valuable features of UiPath are the possibilities. For example, we're excited about what's coming and we've saved some time with the bots, however, we're still learning. The idea is once we get really good at process mining it will be really good at building bots. We'll be able to uncover those opportunities and then execute on capitalizing on them.

I'm not sure of how much time we've saved, in the tens of hours per month. While it's not nothing, they've been small use cases to build up the capability. We are still figuring out how to build bots, and how to get the orchestrator all set up. 

We're doing a crawl, walk, run, taking our time and doing it right. We are building up the center of excellence. We're out of crawl and we're in to walk, however, we're not running yet.

So far, the conversation around automation and cultural change has been really powerful in terms of re-thinking our processes and asking if there's a better way to do it. right now, we're beginning to understand that we don't have to be stuck where we're at.

It's changed the dynamic of how we look at our processes and how we talk about why and how we do what we do. That's been tangible.

Our teams have used UiPath Academy courses. It has been instrumental and we couldn't do it without those courses. That was one of the reasons why we selected UiPath. They're robust and it is easy to access training modules.

The biggest value that we've realized from the Academy is confidence. Just getting over that initial hurdle of understanding what we're doing has been huge.

In terms of the ease of building automation via UiPath, it takes a long time to set up the environment and get the training and be able to do it.

The overall ecosystem and platform, which I know that they're working on, needs to be better. Being able to connect idea generation and opportunity into discovery and then into automation needs to be seamless. It needs to be end-to-end and also more robust. If I had to give them a piece of advice, it would be that the RPA is one component of process improvement, and they own the RPA space, so I realize that's their bread and butter, however, RPA isn't the only tool in the toolbox. I'd like to see more in relation to how we can eliminate waste and how we can lean out our processes.

Maybe the improvement solution isn't RPA. I'd like the solution to address how can I see more opportunities and capitalize on the improvement of any kind with an obvious focus on RPA. That's where the real power is going to come from. That said, it's not the only focus.

I've used the solution for over a year. 

The stability has been great. I don't have any issues or comments there. I don't have any concerns with the stability of the company or the platform's software. We haven't experienced many bugs or anything like that. We're happy with the stability.

The scalability is where the solution is going to come into play. Likely, it will, as we have learned the possibilities are ripe and endless. 

Right now we're using it extensively, however, we're only building bots and deploying process mining within our controller and finance area. That's our learning curve and it is probably the ripest ground for automation. We plan to increase usage. We've just scratched the surface there. We've only done maybe 5% of controllers. Then, we have the whole rest of the organization and the whole supply chain.

Technical support was great. They helped a lot during the implementation. I would rate them at an eight out of ten simply due to the fact that the premium support person was very, very helpful and honestly I don't know what we would've done without them. However, that did come at a price.

Making that service standard as part of the implementation process would probably pump my technical support rating up to a ten in that, while the experience was a ten, we paid for it.

In terms of the initial setup, once you have people that are familiar with the software and you have all your environments and connectors set up, the Building Box is very user-friendly. That said, it doesn't happen overnight.

From contract signing to putting our first bot into production, the setup and deployment were about six months.

Being on-premise, there was added complexity. Had we opted for the cloud version, it would have been a simpler process. We had the standard provisioning servers and had to get them set up and installed the software, et cetera.

The process was complex simply due to the fact that it's an advanced technology, however, UiPath is really great at helping out. We had a premium plus support person.

A lot of the details and things that we'd never done before, they were there to help us on their end and give us pointers and tips on our end.

We have not yet seen an ROI. When we look at the savings we have realized versus the upfront costs and the time investment, we're probably still under water, however, we recognize that this is a long game.

For the quality of the product that we get,  it's a fair price. I'm a believer in you get what you pay for. You always want to maximize your value, however, that doesn't necessarily mean a lower price.

Before choosing UiPath, we did look at Automation Anywhere and Blue Prism. Those two were the ones that we actually did full demos of. We also looked at the websites of some of the smaller players.

The main one that we really looked at where and it came down to a head to head was with Automation Anywhere. The key difference for me, with my focus, was process mining. Automation anywhere had some capability there, however, it was a recording device and it was intrusive to the end-user. You also couldn't go backward in time. When you got everything plugged in and turned it on, you could start recording and building your processes. You could see last week's processes next week, however, the UiPath solution uses the audit tables. Therefore, when I turn it on, I can go back in time, for not just a week; I can go back two years. I can go back that far to see how the process has evolved and where we're at. I can build a more robust baseline to change from today rather than having to wait for six months to build my baseline.

I'm not sure which version of the solution we are using. We just installed it earlier this year, therefore it's probably the latest and greatest.

We do not use AI functionality in our automation process. We also do not use UiPath apps features. While we're learning about some of those new things, we're not using them today.

The main thing that I would advise others is to get leadership on board and get their ducks in a row in terms of the culture that they want to create and the long-term vision that they have for this.

You can't capitalize on it in six months. If you're going to throw in the towel if you're not seeing ROI in your first calendar year, then don't even start. It takes some leadership fortitude and some stick-to-itiveness. It doesn't happen organically or on its own. If a company is not dedicating the resources or not freeing up people's time, they won't get far. The bots aren't going to create themselves yet. Maybe with AI, in the future, that will be possible, however, that's way off.

On a scale from one to ten, I'd rate the solution at a nine for now. I'm really happy with the program that we're building up. I'm happy with the solutions that they offer. It'll jump up to a ten when we get to scale and it's paying for itself. 

Our primary use case for UiPath is the automation of some of our processes. The main departments that have been affected are accounts payable and accounts receivable.

We are developing expertise internally. At least for the first year, we worked with an outside consultancy to provide us UiPath development. They were working with the business team here closely, but also helping to train our people.

The main parts that we've got are in the area of invoice automation, but we also have some bots that deal with the automation of some of our engineering applications within Oracle.

We run six bots, primarily dealing with invoice automation from our suppliers. That is working in conjunction with Abbyy. So, part of the process is UiPath and part of it is Abbyy FlexiCapture. We also have some engineering applications in Oracle that we also use it for. Examples of this are updating bills of materials, or printing out invoices.

The key savings and kind of the real business case of the project were to do with invoice automation.

UiPath allows us to implement end-to-end automation. We utilize the Task Capture functionality for some of the initial parts. Then, building the bots is done with Studio, and Orchestrator is used for monitoring. It's complete, end-to-end automation.

The invoice reconciliation has been very useful. We now process 80% of our invoices automatically, of which 80% of those get no human contact. The remaining 20% of the ones that are automatically processed are either exceptions or they are certain expense items or the price doesn't match up. In this case, there's some human intervention, but we are getting a high percentage of things going through automatically.

This automation has enabled us to move some headcounts into different, higher value-adding activities instead. We have freed up approximately 10 full-time employees by using UiPath. We didn't let anybody go. Rather, they've been moved into other more creative roles.

The most valuable feature of UiPath is its usability. It's very easy to understand. I think in general, some parts of the process were difficult to grasp, and there were challenges along the way. But now at this more mature part, it's definitely increased employee satisfaction. People have been able to move into higher value-added, more enjoyable tasks.

We've got a group of citizen developers that work on UiPath. These are people that weren't developers but given a bit of training and its ease of use, they have been able to utilize it.

Both members of my team and I have used the UiPath Academy, and the training has been really good. It has enabled us to utilize the citizen developer approach. It is because of the conciseness and quality of the teaching that we have been able to employ citizen developers. We didn't really envision that as something that was possible, but given the ease and usability of the tool and the quality of the training, that's been possible for us.

UiPath has definitely helped to reduce human error. The main process that has gone through automation is the accounts payable process. Now, some of our suppliers may offer discounts and stuff like that. So, it's reduced the time for us to get things into the system. We've got increased visibility, and we've reduced the number of people working on this process, ultimately meaning cost savings as well.

The one negative that this solution has is its reporting. I found it a bit confusing because it was suggested to us that we use Elastic and Kibana for reporting. To me, this seems a little bit fragmented. I understand that UiPath has the Insights feature, but it wasn't what they recommended for us and I think the reason is that it isn't powerful enough for what we want to do. Ideally, we should not have to utilize other tools for reporting.

When it comes to speeding up our process, it has not made any impact. This is because the licensing and agreement part is quite time-consuming. Where we may have wanted to scale up quicker, we've been limited by signing contracts or getting things moving in that regard. As such, it's not really sped up our procurement process or enabled us to scale as quickly as we'd like when we wanted to.

We scale up some parts of the system quicker and we were seeing large delays in processing some of the documents that we wanted. This problem was that we didn't have the hardware or software ready for us to scale. So, in that regard, we've not found the ability to scale beneficial.

The error handling is in need of improvement. We'd had a problem tracking when errors occur, and troubleshooting how things are captured in production.

I have been working with UiPath for between 18 months and two years.

My impressions of the stability are largely positive. However, I'd like to see more emphasis placed on error handling for production.

With respect to scalability, I'd like to see it be made more fluid. It was a bit slow for us to be able to scale. If it was more elastic or there was a different way of billing it instead of having to sign up we had to sign up for a year-long license, it would have been useful. It wasn't that we minded the length of the contract or the cost. Rather, it meant that there were contracts that had to be signed, etc. 

With the processes that have already been implemented now finished, we're actively looking at where else it can be deployed. There is even interest from the executive team. They would like to see it used further.

UiPath has an active community but we've not really engaged with them very much. When we were in need of help, we contacted support and our account executives, but not the community.

The technical support has been really useful. I would rate them a ten out of ten.

In general, they've been very responsive, and easy to get them on a call if required. I've been really happy with the SLAs they've provided to us.

Positive

This was our first RPA implementation.

The initial setup was fairly straightforward. As we are using the on-premises solution, we've had to invest in additional hardware.

We used a consultant to assist us with our deployment. We definitely found it beneficial because it gave us experience. We didn't have any experience with RPA, and they helped us to get off the ground and provided some best practices.

There are three members of our team that are responsible for bot deployment and maintenance. One is a UiPath developer, another is a support developer, and the third is a business analyst.

We have definitely seen a return on investment.

UiPath has helped to both speed up and reduce the cost of our digital transformation. Compared to traditional automation approaches, it's been a lot quicker and less costly to implement. It very minorly affected us in terms of needing IT support. For example, we've had to work with our Oracle applications team, as well as our infrastructure team, in getting some of those parts set up. Overall, I've not found it to be burdensome.

UiPath has definitely saved on costs for the organization. I think that initially, there was some skepticism. Obviously, there were significant implementation costs but now, we're definitely seeing the fruits of that. 

Our total savings at the moment is between 50,000 and 100,000 per year.

The licensing fees are billed annually.

The company evaluated Automation Anywhere and Microsoft Power Automate before choosing UiPath. I can't speak to the pros and cons of the different options because the decision was made just before I became involved.

Overall, in terms of ease of building automation, our experience has been positive.

UiPath has features available for attended automation, although all of our automations are unattended. Similarly, we don't yet use the solution's AI functionality but it's something that we're really interested in starting to use.

My advice for anybody who is looking into implementing this product is to ensure that the processes they want to automate are standard and standardized. That was a key barrier that we realized, and it delayed things for us by quite a bit.

I would rate this solution an eight out of ten.

My previous company was in the banking sector, and we had done automation with websites, UI, SAP, Excel files, and PDF. In my current company, it is being used for finance and HR. We have ERP, CRM, chatbots, etc. We are using this solution to integrate different systems.

I use UiPath Studio to develop the code, and I use UiPath Orchestrator to publish my work. We have our own UAT systems to test the code. We can install the UiPath in the test environment and find all the compilation errors in the debug mode and fix them. We also have version control. If we upload a version and it doesn't work, we can downgrade the version. Everything is tracked in UiPath Orchestrator.

We are using it on-premise. In my previous company, it was on the cloud, and we accessed it through the cloud. 

UiPath Academy courses have been helpful for me. There were lots of activities that I didn't know about, and UiPath Academy was helpful for that. There are multiple ways to do an activity, and UiPath Academy helps you to find out those activities. When you start using it, you can find out which activity will work the best for you. The courses are interactive and not boring with just videos or PDFs. They have a mix of PDFs, videos, and interactions. It is fun and interesting if you have a passion for it.

I found the UiPath community very helpful. At the beginning of my career, I had lots of doubts, and I posted them in the community. We had got an unknown error, and we posted our query there thinking that there must be at least one person who has had the same issue. They solved the issue quickly. It was a quick response. If you post a question, sometimes, you can also get a response within five minutes.

I use attended automation, and it has helped to scale RPA benefits in our organization for processes that require human-robot collaboration. We have a process for reconciling bank statements. When the finance department is done with their files, they send them over to me by email, and I have to start the process manually from UiPath Orchestrator. It needs human interaction. It is a monthly process, and we don't want to automatically trigger based on something.

We use its AI functionality a little bit. We have automation for processing invoices that are in different formats. We are using an ML model to train and replicate the output based on the incoming PDFs. We don't have to manually identify the PDF format and process it. Its AI is very helpful in the case of dynamic files where when a PDF is in one format, we want to process it in a certain way, and when it is in another format, we want to process it in a different way. We have automation to automatically identify the fields and then process the documents accordingly. It is helpful in the case of dynamic files. 

It has reduced human errors. We have a process to send emails to the end-users based on the training they complete in our LMS. I did the automation, and the SME was very happy with that automation. She used to have lots of manual errors where she might miss one email id or put an incorrect email id. With the bot, we automated it and added exceptions, etc. It is more stable now, and there are fewer human errors. It is also very helpful for data entry work where there are lots of chances of human errors. All this can be avoided with a bot.

It has freed up employee time. The time saved depends on the complexity and the length of the process. For our LMS use case, the SME used to take around one hour every morning, and now, she doesn't have to do that. Even if she is on leave, our bot is available 24/7/365. 

The UI Explorer in the UiPath Studio is valuable. We can get a unique and dynamic selector for every element in the UI, which is helpful for me in finding out a particular UI element. Most of my automations have had UI interactions. So, I found it the most helpful feature.

It is pretty easy to build automations. I am from an engineering background, but even if you don't have much coding or programming knowledge, you can easily learn and use this tool. I used UiPath Academy to learn about this tool, and they have got a detailed explanation about everything. So, even if you don't have prior experience, you can easily use this tool.

They give updates every year. Before the new features go live, they put them out in the Community edition. When the features are stable, they release them. They have got a helpful community forum. If you have any roadblocks, you can post your question there and you will get a response, sometimes even within five minutes, depending on the complexity of the question.

When I started working with UiPath, there were no activities for SAP, but in the version that I'm using right now, there are SAP activities or SAP modules. Previously, I had to code everything from user login to user logout, but now, all the activities are available. I just have to drag and drop and give the username and password. I don't have to do it from scratch. It would be great if they can include activities for all of the most common CRMs and ERPs. They can integrate it with different activities for the most common systems.

I have been using this solution for around five years.

It is mostly stable. We recently upgraded our UiPath Orchestrator, and we stopped receiving the emails that we used to receive in the morning about the status of our bots and jobs. I created a ticket, and they said that the particular version or update that I had wasn't stable. They provided me with a different version that was stable.

It is great. In my previous company, one single bot was doing all the processes. In this company, we have six bots, and every day, around 50 processes are running. So, it is scalable.

For the email issue that we had, we created a ticket, and they responded the next day. The response time was less, and they also provided me with the correct solution.

Positive

When I started my career, I started working in Python and website development with Django. When I heard about UiPath and RPA, I felt that it is going to be the future. So, I switched to RPA. UiPath is the first tool I used, and I'm still using it.

I have used Power Automate from Microsoft, but I found UiPath much better because it has a single package with UiPath Orchestrator, Studio, etc. It has everything in a complete package.

I have also used Blue Prism. Blue Prism is more expensive. I used its Community Edition recently because I wanted to explore other tools, and I felt that its UI is not as good as UiPath Studio. They both have drag-and-drop functionality, but Blue Prism is not as user-friendly as UiPath. I have never used Automation Anywhere, but I have heard from my peers who are from the same background that it needs programming knowledge.

It was a bit complex because we have two virtual machines, and each one had three robots in it. We had to do remote desktop on the virtual machine to run the automation. We have recently improved all the processes in our company. They are now dynamic, and they can run in the background. Even if the virtual machine is closed, they will run.

It was implemented in-house.

We have definitely seen an ROI. It replaces the manual work and allows us to do other productive tasks rather than doing repetitive and manual tasks every day. If someone costs $50 per hour, and we are able to save one hour of manual work every day for that person, it is a substantial saving.

It is a bit expensive, but it is cheaper than Blue Prism. We have six robots in total. There are no other costs in addition to the standard licensing fees.

I love this tool. They have been improving it every year based on the user experience, or they have been releasing a stable version for any bugs.

I would rate it a ten out of ten.

We are using it to extract information from invoices. We have different types of invoices from about 180 vendors and we need to automate extraction from about 6,000 invoices. We receive invoices via email and are using automation to extract the invoice, put it into a folder, extract information from the invoice, and then enter this information into a SAP-based solution. Not every detail is taken from the invoice, only the relevant portions. 

We have already developed it and it's in the testing phase, where what is being tested is sending the money to the vendor.

For example, if we have purchased something for £1,000 from a vendor and they have sent us an invoice, we extract all the information, confirm that the purchase has been done by looking at our records, and then we have to submit it to the accounts office. That office will create the payment invoice for the vendor.

It now takes about half an hour for each invoice to be processed versus taking two to three days to do the same invoice manually.

And while I wouldn't say that UiPath enables end-to-end automation for everything, for invoice processing it does. Cash to payable is one of those things that UiPath is able to do from end-to-end, right from the point of getting the invoice from the client to the end where an email is sent to that client saying, "Your invoice has been processed. We have transferred X amount of money to your account." In some cases, especially when invoices are handwritten, we face small problems but, other than that, we are able to do it.

And the turnaround times in creating automations are much less compared to when we were using Automation Anywhere. With that solution we were not able to do it as quickly as we can using UiPath.

We did a PoC for an HR company that was giving appointment letters to about 100 people across its franchise. They wanted to give them out in one go and wanted some way of automating the process. UiPath had the tools that we could use to manipulate it enough and send the appointment letters in 15 to 20 seconds.

And automation has absolutely freed up employee time. Now, people are only looking at exceptional cases most of the time, where automation is not possible. They aren't looking at most cases. Productivity has improved to a great extent compared to what it was before automation. People are going home on time and getting their leaves on time and getting to spend quality time with their families. They are happier compared to how things were.

In addition, there was a lot of human error when people were entering information into the computer. Especially in an accounting situation, if someone inputs a four instead of a nine, it's very difficult to figure out where things went wrong. But with UiPath, there is no more inaccuracy or typos.

What we like about the product is that we are able to customize a lot of things quickly because UiPath already has certain APIs and tools available that we can integrate with our system to extract information. For example, if you have to open Word or extract information and put it into tools like SAP or Salesforce, those things get done quickly and efficiently.

I have been using UiPath for about a year.

UiPath is always uploading new versions of its software. So far, we haven't had any problems related to UiPath crashing or anything like that. The stability has been satisfactory. It's good, decently stable software.

It is very scalable. You can scale it up to any amount that you want or scale it down, depending on the kind of processes that you're doing. 

We have automated the number of robots that we use. Every day we look at how many invoices we have to process. Suppose that today we have to process 5,000 invoices. In that situation, we use all 10 robots. If the next there are 15,000 invoices, two more robots will be activated to take on that load. And it works in reverse. If there are fewer than 5,000 invoices, we have eight robots working on them. It took us a while to automate that aspect.

The support is a little bit lacking, response-wise. Just like in banking, where they give you a relationship manager, they should provide someone who is responsible for a project. That person would be responsible for responding to your queries quickly and efficiently. What happens now is that I have to wait for them to come back to me and it takes a lot of my developers' time to figure out how to do things. Support could be better.

Neutral

We did a project for a company that wanted to identify certain vendors to talk to but they needed to know which vendor would give them the best price. They needed to do a comparison but they were spending tons of time evaluating the vendor information. We used Python to do this, not UiPath. We made it possible to do the comparison quickly and efficiently so that when they speak to the vendors they know exactly what to talk about. It improved their resource allocation because they had 15 people doing this work. Now, there are only two people doing it. The other 13 people have been deployed to other sections and other types of work.

Even though Python is very powerful, you need to do a lot of coding. We wanted software where we could minimize coding, a low-code solution.

We looked at UiPath, Automation Anywhere, Blue Prism, and Kofax. But out of all of them, we found that UiPath was a more wholesome product. It's not that the other software products don't have good features, it's just that UiPath has a lot of tools that can be used quickly and efficiently.

Right now UiPath is on the cloud, but eventually, it will be on-prem. When we signed the agreement with them, we told them that we would do it on the cloud and they had to provide us with the storage and cloud space. They were very accommodating about that.

We were able to deploy the first automation in about two weeks. It's not just setting things up, but also making sure that it is working. The users also needed to evaluate things using their tools and data. So the setup was not that bad. Within two weeks we were all set up and ready.

It is worth the cost. We did costing for our invoicing project and we are seeing between 20 and 25 percent ROI.

The price of UiPath is too high. From their website, what I see is that if you can buy one license it will cost about 5,000 rupees here in India. And for enterprise solutions, they are charging about 800,000 rupees for about 100 licenses, which is quite high compared to similar software solutions.

The ease of building automations depends on what the client wants. Some processes can be done very quickly and efficiently, but some need a lot of tweaking to meet the requirements of the client and they take a little time. But as a general rule of thumb, it is quite efficient actually. Some take very little time and some can take a couple of weeks.

The UiPath user forums are good, but there's nothing new in them. Whatever they are saying, we have already done it. There isn't much new information there. For example, UiPath has a tool known as Document Understanding, using Computer Vision to do a lot of the processing. We were stuck a little bit but the user community was not able to give us much insight mainly because Document Understanding was very new. It still is quite new and people have not explored it enough to give their feedback. We were flailing about, trying to figure out what to do and what not to do, what works and what doesn't. We were more or less on our own.

In our company, we try to make sure that prospects have gone through the UiPath Academy on their own. For us, it is mandatory that they do so to have at least a basic idea of what UiPath can do and, during interviews before we hire them, we try to test them on some of the use cases. We don't want to spend time teaching them about it. We assume that if they have gone through the Academy courses, they are well-versed in what is expected.

The solution is used for automating repetitive processes within our entire organization.

In this particular organization, we've been running UiPath for roughly one year, and we've already been able to automate so many tasks that the solution has been enough to replace two individuals.

The ease of implementation is great. There's a large community surrounding this product. UiPath, in their workflow wheel of products, offers a really wide variety. I've tried competitors as well and I would say that they are market-leading.

My assessment of the ease of building automation using the solution is positive. There are a lot of different techniques or coding languages that can be used for automation. UiPath provides software where, instead of dragging from the ground up, I can drag and drop prebuilt functions that will shorten the development cycles. Rather than having to build something, I can just reuse something that somebody else already built.

The solution enables us to implement end-to-end automation, starting with process analysis and rebooting building, and monitoring of automation. They strive to provide all of those. The monitoring part is quite lacking, however, they are a quality provider in other aspects.

The cloud is great. I worked in organizations where we hosted UiPath on-premises, and not having to take care of updates or worry about the on-premises server, is a great help.

The Automation Cloud service helped decrease time to value. Rather than focusing on infrastructure, our focus is purely on finely automating our computers and development.

I’m not sure if the Automation Cloud service helps to decrease the solution's total cost of ownership. I’m not exactly sure how the privacy model is looked at right now if I compare the cloud service to the on-premise service.

In terms of having a SaaS solution and how fast we’re able to innovate when it comes to automation, in this particular case, the main selling point is that they have a really wide variety of automation-related products, which makes them the all-in-one automation vendor.

This solution helps minimize our on-premise footprint.

We’ve used the UiPath Academy Courses. We have got both developers and business people using it. This way, they can gain more insight into what is good to look out for when trying to identify automation. It's a very important part of UiPath. They offer everything from videos and other tools, which makes our team of experts not need to study anywhere else.

The community is quite good and brings value. They have authority. There are a lot of people who answer questions. UiPath has done a really good job in terms of showcasing the people that spent the most time there, giving them MVP statuses and more.

The biggest benefit of the Academy is that people get up to speed quite quickly with UiPath's suite of products. The only thing I can compare it to are open source alternatives. I haven't used any of the proprietary alternatives.

We use Attended Automation. Attended Automation helped to scale RPA benefits in our organization by automating department or role-specific processes that require human-robot collaboration. It has been a good way to explain to the business what RPA is. They can actually see if the solutions align and they gain a better understanding of the bigger picture. It's very important. At the end of the day, business is the most important place that we get automation ideas from. They need to know the potential of the product and Attended Automations helps them gain this insight.

While the solution speeds up digital transformation, I cannot say it necessarily reduces the cost of digital transformation. It has, however, reduced human error. Some of the processes that we have to automate are very repetitive, and when we must repeat this five thousand times a day, mistakes are bound to happen. However, if you make a computer program do it, it's more efficient and less error-prone.

This solution freed up employees' time. So far, we freed up almost two weeks of programming delays. If we free up one day, that's 168 hours per month, and doubled it will be roughly 340 hours per month. This additional time enabled employees to focus on higher-value work.

We haven't measured employee satisfaction in a granular way, however, from just what I've heard, teams are very satisfied that they no longer have to do these really boring tasks.

This solution reduced the cost of our automation operations, although we didn't really do automation before. This solution saved costs for our organization in general as well.

Monitoring and statistics need improvement. It's quite hard to export if you want a long, clear report. It's quite hard to do that based on the style and functionality. You have to feed in your own functionality to do this.

I've been working with UiPath for the past three years.

The stability of the solution is good. We've had heaps of fun since we implemented UiPath one year ago.

If we need to increase the computing power, in this case, it would be adding more robot licenses. We can simply do that by emailing UiPath and they will expand our license. It’s very simple to scale up.

The solution is scalable. It's very easy and quick to scale up. If we need more people for more robots, then we can simply just buy another robot license.

We use the one robot license and we have it at roughly 70%. We will probably buy another robot at the end of this year.

Technical support is great. I've used it on several occasions and I can expect answers within twenty four hours from their technical engineers, and they will speak with me directly.

Positive

We used an open-source program called OpenRPA. UiPath is a much bigger suite of products with a big community. We get a lot of services for free when we're using UiPath.

The initial setup was extremely straightforward. We sent one email and they set it up for us.

The deployment took roughly one month, and the installer set it up for us. It's more of a matter of informing and educating the business.

Our implementation strategy was to demo the product for a business, explain the capabilities, give them the information about UiPath Academy, and then based on that, move forward.

We handle the implementation in-house. 

We have seen a return on investment. In less than one year, we had already automated many tasks and saved time in terms of hours, manual hours, and days.

As long as your company has enough repetitive work where you can automate, the pricing is quite easy to calculate. If you save more money automating these tasks in the first half-year, then it's definitely a worthwhile investment.

You should take into account the different server where you actually run the product with a Windows license and the cost of purchasing the machine.

We evaluated the top five market options based on Gartner, and based on previous experience with consultants and colleagues. We then picked this solution.

The pros of UiPath compared to, for example, Automation Anywhere or Power Automate, which was my first alternative, was that they have a larger community. They also have a wider range of products. They have a wider range of activities within the products as well. They have in general, a stronger tool. UiPath is very broad.

We do not use the solution's Automation Cloud service.

We do not use this solution as much as we would like to, however, we use monitors with the Automation Hub to gather all different types of automation IBS in one place. All of our products are hosted on the Automated Cloud.

At this point, we do not use the solution's UiPath app features or the AI functionality in our automation program.

I'd advise users to follow best practices in regard to populating automation. It's a good idea to follow people's advice. You aren't going to make the wrong decision if other people have done it before.

I'd rate the solution a strong seven out of ten. The only lacking parts I can mention are the monitoring and statistics.

We're doing a lot of accounts payable automation and accounts payable invoice automation. 

We have about 70 bots in production right now. They are unattended.

It's helped us to dramatically cut down on the number of people having to key in invoices manually. We've been able to repurpose some of the staff into other jobs and have the bot do all this work for them. It's really changed things. Our staff likes it since they're doing more meaningful work and not keying in invoices all day. I'd say it greatly impacts our staff, and our dealers love it as they're getting paid quickly. The invoices are getting paid much more quickly now.

We know that it's increased the speed of payment dramatically. I'm not sure of the numbers. However, we've processed about 40,000 invoices to date using the bot. We started in January and do about 5,000 invoices a month. That's saved a lot of hours. Our guys were doing this all day, every day, and we've cut back on it dramatically. It's a considerable amount of hours saved.

We enjoy using the AI functionality. The document understanding is the tool we're using to do the invoice automation, so it has an AI piece and machine learning built in. 

The invoices are probably our most complex as there's a lot of information that has to be scraped off the invoice that DU is doing. We started with the hard ones, and we're easing into the easy ones now. We worked backward a bit. We were a little concerned going in that this was a little bit complex; however, in a very short time, we got a lot done. Looking back, it was probably a good decision to start there. With AI, we're looking to do more. We'd like to bring on more invoices and continue to use this throughout the whole organization and in Latin America as well.

Just seeing all this manual work being automated, and seeing how the staff is thrilled that they're actually doing interesting jobs now has been great. They come in the morning, and they're actually excited about coming to work, not keying in invoices all day. That's the biggest benefit I've seen. The staff is really excited about the product, even though, in the beginning, they were a little nervous about bots doing their work.

The goal of the project was to get 75% of our invoices done with no human intervention. We actually hit 90%.

We use the UiPath community quite a bit. We find it very helpful. Most times, when we're having an issue, other people are having the same issue. We have gotten very good insights and have found other use cases. It has helped us a few times to fix an issue. It's a great feature.

The UiPath Academy courses are great. When we rolled out, we did a project with UiPath. We put a lot of their courses in our Academy so that our users could take them through us, and have actually had a very good response. A lot of people in the company took it, and the completion rate was very high.

The Academy teaches people what RPA is, and how to use it. It could be as basic or as complicated as you want. They have a wide range of classes. The fact that people can get in there and start learning for free is also very good.

Maybe we need to rely on our rep a little bit more to find out what's out there and start asking a lot more questions. We don't understand its full potential. However, that's a little bit of us not asking the right questions. What they've been terrific about is coming out with fixes. Every time we have an issue with something, they're quick to fix it immediately or in the next release. 

They're spending a lot of time and effort on unstructured documents or core quality documents. Sometimes things don't pick up right away, however, it is my understanding that they're working on it, and it has improved tremendously. Even since the beginning of the year, we've already seen some improvements.

I've been using the solution for two years. 

The stability is great. What they've done is pretty impressive. They're going to be here for the long haul.

We found it to be very, very stable. We have not had any issues since we went live, so that's also been very impressive for us that it's extremely stable.

From our perspective, there's really no issue with scaling. We're looking to expand, even by putting more invoices on it, and we don't anticipate it being an issue. We're not concerned in the least about how much it can handle. We're looking forward to expanding it a little bit.

Technical support has been terrific. 

They're very quick to react to us, and even if they aren't, our rep is always very quick to help us get a response. 

Positive

This was the first RPA solution I've used. 

I work in finance and accounting, and we were chosen to be the proof of concept to use UiPath. We were in very early, so we did a very early proof of concept, built five bots, and presented them to senior management. We gave feedback that we thought it was something that could be beneficial for the company.

The initial setup was very straightforward for us. UiPath worked with us. They were great in helping us out; the reps really helped us through the whole proof of concept. It was very new to us, and we had their full support - even when we were presenting to senior management.

We're looking at ROI on one project right now, and we estimate we will begin to see a return in year two, which is great.

The pricing has been fair. They've been very good to us with the pricing. They let us choose what we needed. They build packages that fit us, whereas maybe the competitors aren't doing that. Others don't give us the ability to buy what we need. We kind of would have had to buy in bulk, and we didn't like that either. UiPath gives us the ability to be flexible with what we need.

We looked at Automation Anywhere. We just had a better feeling about UiPath. Even from the proof of concept, we had a better feeling about UiPath.

The biggest thing we found with Automation Anywhere, for example, was we asked for a demo license so that we could do a proof of concept; we had a very difficult time even installing the demo licenses. In contrast, with UiPath, it took us a matter of minutes to get going. We were on and building bots within a matter of minutes. Therefore, very quickly, we realized UiPath was the right solution for us.

We're on the latest version, I believe.

While our company is very socially and environmentally aware, we're not yet leveraging UiPath on projects that work towards good causes. RPA is starting to get some acceptance into the organization now, and we'll do something in the future. 

I'd advise potential users to set expectations with users. Talk to users. With RPA, people always fear when they hear robots. Setting expectations for your user base. Also, if you're not sure, find a partner that you can trust. We found a very good partner. They were very good to work with, and we really felt like we could trust them. We wouldn't have been able to do this without them. They really brought in the expertise. 

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

The software's terrific. The support's terrific. All the people that are assigned to our account are very attentive to us. Our current rep is amazing. Every time I call him, he always helps. If he can't answer it, he always finds us an answer. They're quick to respond to us, even if they don't have the solution immediately. It's never gone more than two days without us resolving any issues. They've been very, very good.

We're very happy with the overall solution.

We started out with a lot of unattended use cases and then moved into using attended bots to help users. I've been with two separate companies. One was a financial services company. However, there was a lot of support for external clients. In the company now, we're doing a lot around the back office, HR, finance, and supply chain. UiPath just runs the gamut of all different kinds of use cases.

It's definitely made it easy to build automation. We have a team of about four or five developers. One of them was straight out of school, and they had never really had professional experience. We've also taken a couple of developers that were more into custom code and converted those over to using UiPath. It's interesting to see the level of excitement when you use a tool like UiPath from someone who is straight out of school and can convert over. 

We enjoy the constant innovation. It's coming out with new things that we can use and new features all the time. RPA has been around for a while now; however, the fact that we're adding integration services, adding apps, and all these other features, makes it possible to expand our use case.

We use UiPath to automate processes that deal with a good environmental cause. For example, for the company, however, we get invoices for bulk fuel. Our company sends out a lot of trucks, and a lot of customer engineers to actually service equipment. All this was manual, and a lot of not knowing how much we were paying. We automated that, and then the next step of that process is, "Okay. Can we start figuring out exactly how much money we spend on fuel, now, let's try to figure out ways to lessen that?" I could see how that could be environmentally friendly as we're trying to reduce consumption.

The user community is interesting. I've met a couple of people here and had really good conversations. It's interesting in the virtual world that we live in now, where everybody's just a face on a screen.

We've used UiPath's Academy. Being a solution architect, I'm not hands-on with code every day. I got certified as an RPA associate so that I could better understand what the developers are working on and using. When I'm designing solutions, I have a better knowledge of what's possible. I've taken a lot of the courses on UiPath Academy.

We're actually looking into a document to understand the use case. It's essentially car titles, and we're struggling. We've used several different OCR engines to try to train the model and try to improve it. For us, a little more direction on how to actually achieve this would be useful. We've been struggling for a couple of months now trying to get it working and getting it to the level we need it.

I've been using the solution for five or six years. 

The stability is great. I compare it to what I would think the best in class is. It's like Microsoft releasing patches. I've had fewer issues with UiPath updates than I do with my Office client on my computer. Therefore, it's very stable. 

We've had it where we had an update, and it did break some of our robots, and we had to go and do some troubleshooting, yet that's only been one time. It's pretty good overall. 

It remains scalable for us. We're not a huge shop yet as far as the number of bots, so it remains to be seen. It will be interesting when we try to reorganize our Orchestrator to make it more scalable. I can't really answer that one yet, as we haven't really tried to scale a lot.

Technical support is great. It's easy to reach out to them. It's easy to get feedback. As with any organization, a lot of times, the first answer is, "Go read the FAQ." I usually respond, "Well, I've already read the FAQ. That's why I'm asking." This is normal. Once you get past that, they're really ready to jump in and help.

Positive

I started out in 2016 looking at what was the best solution for the company. We looked at several of the top options. They're still the top ones today if you look at Gartner, Forrester, and publications like that. I used some of them. I've used Power Platform and other low-code tools like Pega and Appian. There are a lot of different tools in this space, and they all bleed into each other. 

I've been with two companies that focus on UiPath. It's just the constant way they try to keep up and keep innovating has made them a bit different than other options.

I was not involved in the initial deployment of the platform. I came in about a year ago. Since then, we've done things like automating month-end close processes, automating a lot of manual processes from moving from an old legacy HR system to Workday, and integrating with Workday. There have also been several other different smaller use cases like that. That said, for the implementation of the main platform, I wasn't here for that part.

The deployment of automation depends on how it's built and how you structure your UiPath Orchestrator, which has changed a lot in the last one or two years. They've got this concept of modern folders now in UiPath.

It's taken a lot of effort to transform what we did previously into what we're trying to do today. We very much had one tenant for one automation or a group of automation. Now, we're trying to do more. We ended up with a lot of tenants. Now, we're trying to consolidate into fewer tenants with these modern folders and trying to understand how that all works.

We have definitely seen an ROI. The team has talked about a million hours returned back to the business for other activities. It took a few years to get there, however, now it's every year. 

The pricing changes every day, however, it's not unlike any other SaaS platform. Sometimes it's hard to understand. That said, I'm more on the technical side. Some of the big questions are unattended versus attended since there's a lot more cost to unattended. When we get into document understanding, it's the number of OCR models, and the models you use that increases cost.

I looked into the other two big ones in this space. One of them, and this was in 2016 or 2017, didn't have a concept of attended automation. They thought it should all be unattended and no one should touch it. It should just run. That was really a barrier for us since one of the big value propositions is just automating those small tasks that people do to free up more time. Attended automation eliminated them.

One of the other ones we looked at couldn't support us. It was a proof of value, proof of concept type exercise, and they couldn't give us the support we needed to execute it. It was pretty easy to disqualify them when they couldn't go through that pre-sales motion to really get us. Why would we want to sign a contract? Why would we want to move forward? 

Potential new users should focus on the business driver or the business use case and find the best tool. UiPath lives in this space of RPA, low-code, AI/ML. There will probably always be three or four of these tools to choose from at any enterprise or sizable company. How do you pick the right one? It's really about what the business is trying to do.

I'd rate the solution eight out of ten.

Support is good, reliability is good, and innovation is great. There are just some things they could get better on to catch up with some of the other players in surrounding technologies. UiPath started as RPA. Other companies started as integration platforms. I know we're getting into connectors and things like that. It just keeps moving in that direction.

I am a UiPath developer. I have automated web-based processes like HR and finance. I have also worked on a use case consisting of web-based automation, Excel automation, and email automation.

The solution reduces FTEs in processes that require 100 people for repetitive tasks. It really helps customers to reduce human effort and guides the robot to do efficient work within the schedules.

It's very easy to manage and automate Orchestrator because it allows plug-and-play models and drag-and-drop approaches.

UiPath should be able to adapt to other operating systems like Linux or macOS. The tool must reduce the activity required for workflow design. It should be made similar to Visual Studio. It should provide a better way to analyze the recursion functions.

I have been using the solution for six years.

Compared to Automation Anywhere or other open-source tools, UiPath's stability is very good. However, when it comes to very complex hybrid automation with high-density bots, where we require many third-party applications, UiPath cannot handle such scenarios.

PDF automation is very complex. Either we will have to use a third-party Python script, or we will have to build a custom OCR. We require good programming knowledge. The product must improve its stability. I don't see much stability. Though it is available in an environment like Mac, it is not up to the mark as it is in Windows.

The product is scalable.

First, we validate with the logs. In logs, we have to identify certain categories of errors. From there, we identify the root cause. During development, we rename all the activities to appropriate annotations so that we can backtrack them accordingly. If there are any exceptions, it is passed on to the Global Handler. If any error occurs, we email the support team with a screenshot. For example, if ten transactions have been processed and there is a system exception, we immediately send a screenshot to the support team.

Positive

The initial setup was straightforward. It did not include the CI/CD pipeline. There were two machines. One was the developer, and the other was the production machine. We had to deploy it into the production machine. An Orchestrator admin and a developer are enough to deploy the solution.

To deploy the solution, we create the package and describe the overall process. We compress it into a new package and assign the robots with the machine key. Then, we create certain asset queues for the processes and upload them into Orchestrator.

Once all the assets are created, we assign a VM to the package. Then, we upload the package and map it to the process name. We add triggers if required, and if any change request comes, we raise the request, the manager approves, and we proceed with the implementation. It is very easy to maintain the product if there are no version changes in the applications.

The licensing cost is very high.

UiPath's cost is very high. When we transfer the knowledge of a robot to another, certain images are not available. It's difficult to identify the XML collectors. A proper annotation or guidance must be given to the user. When a new version is updated, the tool becomes slower. It is very difficult to maintain version history because of the bulk update activities. If we want to convert from Windows to Windows legacy, it is very difficult.

We get the input files from emails. We read the input files, extract data from the template, and open it in the browser. We worked on an engineering product. We used UiPath to get information about the testing and the model's integrity. Certain information was in the Excel file. We had to extract information on whether the model had to be tested with plastic or without a plastic cover. There were drop-down messages. We captured the values and injected the JavaScript modules to autofill the data.

Once the testing was created, we created a sample order. We filled out a form from the input file, gathered all the details into a summary, and wrote an HTML code for it. Then, we sent it to the client and informed them that the test had been created successfully.

For SAP, we did an auditing type of automation. For example, we automated payments and filled in all the information from the template. Then, we had to propose, settle, and release the payment. In SAP, we are using VBScript also. It has some complex scenarios.

If it is a PDF type of automation, I would recommend the latest technology called Document Understanding. I can define and train the fields using certain anchors and then go with extractions. Machine learning models are also possible. It would be the best way to do a PDF automation.

Calling an API would be the right choice if it is an API approach. If we have been asked to download certain files from SharePoint, we create a custom Azure application. We define secret keys, certificates, and IDs. We define certain API permissions. Then, through UiPath, we install Microsoft 365. We can then download the file. If the process is more complex, ABBYY is the best choice.

Building automation using the solution is easy. We need a little bit of programming knowledge for complex or hybrid automation. For easy automation, plug-and-play connectors and activities are readily available in the solution. We just have to get trained and use them.

UiPath speeds up digital transformation and reduces the cost of digital transformation up to a certain extent. We required a ticket-tracking system where we needed additional third-party software like OneDrive and Office 365 to be installed. For Box drive, we had to install SDK. We also had other solutions like Google Drive, spreadsheets, and Zoom APIs. The solution has helped a lot to minimize our on-premise footprint.

It enables us to implement end-to-end automation. It is important for customers because they want to avoid repeated tasks. If a customer wants to search for an email and upload it in a different portal, they might have to open multiple pages. However, if we choose end-to-end automation, things can work in the backend. The Picture-in-Picture mode in UiPath allows the user to work parallel to automation. So, while the robot runs, the user can do their work parallelly.

I have not used the AI functionality much. I have used AI for a POC of a custom model where I had to identify objects from an image. There were many questions like how many people were in the image, how many cars were there, how many street lights were there, and how many fruits were there. I had to find the count of the people or objects and their confidence scores. It was a small POC with the object detection model built with Python.

The product has helped to stabilize standard and structured processes. If the data is unstructured or unorganized, we use ABBYY as a third-party application. We have to train and classify all the assets and forms. The robot trains the modules using the connector and converts the semi-structured data into structured data. We can make automation more scalable using third-party applications. The cost is very high, though. UiPath is not that stable.

I have used the Academy courses. I have also completed enterprise training and acquired a certificate as an RPA developer. UiPath has a very good community. If we get stuck on anything, we can get solutions for our problems. Currently, ChatGPT is also helping us in many ways. My UiPath skills are really good. I keep doing R&D on AI Fabric, automation, and other features. The community helps me to learn.

A little bit of programming knowledge is a must to use the tool. A level one automation or a straightforward case with repetitive tasks does not require much programming knowledge. The user can use the solution if they have knowledge about the dynamic selector and wildcards. They should have a little bit of fundamental knowledge of computers and automation.

Overall, I rate the solution an eight out of ten.