UiPath Reviews

I've created an app for conversions and exchange rates. Every day I need the exchange rate of a certain currency and I use the API free exchange and UiPath.

It's also used for the reconciliation of invoices.

I've used it for the creation of an onboarding bot for employees to be onboarded onto a website with a remote system. I used AWS and a virtual machine and created a Google Form from there, and used UiPath's computer vision to do onboarding activities and extract data from files. PDF files can then be entered into the remote system. UiPath can be used to fill the forms.

It can be used for web extraction tasks as well, for example, for booking flights, where you can extract the flight details for particular search criteria and place them into an Excel sheet.

It can also be used to extract data from invoices in order to populate an Excel sheet, for a portable format. I've created a process that used documents as a learning model and extracted the invoices, using logic to output the transactions. 

Another use case I tried was extracting data from Amazon based on exact data. The same can be done on Linkedin using the Linkedin API. I'm fine-tuning and extracting data, putting the outputs on Google Sheets.

I've experimented with many use cases and automated many processes. 

It's low code/no code which makes it very easy to work with. 

Building automation using UiPath is easy. If I see a video or some instructions, I can do it. Things are doable. You learn. If there are use cases or there is information online, you can replicate the process.

Adding activities is easy. All of these partners are integrated into UiPath now - including AWS and G-suite. You have activities already built right into UiPath and they are working to make everything as low-cost as possible.

Then you have OCRs which offer the Document Understanding. I can do a PDF extraction using just OCR in a normal way.

I love the Document Understanding. You can see whether a document is valid or not. You can accept or reject. I came up with a .NET background. I used to write so many lines of code for doing a certain thing. Here, you have a for a loop. You don’t need so much code.

I remember when I used to work for a UK client, a gas utility, and at that time we used a read-through data driver, and got the Excel data, and again validated everything. However, for that, we used to write around two, three pages of code. Now, using UiPath, you just do a real Excel activity and you get the entire sheet. Automation has made our lives easier.

I can scale automation without having to pay attention to infrastructure. Now, since the cloud has come into the picture, everyone is going to the cloud and everything is easier but with the new cloud partners like Google, AWS, Azure, and Oracle. A company may not have its own on-premise orchestrator.

Earlier, you needed three servers for production, testing, and development. Since UiPath has both cloud orchestrated and on-premise, it's easier for organizations to use less physical space. For smaller organizations, they can go to the cloud. For larger they can have their on-premise orchestrator. It’s flexible.

UiPath enables me to implement end-to-end automation starting with process analysis and then robot building and finally monitoring of automation. There are many process mining tasks, capture tasks, mining, et cetera. More things have to be automated - such as deploying, managing, and enhancing for continual improvement. It has all the components.

For a beginner, end-to-end coverage may not be essential. When we talk about automation, we should know what can be automated so that we ease our lives and that doesn't mean we have to remove the resources. You don’t have to involve the employees. You just need to simplify the task so that there is continual improvement. Users should consider not only, how to automate but what needs to be automated. If it is automated, how it can be improved gradually and what are the returns? Sometimes that doesn’t necessarily mean you need end-to-end. You just need simplicity.

I do use the attended automation. For some processes, I use the attended automation for testing purposes. I use the attended if I'm using UiPath assistant, otherwise, it's normally background processes that are unattended.

Attended automation will be for Document Understanding when I'm training a robot, for example, for what is the format or validating the time I'm using attended one. If I'm asking a user for particular search criteria, or for currency exchange it's mixed but mostly unattended.

Both attended and unattended work together - the human as well as the robot. However, it depends on the scenario. Unattended means you are not dependent on any human resources.

The orchestrated cloud, which is a SaaS, it's quite helpful. If I just want to install UiPath studio in my system and I'm least bothered about what environment it should be, what infrastructure should be, where I'm going to deploy, it is quite useful and quite easy when there is a SaaS option available.

I’ve used the AI functionality for sentiment analysis such as getting reviews from the websites about a particular product or service.

UiPath offers great object detection where you have a magistrate and you can detect whether you want to detect the people. If you want to extract how many people are there in that image, for example, during a social distancing sort of event, that can be used for object detection. I've used object detection for images in terms of extracting a number of people.

I’ve trained the system to read different types of invoice formats. I've used the email or Document Understanding that can read separate invoices, receipts, utilities, et cetera. I’ve used the solution to create processes for invoice reconciliation.

The AI functionality is quite easy to use. For tollgates, for example, when they charge for tolls, the solution can be utilized for seeing the number plate, and through the image, get the data, extract the number of data from the numbers plate, use the driver information from the number plate of the car, et cetera. It becomes a very easy AI model. Without any type of knowledge in AI, you can use those out-of-the-box functionalities.

The more training you do with machine learning, the better results you get in the end.

I use the automation cloud feature.

We are not bothered about any patches or any work that has to be done to maintain the infrastructure; the vendor does it.

The automation cloud offering has helped decrease time to value, however, since I have not deployed real-time projects, I cannot give exact numbers on the decrease. That said, from my experience, I feel that it is true.

It’s my understanding that the automation cloud offering helps to decrease UiPath's overall cost of ownership, however, at this time, I just use the free version.

The solution enables you to be better and better with cloud features that are quite accessible.

In terms of UiPath Apps, I have used them, however, just for my own purposes, for my own training purposes, as I was learning. It is easy to use and pretty much drag and drop. For the basic things, the user can do a lot with minimal training. You can do everything with low code and less coding knowledge as well. A person may not be technically sound, however, even with minimum knowledge, they can create apps using UiPath apps. That's the interesting part of UiPath apps.

UiPath reduces the cost of digital transformation. It does not require expensive or complex application upgrades or IT support.

UiPath has reduced human error. For example, let's say I'm filling a form using a document. Typos, errors, spelling mismatches, et cetera, are reduced when it is handled by automation. When we automate this process, the robot minimizes the error since a human is not involved in this case of data entry. It will extract whatever data there is in that document and it will fill in the form. Similarly, for calculating Excel data, we can avoid calculation errors.

More videos are required. There are basic videos that can help you learn about the product, however, there need to be more in-depth videos to help you through certain tasks. For example, I was trying to use an API for conversion. I was doing it for a single transaction, one by one. There can be cases where it will not go for a simple conversion or simple transaction, and it will be a bulk action. In that case, I may need to upload a file. I was searching for an upload control however, I could not find anything to assist me.  It would have been helpful to find some sort of instructional video for this task. The file upload, where you upload a file and select a file so that you can extract data all those things based on that file is a commonly used feature - and yet, that was missing. 

UiPath apps may be able to increase the number of automation I can create while reducing the time it takes to create them. However, they need to elaborate on the process. I need more articles on that. From the point of view of the person developing the automation, I need more details on writing the correct code or doing the automation, which I hope will be coming in the next releases.

They require an improvement in the IEP. I don't know whether it's a bug or something. I find that, with drag and drop, you have to drag it in a particular fashion. 

When they add new features, they should offer some in-depth sessions on them to help people get comfortable with the changes. 

It would always be helpful to have new partnerships between UiPath and different cloud vendors. 

I started using the solution in February of this year.

I am on a gap year. I used to work for an IT company, and I have taken a gap. To re-skill myself I started learning UiPath. 

The stability is quite good. You have other options, such as Automation Anywhere and Blue Prism. UiPath will be like coming out with new revisions in the coming years that will continue to compete with those.

Even now, it's quite stable and quite reliable, even if the changes which are coming, in the much of the deployment, are felt good. There are frequent revisions. I have no experience in other automation, however, from what I've seen, even as it changes, it's stable.

Scalability is quite good. It has alliances with different cloud vendors so that you can scale your robots. You can have different instances, different new virtual machines, and in the cloud. You're not concerned about what to install and you just pay as you use. The cloud vendors make it very scalable. 

Once I am employed, I do plan to increase usage.

I use the forum for any queries. I didn't face user technical problems for any robots that I am using. I have not been in direct contact with technical support.

The initial setup is straightforward. 

You just go to UiPath.com and register with your user ID or any email ID. From there, you install the UiPath Studio and you set your workflows. Once you publish, you get it in your orchestrator, attach the process, create a job. And then you run it. 

It's quite easy to create a workflow, publish it, and deploy it in the orchestrator. Next, you have to tag the correct robot, the correct machine, and the correct sponsor. In any environment you want.

For small processes, the deployment would hardly take a few minutes to deploy.

Maintenance is light for the cloud instances and really does not need much. The cloud vendors do the work, however, users need to pay for the services which they use.

I handled the initial setup myself. I did not need an integrator or consultant. 

I can't speak to the exact pricing of the product as I am using a free version of it right now. I'm not paying any licensing fees to UiPath.

I shouldn't say you need licenses for many things for today, however, for working on Visual Studio, if you want to automate something, you need a license, which costs you around 5,000 to 6,000 Rupees. If you want to do some extra Microsoft office activities. You need the maximum office license, which is 70,000 Rupees. That said, with UiPath, you need not have Microsoft Office installed. You can still read the data and extract the data in an Excel format. You can then share the data from those automation activities with no third-party license cost and no software licenses.

UiPath can help save costs in an organization. There are so many legacy systems wherein you have so much data migration, and many things which are done manually can be automated and you can save resources while doing something new. 

I'm just an end-user. 

My first experience with automation was, "Okay, which product to learn?". After all the reviews and reading, I decided to start with UiPath. My previous background was .NET web development. I was a full-stack web developer with seven-plus years of experience and I found that I really like when a product is built on a .NET framework. I realized that "Okay, it's better to do something, learn something and I have a background of the platform so let's start from there".

When I started using this product, I found the academy was quite open, and in the forum, there were people who were training as well. I found that while I may not get 100% of the answers I need, 85% to 90% of the time the answer is there if you search. 

Many people do not know RP automation, and it's great that they have these free resources - which is rare for such a product. Each region has a chapter where people working in this area come and share their knowledge and experiences.

Currently, I'm using the 2019 version of the solution. It's not the latest, however, it's not much older. I'm using the enterprise as well, which is free for 60 days. I started using UiPath apps as well. I'm learning so I use the cloud orchestrator to deploy my processors. 

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

My use case is to automate a bunch of office processes. It helps my team and finance organization save time and money.

There's a monthly upload process in my order management team. Every month, this team uploads a bunch of files to SAP. Now they don't need to do that because the bot does that for them at a given time period. The team members need to just upload a file to SharePoint and then the bot will pick it up.

It reduced human error. It saves us time redoing work and allows our humans to do other stuff.

It has freed up a couple of hours in a month. If you scale it, I'd say there are some processes that are daily. It has been at least 2,000 hours so far. This additional time enabled employees to focus on higher-value work. Bots can be tricky to debug. So, sometimes employees get frustrated there but overall they're happy it's there in the first place.

UiPath reduced the cost of our automation operations. Right now it's breaking even, but over time there'll be more. It has also reduced overall costs. 

The Studio and Orchestrator are pretty valuable. They seem to have a lot of connectivity and usability. It's pretty easy for people without a coding background to use it.

It's pretty easy to build automation using UiPath. It's a little hard for some activities because there's not enough support. There's not a lot of adoption with that activity, but the ones that are commonly used have pretty good support.

Its end-to-end coverage is important to us. If we have it all on one platform, we don't have to bounce around other software. But, we ended up doing a little bit of both.

Capturing ROI needs improvement. I would also like for it to have more logging mechanisms in Orchestrator.

I have been using UiPath for about two years now. 

It's stable now. 

We mainly use Unattended Automation but it has helped to scale RPA benefits by automating departments for the very few Attended Automations we have. It's important to me because my job pretty much depends on this software. Changing from this product to another RPA product is going to be extremely costly and time-consuming.

It is scalable. We have about 30 users on it now that are entry-level/senior associate-level people.

It requires four developers to maintain. 

We plan to increase usage in the long term. But right not we still have enough capacity in our existing Orchestrator.

I would rate their tech support a six out of ten. Most of them don't work in U.S. time and they're not always very responsive. Sometimes they give an answer that is pretty generic and can be found in the online article, even though I referenced the article already.

We also use Automation Anywhere. 

The initial setup was not too hard and not too easy. Some documentation wasn't very clear, and for basic features it handled it pretty well. But, if you wanted to go more granular and customize your deployment, it would be a little hard to find out the answer.

The deployment took about a month. We involved the UiPath support to help us implement it and upgrade our systems. Other than that, we got our PAM software lead that uses CyberArk to configure the Orchestrator with us.

We have seen ROI. I don't know the max number of hours but I'd say we've saved around 2,000 hours so far.

I think pricing could be better. I think it should be more visible.

The license system with Studio licenses seemed a bit redundant and not necessary.

We looked at other solutions but went with UiPath because of the cost. Another reason was that we have more developers that are specialized in UiPath, as well as management, who seemed to like UiPath more.

I still have to pay attention to the infrastructure a little bit because it's still On-premises. I'm using the On-premises products more so, but the support has been pretty decent. And then, there are community forums to look up how to debug some stuff.

The upfront cost is always going to be more than trying to keep it to the human process, but over time we'll realize more return.

My advice would be get UiPath support to do this for you and involve all your IT firewall security team.

You need to know more about security and cybersecurity in order to fully deploy your automations. Some of that is kind of missing in the Academy where they focus mainly on building automations, but not really securing it.

I would rate UiPath an eight out of ten. 

I work for a banking company. We use UiPath for tracing and collecting customer's credit information.

We also use it to deploy a bot when clients have specific requests for changes to their information or accounts. We're able to change their service via these requests. We can also remove some processes of manual intervention.

We've deployed bots across various processes. We have been able to remove human intervention for multiple processes and have seen a general improvement in terms of cost-effectiveness.

We used to handle dashboards manually. Now we've turned customers into kind of specialists in that, whenever they want to change something, such as adding debit, or opening/closing accounts, changing addresses, et cetera, they can handle it. They no longer have to push that request through us and have us intervene. They can do it themselves using the bots. 

Previously, nobody could automate the process. The design and implementation allowed clients to handle their own data, for example, for transfers and items like that. We were able to digitize entirely from end to end. Now, the customer doesn't have to come to the bank and they don't need a pen and paper. They just have to log on and fill out the details of their request. Being able to share this new data is important. If there are manual aspects, we can now handle them for the customer. We don't have to have them worry about doing tasks manually.

We can use browsers like Internet Explorer for our automation. However, we've been able to use Excel as well with just a few hiccups in the beginning. UiPath really helped us with this change by disabling some elements at the managerial level. It was a big learning experience for us.

We are able to use codes to do a lot of checking to see that we are getting enough data and that we are able to filter it correctly.

The ease of building a process is pretty good and simplifies things. Normally it takes three to four hours to complete a process. That includes everything, including generating reports and sending the data. There are, of course, multiple steps involved in the process. We've gotten that down to about six minutes. We're able to better focus the work and, at the same time, we're able to use a lot of bots to get things done. 

We can scale the solution well. We've already deployed four more bots for various processes. We're actually able to have good control of each bot. We're able to put things into a proper standard format and then send the information where it needs to go without having to handle the process manually. It would go so much slower without the bots in place without having to go back to the customer. There's no longer a needs to do anything manually here. There was a concern that customers would not be able to manage the process that's automated by the bots, however, in the end, everything was clear and it was easily handled. 

The solution enables us to implement end-to-end automation, starting with process analysis, then robot building, and finally monitoring automation. We're involved from the very beginning to design the process from step one. We're able to test everything out before moving to production and that allows us to make sure everything works. End-to-end coverage is first and foremost. The visibility we have is really powerful. 

We were able to deploy in parts, as we didn't have global production. At first, we didn't know how to manage everything. Once we went live, however, we were able to monitor it all. We could send reports to show what was happening, and if there were any concerns, we could go and directly look at those areas.

The solution helped to minimize our on-premises footprint. I always look for capabilities to deploy from the cloud. It changes as the customer needs to decide how to ultimately deploy. However, the cloud is able to handle anything an on-prem option would. We are able to handle the entire volume using one cloud. Our bots are able to be on the cloud and online. 

Attended automation has helped to scale RPA benefits in our organization by automating department roles and specific processes that require human/robot collaboration. Previously, we were concerned with data loss and not being able to attend to the browser. We were not able to do even the simpler stuff.

We were able to upgrade to an updated version, from 19.4 to 20.4 which had some more UI and automation. We were able to upscale our entire quota. We're able to do workarounds if we need to.

We can speed up our automation processes and automate faster with UiPath.

The automation cloud offering helps to decrease the solution's total cost of ownership by taking care of items such as infrastructure maintenance and updates.

The solution speeds up the cost of digital transformation.

The solution has reduced human error. We've been able to reduce errors and have gotten more quality data instead of just more data. That way, if there is a mistake or something goes wrong, we can check the error against the quality data and resolve issues more effectively.

It has also freed up our employee's time. They can better deliver on big and innovative processes. We used to handle a lot of high volume tasks at the end of the month mostly and that's since tapered off. We'll have to see at the end of this month how much time savings we've accumulated. 

Our employees can now focus on more high-value work. Employee satisfaction is high as well. In a bank, we do have a high volume of transactions every month, and previously, each would have to be checked and verified and balanced by someone manually - even if most would be dismissed as canceled transactions, et cetera. With automation, our employees no longer have to look at everything themselves. They can be wiser about what interventions they have to make every month.

Overall, the solution has reduced the cost of our automation operations. As a developer, I cannot speak to exact amounts, however, as that's handled more by project managers. 

So far, the solution has saved the company costs. We're very customer-focused in our organization. Deploying these kinds of innovative solutions allows us to better serve while offering our customers better services as well. It's become like their personal service manager. We've done this without ballooning costs. 

While the solution speeds up the cost of digital transformation, doing so requires expensive or complex application upgrades or IT app support. You will need IT. That said, I haven't had a chance to explore mine in any detail.

There need to be more warnings for when there are issues within the automation especially when it comes to exceptions. We're not easily made aware of problems. The sooner we understand what the exception is, the sooner we can adjust things.

I've been using the solution going on 25 years now.

For the most part, the solution is stable. We did encounter one problem when we were testing. Apart from that, we did not encounter any issues. 

The solution has helped us to scale. For example, if we have no idea from where to start, but we know the process test and know the application is involved, we're able to start building. We can go and test and try out options without having to put anything into production right away, so we can refine and validate the data.

The solution itself is highly scalable. We have three worker bots running at the same time. Users, however, can scale it up however they want to.

I'm not sure if the company has any plans to increase usage or put more bots into production.

We have a team that lets us know if there are any changes coming up in relation to the infrastructure. If there are any changes that will affect the bots, it will not be done suddenly. We'll be able to ensure nothing is overly affected. 

In terms of technical support, if something is not working as it should, they do need to review it. They do help us with technical validation.

We did not use a different solution before we adopted UiPath.

The initial setup was complex to a certain degree. The documentation was unclear. In the beginning, we weren't really comfortable with the approach or the process. 

There were two types of processes happening at once during the deployment. We did each process twice, and each took two or three hours, so it was about one day to get everything going for each deployment, and then we did a final run-though. Likely, in total, it took us about 12 days or so. 

We tend to have a specific process that we go through for every implementation we do. We'll go through how many bots are needed and what to do. We also do testing for all types of situations. We have a process designer who is involved and assists with the setup.

In terms of maintenance, we don't need anyone to run the operation. We have three to five people that after a month of production, have a good enough understanding to handle any outstanding tasks, whatever they may be. If there are issues, such as, for example, if Internet Explorer is not working, they are able to troubleshoot and manage the solution.

We did not use an integrator or installer to assist in the deployment process.

We have seen an ROI.

I always work to design my solution in such a way that is the most cost-effective.

You do need to pay the full license cost in order to use UiPath, so you need to be strategic to get the most out of it.

Our company handles costs internally as we do not directly deal with a vendor.

We did evaluate other options for data capture before we chose UiPath.

We are customers and end-users.

At this time, we do not use the AI functionality within UiPath. Our solution is not impacted by anything generating artificial intelligence.

The automation speeds up the time to value and we see very quickly how much the solution is able to positively affect the business aspects. It's been really helpful for us overall. The processes have been profitable. 

I'd advise users to really focus on their input and output size. You'll be able to validate your data. It will help you transform your processes. You just need to figure out where you want to simplify and where you want to maximize value.

We've learned how to standardize processes. We've realized how important it is to always try to be very clear when creating automation.

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

I am a software developer and I am a full-time RPA developer for my company. We create automation for internal purposes as well as for our clients.

I have implemented 15 to 16 processes end-to-end that cover use cases including Excel, front-end web-based applications, backend Windows applications, and sometimes Citrix. I have also done some Adobe Flash Player automation.

The REFramework (Enhanced Robotic Enterprise Framework) is what we use for most of our use cases.

We are using Studio for development on-premises and we use Orchestrator in the cloud.

UiPath has helped to improve our organization in several ways. Prior to UiPath, the company was using legacy methods of automation. These were time-consuming and required that more code be written. With the ease of use and speed at which automations can be developed using UiPath, the company is bringing on new clients and therefore, more business.

UiPath and the automations that we create help us to better utilize our resources. For example, a manual task that used to take between seven and eight days can be completed in one or two days with automation.

This product is bringing new clients to the business and nowadays, all of our clients require something to be done in the domain of robotic process automation. 

With respect to ease of use and building automations, UiPath is very good. I would rate them at least a four out of five in that regard, especially when compared to other products on the market. The ease of building automations makes them quick to create and it can be accomplished by people in the business sector.

UiPath enables and helps us to create end-to-end automations, and it divides all of the subtasks up in a good way. For example, monitoring processes is different from developing code, and each of these is separated such that they are independent, but we can link them together for the benefit of the process. This is important because I am a complete process developer, so having all of the different subtasks available in one tool allows me to best develop automation for our clients.

This solution has helped to decrease our time to value, which is something that is evident when you look at the automation we were doing previously. Our technologies included Python, VBScript, and other ways. These approaches took more time to develop and are a little bit more complex. With the help of this tool, it takes less time to build the same automation. It allows us to focus on building the logic and algorithms, without having to deep-dive into things like syntax. By allowing us to focus on the business logic for each process, it leads to significant time savings.

We use the attended automation feature and it helps us when it comes to tasks that require interaction between user and application, such as the necessity to enter credentials. It is quite helpful, in particular for BPM processes, and this is something that is important to us. The typical case is when somebody is doing repetitive work as part of their task. In other words, they are working on one task, and the bot is working beside them but needs the occasional input from the user. In these processes, the bot is doing 80% of the work and the user is doing the remaining 20%.

We use the AI functionality because it makes it feasible to automate processes that are quite complex. For example, Document Understanding and NLP from the UiPath Cloud are things that we use. 

The AI features enhance UiPath's capabilities and allow us to automate more processes overall. Previously, when we were doing a specific task, we may not have been able to fully automate it. With the help of AI, we can do more.

In previous iterations of our bots, before the AI features were used, we were not able to get all of the information that we needed from PDF files. This is specific to certain use cases, to present an example. The AI functionality generally gives us more data, whether from document understanding, computer vision, or otherwise.

UiPath has helped to reduce human error because the bot is doing everything and eliminates the opportunity for people to make mistakes in the process. UiPath has had a positive impact in this regard, although we have had successes with other similar tools as well.

UiPath and automation have helped to free up employee time and nowadays, they are more creative because of it. With many of their tasks automated, they have time to work on things that are more creative and have a higher value.

For example, for a task that used to take an employee 10 hours, they are now spending between three and four hours on it. In the remaining six hours, they can be more productive and work on more important tasks. This not only helps the employee but adds value to the company as well.

The selectors work to help automate at the front-end or backend of applications, and they are quite useful. If you use selectors correctly then the automation can be done in a systematic way. For example, selectors can be used for clicking tabs in an application, and what we do is create an algorithm with the correct logic to go with them.

UiPath has good recording features that help to create automations.

We use the REFramework as a template, which divides things such as the opening of applications, applying the business logic, using the queues, and closing applications. As part of this framework, UiPath provides a systematic architecture to us. We just have to understand and work with it by applying our business logic and coordinating effectively to create end-to-end automations.

I would like to see more AI-related features added. Improvements could be made to the models so that they are more compatible with data science and machine learning.

Better support for databases should be included. For example, interacting with SQL Server and SQL Developer would be beneficial features.

I have been working with UiPath for more than three years. The company started using it before that.

Stability is something that UiPath is working on. The new versions have added more stability and important features like test suites and the workflow analyzer. Adding features and improving stability is a continuous process.

In my previous company, which is a large MNC, there were between 700 and 800 people working regularly with UiPath. In my current company, we have between 400 and 500 people working with RPA using UiPath. As we continue to take on more clients, we will expand our usage.

There are a variety of roles for the people that work with UiPath. Some are developers, whereas others are set up or support teams. Our company is very heavily focused on this domain.

The number of people required for deployment and maintenance depends on the size of the process. A larger and more complex process requires a larger support team to maintain it. For example, a simple process can be deployed and maintained with a two-person team, whereas four people are required for a medium-sized process, and a six-person team would be used to handle a complex process.

I would rate the technical support between seven and eight out of ten.

In general, we express whatever concerns we have and then within a few days, we get updates from them. However, sometimes we have to elaborate a lot before we receive an answer. The documents and repository that they use for analyzing and improving our processes could be organized in a more systematic fashion.

We were using a variety of legacy tools that were more time-consuming and needed code development to a greater degree. These included things like Python code and Visual Basic scripting. There are still other tools that are being used, in addition to UiPath.

Prior to UiPath, approximately 80% of our costs were spent on developing automations. With the benefits that come with UiPath, the RPA costs are now only 45%. As the costs have decreased and the volume of automations increased, it improves company profit.

I have worked with Blue Prism and Automation Anywhere, and I find that UiPath is easier to use. However, to capture more market share, UiPath has to continue expanding its machine learning and AI features.

Automation Anywhere and Blue Prism are still being used for some processes in the company. We have switched away from them in some cases, opting instead for UiPath, because in general, it is easier to implement automation tasks using UiPath.

We have a setup and deployment team in-house that is responsible for implementation. They take care of the deployment for our clients and bring things into their production environment. 

The team does their best to keep updated on what UiPath features are available and what the current version is. If updates are pending then they will be aware of them.

The company is experiencing quite a good return on its investment in UiPath.

I began learning UiPath with the Community version, which is available free of charge.

Before choosing UiPath for any particular job, the company examines the process to see how complex it is. Based on the time that it will take to implement it, as well as the number of resources, whether in UiPath, Blue Prism, or something else, the decision is made. Different tools are used for different processes based on these assessments.

I started my UiPath journey using the Community Edition, version 2018.4. After I spent some time learning UiPath personally, I began using it full-time in my company.

We have several different teams that use UiPath in different ways. First, we have the developers, who do the coding and create the bots. Then, we have the testing team, who ensure that the bots perform correctly. Next, we have the deployment team and after that, there is the support team.

My advice for anybody who is implementing UiPath is that they need developers who are good with logic. They should come from a coding background with experience in logic, algorithms, have some knowledge of C#, and have some knowledge of HTML tags.

The biggest lesson that I have learned from using UiPath is that technology can be made more efficient by using these tools.

UiPath has all of the features that are required to make automation successful. It is currently just ahead of other similar tools on the market and if they continue to add features then it could be the market leader.

I would rate this solution an eight out of ten.

For a current client, we have around 22 to 25 use cases, and it's all based on the financial side of things. The client is in finance, and we have use cases all of which are comprised of different tools, including SAP and their in-house CRMs. It's about automating the process where we take some data from the CRM tool and upload it to SAP. It also involves uploading the files to the FTP server. 

For example, one use case is where the applications used are Oracle, and SAP, and STP. We just download the data from Oracle. There are different files that we download from Oracle and upload to the FTP server. From that FTP server, there is a different team that takes those files and creates a Tableau dashboard. 

UiPath Studio helped us automate many processes that have helped us save money. Even though the tool price is there and the license costs are there, it has given good ROI. For example, automating a process can reduce the work to half or maybe 60%. We divert efforts to different work. Therefore, it has been pretty useful in terms of savings and quality control.

For example, one client had a focus on quality control. There are instances where employees make some minor errors that could lead to major losses to the organization from the department's point of view. We automated that process and it gave us more return in terms of quality control. Fewer errors ultimately were made which saved the company from losses.

UiPath has a full suite of capabilities. It has, for example, an end-to-end automation suite. From a development point of view, it is pretty helpful to have access to all of the activities on offer that anyone can understand. 

The Studio as well as the process mining are great. Document understanding is another useful feature. It has eliminated the business analyst side where you have to go through each department and find out which processes are there, and take a different tool to get those all processes in one place and create a process workflow. All of this can be done with process mining. 

With document understanding, we have the capabilities of having UiPath understand and create documents, which previously was quite a lengthy endeavor. You just have to install it and follow the steps. It will automatically take a screenshot and create a document for you and then create a brief description of it. 

It’s easy to build automation using UiPath Studio. From a developer's point of view, it is easy due to the fact that you don't need much of a coding language or coding background. You just should have a clear logic behind it. If you're clear with the logic, a layman can handle the task. They do have Studio X features, which is for the layman who doesn't have any background, who doesn't have any coding or developer's background. They can automate their own work. Even an SME who doesn't know anything about automation could automate small tasks.

It’s great that we can scale automation without having to pay attention to infrastructure. That is very important actually. For example, scaling automation plus giving attention to the infrastructure can be a little hectic and time-consuming. If there is any way where we could reduce this work or optimize it, it would be great from the implementation point of view.

UiPath enables us to implement end-to-end automation. Right from the start, you have document understanding and process mining as well as the Orchestrator, which helps you with getting an overall view of the bots in our organization.

End-to-end coverage is the most important thing, due to the fact that, if it is end-to-end, we don't need to go to the market and look for any other application. If you can get end-to-end, you don't need to go for other products which simplifies everything. It's easy for us to maintain and work with it instead of having to integrate and manage multiple systems, multiple products, and multiple applications.

UiPath has helped minimize our on-premise footprint. It has helped us with quality control savings. We have saved many efforts previously requiring full-time employees. It’s one of the most important factors when we work for clients. If a client is hiring us to automate many processes, there are different intentions of doing it. If we are able to help them reduce cost, reduce and do some quality control, it is important for them. For example, previously, if work required ten employees, we have been able to reduce that down to six or sometimes four personnel maybe.

The UiPath Studio has reduced human error. It has helped us with quality control very often. In the past, mistakes have cost us. It has saved costs as well as saving us money related to fines or penalties.

The solution has freed up employee time. Instead of doing the same mundane work every day, we have just automated that part and now the employees have more free time to do more meaningful work. In terms of hours, from a department's point of view, we have saved around half, that is four hours per day, maybe about 80 hours per month. The additional time enabled employees to focus on more important work.

We have found that the product has reduced the costs of our client’s automation operations. With my previous client, we calculated an average of 40% in reduction of personnel and 40% in cost savings. UiPath has saved us money across the organization. The average saving is likely around 40% to 45%.

I'm pretty much happy with all of those tools. I don't have anything in mind that I could see improvement.

While UiPath Studio helps speed up the cost of digital transformation, in a way, it requires expensive or complex application upgrades or IT support, as it needs an entire setup. That setup requires support from different departments, and that comes with a cost.

I came across one problem while upgrading. We were upgrading from the 2019 version to the 2020. There was one thing that was not mentioned either on the website or documentation, and we had to take support from UiPath. The documentation needs to contain each of the scenarios which could occur while upgrading the solutions. As it is now, this is not the case. That said, when we ran into issues, UiPath Support helped us through it.

I've been using UiPath for five years now.

We've had outages once or twice. For that, they have a workaround. If a server goes down, we should have a backup server for it. If that's the case, it is just a few steps needed to migrate or we can take the setup from another server. That's it. It's pretty good in general. 

The scalability is fine. For example, if the bot count is about zero to 100, we have the capacity. And if it goes beyond that, then we have to increase the features of the systems and servers. It could take time if we scale beyond the limits, however, it's still possible. It just requires an upgrade. 

What's required is managing all the infrastructure and getting all the permissions from the client which is what could take time. Scalability can be an issue when it goes beyond the mentioned limit.

In the current organization we're working with, it's totally unattended bots where no user is actually using this tool. That said, the bots are in production, which works 24/7. No user is having this access to the tool. It is all unattended bots.

In the previous organization, there were 58 to 70 users as we had attended bots. They were using bots in their daily routine.

It's a routine for us to use this product every day and deploy this solution. We are definitely looking at increasing it and scaling. We have a lot of work in the pipeline.

I've contacted technical support many times and they are very helpful. Based on the severity and priority, they do help us on priority and they are very helpful in terms of responding, supporting, and maintaining. If they can't help us by email, even after giving clear instructions, they'll bump you to a different level and help. It can be just like spoon-feeding us. They are very patient and try to be very clear.

We were doing automation, however, it was just .com and .net. We used to write five lines of code just to click on one button, which is just an activity right now we have in UiPath. We switched to UiPath to do end-to-end processes which would require large amounts of code if we kept doing what we were doing.  

I've implemented UiPath from scratch many times. 

The process is quite straightforward. You just have to have the installer and just click install, and then after a few steps, it is done.

Setting up just UiPath Studio hardly takes ten to 20 minutes or maybe one hour if you're facing some complexity. Setting up an Orchestrator with all the robots could take a while.

Our implementation strategy is based on whatever the customer's requirements are. Different clients have different requirements. My previous client, for example, didn't want the cloud as they were pretty concerned about the security as they deal with financial data and they don't want the data to go to the cloud at all.

Clients have the option of on-premises or cloud. Based on that, we just go with the requirements. Some clients want attended bots due to the cost, and some want unattended bots due to the features. 

In terms of maintenance and deployment, how many people you need depends on how many processes you have with the client. Right now, with the current client, we have 22 to 25 processes that we have automated. We are just three users who are developing, testing, maintaining, and supporting this project. However, it varies and often depends on the process and client and how many bots.

For maintenance and support, you don't need many people. For development, if they're at 10 people, five or four could do the work in terms of support and maintenance.

We handle the deployments for our clients. 

While the clients might have released some reports, I don't have much knowledge about ROI. 

I do know about the prices of attended and unattended bots as well as Orchestrator. 

There are costs related to Orchestrator, Studio, and attended bots. There are also infrastructure costs, and, while implementing this tool in any organization, there are different costs attached to it.

The price for the attended bot is between $1,800 and $3,000. The unattended bot was $8,000 last year.

Orchestrator is around $20,000.

We looked at Automation Anywhere and Blue Prism, however, about five years back, where UiPath, Blue Prism, and Automation Anywhere were the leaders in the market, at that time, just UiPath had the free training and Intuit training for their tool. The other tools didn't have any training, or if they had, it was paid. That's why we chose UiPath, which ended up being the best out of the three anyway.

The company I work for is a UiPath partner.

There have been multiple companies that I've been working with. Two remain the same. I've been using different tools as well. It's been on and off with UiPath.

We are not using the latest version of UiPath. The latest version is 2021. We are using 2020. This is due to the fact that the client that I'm working with has a stated policy as to using a minus one version. They believe it could not be a more stable version for any product. 

At this time, we don't use the SaaS solution or the AI functionality. However, I have enrolled in AI training to better understand it. We do not yet use the automation cloud or UiPath apps either.

In terms of employee satisfaction, from the experience I had from interacting with the client and different users, they are happy as well as sad. They are happy in terms of moving away from the mundane work that has been taken off from their hands. They are, however, both sad and afraid that they could lose their job.

I'd advise users, if they're a layman, to go with the training. Just start with the training from the UiPath website itself, in the RPA Academy. That is sufficient for anyone to start with. They have all the courses that start right from scratch for every role, be it business analyst, solution or product developer, et cetera. In six months, even starting from scratch, you can excel on this product.

With UiPath, it really is possible to optimize so many things. 

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

Our use case is mainly for PDF automation for invoicing. Specific data from the invoice needs to be gathered, entered into, and compared within the SAP application we use. We face challenges as the formats of the invoices change and can range in length from a single page to up to 100 pages. 

We've integrated a tool called ABBYY FlexiCapture and ABBYY will help format and be used as the source of input for the UiPath bot. This bot in turn will process each and every necessary customer detail to the SAP application. If everything is correct, and the data meets the parameters, an email will be sent to the customer, attaching the necessary invoice. If there's an exception, we'll be able to look at that too.

There are some other sets of use cases as well, which include SAP or Hyperautomation. However, we also do generic workflows where we have data from multiple domains and will need to build our XML output. The XML output will contain a lot of data (such as the date, time or name of the customer) which will keep changing and is not fixed. I built a bot using UiPath that I host on Orchestrator which can monitor this data.

Another use case is placing job descriptions into an analyzing tool to search for keywords. Depending on the sort of description which we have pasted in, it will throw out a certain set of outputs, such as if the word is feminine, masculine, how many details it contains, how long it's going to take to complete the description, et cetera. This part has been done using an API key, and therefore it's not a normal cut and paste job. 

There are a lot of processes that are, even today, done manually. I can take a simple process in, for example, ServiceNow, where issues are made into tickets and put into queues. Previously, a person would have to pick up the ticket and then assign it to a variety of people, but first, before even doing that, they would have to check in on those team members and figure out who had the most or least workload to be able to address the ticket.

This process is automated now. There's no human intervention in assigning tickets. The bot will monitor the queue and when a person raises a ticket and can monitor which person is working on which ticket number, and who should get the next ticket. The turnaround tie has been reduced by a lot and is also saving us costs when you look at it in relation to the entire project as a whole. 

The most valuable feature is the API.

It's really compatible with other solutions and it got integrated when I was working with ABBYY. There is no dependency. I just need to trigger my bot and that's it. I didn't need to go and separately trigger to work on every part of it. It is really good when we talk about the integration of UiPath with any other tools.

I am currently working through the documentation to help with understanding the solution and it is really great.

From a studio perspective, I really like the feature of debugging.

It’s making automation really feasible and ensures that it takes less time.

The ease of building automation using UiPathis great, even if a person doesn’t have a development background. Just by going to the UiPath Academy and doing the basic certification, any user can start to understand the process and begin automating.

In my first organization, there were two or three developers including me, and our challenge was that we had a lot of projects. We had certain process analysts that would run on different sets of processes. We were able to train them and make sure that they understood the processes and could start developing. We saw a lot of progress in them, and, due to the fact that the tool was really easy to use and didn’t require a lot of coding, they were able to do a lot just by drag and drop functionality.

UiPath enabled us to implement end-to-end automation, starting with process analysis, then robot building, and finally monitoring automation. It really supports the end-to-end deployment of any project or any task and makes it very easy.

The Automation Cloud has helped decrease time to value. If there was no Automation Cloud, we would need to run the bot from the studio all of the time, or we would need to create an upgraded file and trigger it via a third-party application, like VBScript or something like that. It has reduced a lot of time. It also makes deployment really easy. For example, if I am working in a development environment, I publish to the cloud, it will start reflecting in the Orchestrator and I just need to push the package. From the Orchestrator itself, I can trigger that particular package to any other machine. That makes life a lot easier - just publishing the package and testing in any other system and understanding how the UAT is going.

The deployment in production is really easy. I have tested Orchestrator and production Orchestrator and I just need to copy the package from the studio and download the package and push it back to the Studio or Orchestrator production, and the work is done. I don't need to manually copy and paste the packages again and again.

Automation Cloud, in a way, helps decrease UiPath's total cost of ownership by taking care of things such as infrastructure, maintenance, and updates. There’s no need, for example, to host on different servers or a defined cloud. It has definitely reduced a lot of costs due to the fact that, instead of going for a different set of applications for a different set of projects, now we are relying on UiPath for most of our work. Whether it’s invoicing, finance, or an HR process, we can rely on UiPath to automate a particular process instead of going back and forth across multiple tools.

Automation Cloud allows us to also effectively scale up automation. It is very easy to monitor any process which is running correctly, and, with automation, you don't need to have any separate application downloaded into your system. It is just an URL. You just need to have a URL and you just need to enter the URL and you can monitor from any system and easily understand how the process is performing.

On top of that, with Automation Cloud, suppose you have 10 licenses. You can see how many licenses have been consumed by how many processes and what the outcome of the processes was.

Moreover, you can integrate your cloud with other tools and create a dashboard. With a UiPath dashboard you can see, for example, the percentage of success rates, the failure rate, and how many processes have been successfully done or what quality. From the management side, we don't need to go to the logs and check what has run. We can directly look into a dashboard and we'll come to understand how many processes are running successfully and what are the outcomes, and how many licenses have been consumed.

It is important that we can scale automation without having to pay attention to infrastructure. I’d rate the level of importance at an 8.5 out of ten. It is helping a lot.

When we talk about automating a web application or we need to work on a different set of applications, we used to get integrations and we needed to have, for example, a PowerShell scripting application license. Now everything is being replaced by UiPath, or most of it is. It does not require you to have a license for a different set of tools all the time. If you have UiPath it is easy to integrate with any third-party tool and it is easy to automate a web application or desktop application or even code. If I know the coding, I can just do coding right in UiPath itself. Instead of going for multiple tools, for multiple projects, it's just a single tool for multiple projects.

We can use the infrastructure and we can also host it. Suppose there are two users who are accessing the same VM over a different time zone. They can rely on the same VM and they can use the same UiPath tool and do not necessarily need to have a separate licensing for it.

UiPath has helped minimize our on-premise footprint. Mostly now, everything is on the cloud instead of on-premise and it is making life easy. For example, suppose a person who is working on-premise, if he logs out, then the other person can log in and cross-verify the work he has done. With the cloud, now the transfer of files is easy. If a person falls sick or something happens that he's unable to make it then the other person who has a login or credentials with him can just directly go in and start working. If a code is being published in the cloud, we can just copy or download the code and cross-verify how it's working.

We do use attended automation. We use it relatively less compared to unattended. However, in certain cases, where the project is too critical and we do need to run all the time, it’s nice to have that option. Attended automation helps scale RPA and benefits our organization by automating specific processes that require human, robot collaboration. There are certain processes where you can't automate end-to-end. We have to rely on a human being occasionally, and it’s nice to have automation we can collaborate on. At the same time, we do largely take advantage of automatons where no human intervention is required.

We use UiPath AI functionality, although not much is being used in any of the projects which I have worked on. I’m just looking forward to it, as I am currently working on documentation understanding before diving in.

UiPath speeds up the cost of digital transformation and has also reduced costs. I started with Blue Prism and then I got my hands on UiPath. Now, I can see the transformation which is happening and I can see the comfort which we have with the tool. I can also see how it’s a lot easier to deploy the tools.

The solution has helped our company reduce human error by a significant amount. For example, when I automated the complete process and I put everything in GPL step by step and automated using UiPath, the best thing that happened is that there was one invoice that got stuck and I could see that the bot didn't process it. The bot has sworn an exception stating that there is a certain set of values that a bot should not process, if it is not matching, the quality is not matching, then the bot cannot process it. When the customer logged into the particular invoice and they saw that, okay, the value which is being mentioned in the invoice is below the threshold critical value. For the first time in over a period of 13 or 14 years, they came across a particular invoice that got stuck with this particular amount, which was below the threshold level. The bot captured something that needed to be dealt with, and the client was so happy it was caught as it saved the company a lot of money - around $1 billion. After catching that threshold, they have monitored all the invoices for the past 13 or 14 years and they came across a lot of differences. It has played a major role in saving a lot of money.

UiPath has freed up employee time. The faster you deploy, the better. We look at months instead of weeks when calculating time. If a ticket, end-to-end, takes 24 hours to resolve, for example, with automation, we’ve managed to reduce that time down to seven to ten hours. It will keep following up and sending emails until there is a resolution, and those reminders are quite helpful in moving the process forward. It’s definitely allowed employees to focus on more important tasks and there’s less time spent on follow-up.

In terms of employee satisfaction, when we are developing something and we have a proper outcome, it makes life easier.

The product has reduced the cost of our automation operations. Not for all the processes, however. If the process is really simple, just like 10 pages or 20 sequences or 10 activities, then the cost is high for a particular license, for a particular process. That said, when you talk about the complex process, where the process takes 48 hours or 90 hours to process a particular activity manually versus what the bot can do in just five to ten minutes, it impacts the cost. Now, a single bot is taking care of that and there is only one person instead of many who monitor the process. Likely, it has reduced costs a lot, roughly 50 or up to 70%. Overall UiPath has saved costs for our organization. Processes that needed five people can now run with just one or two running things with a bot.

When the Orchestrator got upgraded and UiPath didn't get upgraded, we started getting errors regarding the managed packages, the packages were not getting upgraded. There are little things like that where we’ve had trouble. We have just made sure that if the company is upgrading and they have a license to upgrade Orchestrator and the Studio, they do it simultaneously instead of waiting for a week or two weeks or one month. If they have upgraded the Orchestrator, and they have not upgraded the studio, it will impact the developers.

In terms of the upgrading of the on-premise orchestrator, there are organizations that are upgrading their developing environment but they're not upgrading the production environment. Therefore, now, when the bot or the particular package will move from a higher-end environment to lower activities, it is not working well and it needs to get downgraded.

While delivering or providing the license, we need to explain to clients that this particular product, if you are working on a development and production environment, they have to keep them on the same packages or they have to keep your production higher, so that if they move the packages, it won't impact anything.

I've been using the solution for the past five years.

The solution is very stable. I have not faced any difficulties at all. 

Until now, it hasn't scaled a lot. From 2018 to 2021, the tool, the overview, the look and feel of the tool have been scaled a lot. It has scalability, definitely. We haven't scaled it a lot. 

In our organization, we have between 100 and 150 users on the solution.

The vendors are really helpful. Whenever we have a concern regarding any of the issues, including if there is an issue with upgrading, it gets resolved well. For example, when we upgraded the studio and didn't upgrade UiPath’s Orchestrator, there were some issues. The board was not connecting to Orchestrator. We had to raise a ticket to our support team and it got resolved. 

I'd rate them at an eight out of ten, as we've gotten a good response overall.

In the last five years, I have worked in two to three organizations. All of them have started exploring automation tools. I've used Blue Prism as the very first tool, then I got the opportunity to work with UiPath and explore the different sets of opportunities with it. 

At this company, WinAutomation was previously used. That was four years ago.

The initial setup is pretty straightforward. It's not too complex. 

We have a server we implemented the solution on. We installed the certificate to have the application installed with the Orchestrator URL.

The deployment took around two days of full-time work for us. There were multiple servers involved.

The implementation strategy was very simple. We got onto a call with the UiPath team and they had a lot of data with them, including all of the details regarding the applications. We wanted our certificates to get installed and we had our internal team involved as well. Between the two teams, it was working properly and it got installed in less than the expected amount of time. 

We have a team of 25 to 30 people that can handle deployment and maintenance. Maintenance would be, for example, if you have certain packages missing, someone would have to deal with that. Or if something wasn't working as required. Another example of maintenance might be if we are accessing multiple applications, or if we are accessing SAP, and there were tools that the bot accessed, the maintenance team would need to go and check the particular environment on which the bot is going to get deployed.

From the very first organization, I have implemented UiPath end-to-end.

We don't use a third party for deployment now. We have our own team. There's an internal team within our current organization which deploys everything.

I don't have any details in regards to the pricing.

We did POCs in the past with WinAutomation and we also looked at Automation Anywhere. At the time, we were looking to deploy more on the cloud, which is why we went with UiPath instead.

I am just an end-user of the product.

I'm not sure if the version we are on now is the latest. It likely isn't. We are in StudioPro currently.

I'm not sure about the infrastructure side of things, in relation to the cloud, as I'm more on the side of developing and deploying the project. We have an internal team that looks into cloud deployment and other stuff. While we were working on and purchasing the license from UiPath, the very first instance, then definitely the team got integrated with the UiPath team, however, after that, the internal team is capable of handling the end-to-end part of it.

We don't use UiPath as a SaaS solution and we do not yet use UiPath apps.

In the process of UiPath, speeding up and reducing the cost of digital transformation, I have never required expensive or complex application upgrades or IT application support, however, we have a different set of teams that work on the licensing part and the management side of it. They likely worked with UiPath to get their issues resolved. I do not have much knowledge regarding this.

A person who's starting on UiPath can also up-skill himself with the tool as well as it is easy to learn. 

The best part about UiPath is that they provide a trial version. Any organization or any individual or any business looking for automation solutions can give it a try. There are a lot of things which you can explore and you have a lot of integration. If we have a module that is already running, which has been designed in almost any language, you can just integrate that in UiPath and keep that running.

It is reducing a lot of dependencies on other tools and it's making sure that our lives get easier from the deployment and monitoring perspective. From the licensing and the cost perspective, there are a lot of items that are really helpful. In terms of integration with third-party tools, they have a lot of packages which are available on the internet. You can download the packages and integrate it with any other tool. It really makes UiPath a better solution for organizations compared to any other tool.

The biggest lesson I have learned from  UiPath is that if a single step of the solution is not working, you have to keep trying. There are other ways of doing things. You have options. There are a lot of ways by which a user can understand and explore.

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

I am an RPA developer and I work with UiPath in that capacity.

Our current use case involves the automation of a process involving healthcare-related data. This is confidential data that is received from the customer and inserted into Oracle forms. Reports are then generated from it and these reports are then used by the organization, which is in the healthcare domain, for their analysis.

The data being analyzed includes medical and treatment history. For example, with the current pandemic going on, there are all sorts of healthcare data that is related to it, including various types of treatments. When somebody walks into any clinic or hospital, all of the treatment is entered into a database and we get an extract of it. The analysis is used to get more details.

Another interesting use case, prior to this one, involved the documenting of invoices. We were working with approximately 250 different samples of purchase invoices, many in different formats. One might be a native PDF file, whereas another could be a scanned PDF, and yet another might be a simple handwritten invoice that was converted into a PDF based on a picture that was taken from a mobile device. We were receiving these invoices from our client and they wanted to extract data from them. It was accomplished by using the Document Understanding features in UiPath.

The other notable use case had to do with issuing refunds for purchases that were made on an e-commerce site. When a customer made an order and there was a problem that resulted in them wanting a refund, there were multiple ways that the client could request one. A refund application could be received by the customer care department in the form of a simple call, which was a verbal request, or as an email written by the customer, or as an automatically-generated email that was created based on filling out a form on the website.

Regardless of which of the three input methods is used, the refund request is gathered and sent to a mainframe application. At that point, the information is extracted from the mainframe and the refund is issued using another application.

The automation of these tasks using features such as artificial intelligence and document understanding has reduced our costs. For example, with the invoice processing use case, there was a team of between 20 and 25 agents who were doing it manually. Obviously, a team of that size has a large cost associated with it. Also, the volume was very high, which meant that the team was not able to deliver on all of the work. There are approximately 250 vendors sending invoices to our customer to process the data, which translates to about 1,000 documents being sent on a daily basis, to be processed by only 25 people. It was a huge task. With this level of volume, people tend to get frustrated. 

We implemented the automation and the team size has now been reduced to only five or six people, and that is only required to monitor the bots. For example, they check to make sure that the data being fetched using document understanding is at par. We have set the minimum confidence of the documents being scanned at 90% and each day, a report is generated and sent to the customer. Overall, it was a very cost-saving implementation.

When it comes to building automations, it's pretty simple. UiPath has a lot of features, starting with Process Mining. For example, when a business person wants to start from scratch, they don't necessarily know which process to automate. They can use the Process Mining feature available in UiPath to get an answer as to whether a particular process is worth automating or not. Features like this are available to shorten the processes. Once a process is identified, we can go ahead and implement and develop the automation. Overall, it is very easy to develop automations because of the inbuilt features.

UiPath provides us with features to implement end-to-end automation, and it begins with the initial steps. They have Process Mining or task mining features to help companies that have an appetite for automation but don't know what they want to automate. Once a process analysis is completed, it can determine whether a process can be automated or not. At that point, we can proceed to the bot development.

Once the bot has been developed, there are different options, including third-party support, for deploying them. After a bot has been deployed, they have the hypercare facility to monitor and maintain bots that are in production. Taken together, all of these features facilitate end-to-end automation. This is very important to our work. 

Consider that UiPath did not always have the Process Mining feature. In those days, in order to do process analysis, companies had to hire Subject Matter Experts (SMEs) for different domains at the beginning of a project to determine which processes could be automated. For example, if there were a requirement for a healthcare process then the company had to hire a healthcare SME. The SME would assist in process analysis and in the determination of whether it was something that could be automated. Nowadays, with the help of the Process Mining features, we no longer have to worry about who is doing the analysis.

From our standpoint, we have to do the recording and supply the inputs. With this, a report will be generated and it will tell us whether the process can be automated. If so, then the developers or an architect will come in and do the development. Following this, the DevOps team will come in for the deployment. Finally, the production support and monitoring are taken care of by the developers.

Using the cloud-based deployment helps reduce our on-premises footprint because we no longer have to take care of servers and local databases. There was a separate team taking care of the networking aspect, and another team taking care of the databases. For on-premises deployments, there are different teams that come into play, whereas with a cloud-based solution, we don't have to worry about anything. UiPath takes care of deployment and the databases, and everything is automatically handled. I can't estimate an exact percentage of how much our on-premises footprint has been reduced, but it has really made a significant impact in terms of substituting or replacing the on-premises facilities.

Attended automation has helped to scale our RPA benefits and in fact, in my almost five years of experience, I have not come across a scenario where the automation could be purely unattended. In the use case with the invoices where we used document understanding, there was still a minimally-sized team of five people in place after the implementation. They monitor the processes and if the criteria of 90% are not met then the invoice will be rejected and sent back to the vendor. In this case, attended automation is really helpful.

The Automation Cloud saves our IT department time because we don't have to worry about hiring different teams for different tasks. The infrastructure maintenance is handled by the vendor and all we have to do is pay for our licenses, then everything is ready.

Automation Cloud has helped to decrease our time to value. You don't have to worry about how the installation is to be done, you just have to pay the license fees and the team will do everything. They have packages, and you just have to give them the numbers according to what you need. Based on that, they will propose a solution and propose an infrastructure for you. Once that is agreed, they will do the installation within a very short time. After that is complete, your developers can start doing the development and within no time, you will start seeing the ROI.

The Automation Cloud has indeed decreased our overall costs.

It is really helpful for an organization to use the Automation Cloud when they do not have sufficient resources available themselves. In situations like this, the UiPath Automation Cloud plays a very important role. You just have to give them the number and they propose the solution including the infrastructure. You just need a few developers and everything else is taken care of by the Automation Cloud team.

We have a lot of clients who are looking at digital transformation, but they don't know what tool to use. There are a lot of vendors available in the market who provide products that are similar to UiPath, but UiPath has a lot of very strong marketing, a strong sales team, and at the same time, the product is very good. UiPath helps in doing quick installations, quicker deployments, and quicker turnarounds. Ultimately, it really helps with digital transformation for any organization.

Digital transformation requires an upgrade, but it is not very complex and not very costly. A company may have to be 25 to 30 million dollars to upgrade, which is a significant cost, but if it saves 100 million then in the end, the organization is saving money.

UiPath has helped to reduce human error to a great extent. When humans perform the same task over and over again, we tend to get bored and frustrated. Our excitement goes down day by day. However, when it comes to machines or bots, they don't get bored and they don't get frustrated having to do repetitive work. This leads to fewer errors, which has a positive impact on the business. There are fewer escalations and the customer is happier.

Our automations have helped to free up employees' time by reducing how long it takes them to complete their tasks. It leaves them time for learning or performing other jobs, and in general, it helps to reduce work hours. I estimate that percentage-wise, it saves my team between 30% and 35%. The total time saved is approximately 250 hours per month.

One of the ways that our employees benefited from having time freed through the use of automation is upgrading. A lot of people, in particular our technical staff, upgraded by learning new technologies. This ultimately led to helping the organization because they are able to work on different jobs.

Automation also leads to an improvement in employee happiness. If you ask them to do the same thing over and over again, on a daily basis, they get bored. When 30% of the time is saved by using automation, it frees up perhaps two hours a day for them to do different work or even recreational activities. 

UiPath contains a lot of very useful features.

The artificial intelligence and document understanding features are very good and have been helpful when it comes to processing handwritten or unstructured, especially when there is a high volume and it is repetitive. 

Using the artificial intelligence and machine learning features had a drastic impact on our use case. In the scenario where we used document understanding, we were able to successfully automate the use case without artificial intelligence. However, there was not a sufficient improvement. The success rate was between 78% and 80%. We did not use these features originally because they come at an extra cost and we did not have approval. When we were given approval and acquired the licenses, we re-implemented the automation and included the inbuilt AI and ML models. Our success rate went up to between 92% and 93%, which is significant.

The Orchestrator is in drastic need of improvement. Three or four years ago, the Orchestrator UI was very simple and comfortable to use but now, they have added so many features that it is difficult for new users to quickly understand it. The latest implementation that we did was so complicated that nobody was able to understand it, aside from the developers. Generally speaking, UiPath needs to improve the interface, and the overall user assistance should be boosted.

The developers are the core users of the product and it's important to make the product easy for them to use. The easier it is, the more people start using the tool. Then, as there are more developers available, more organizations start to hear about RPA tools and Uipath.

I have been working with UiPath for approximately four and a half years, across three different companies.

I have found that one or two times out of ten, UiPath Studio hangs and needs to be restarted. These types of technical glitches do happen but not often.

In the organizations that I have worked in so far, the UiPath features and the licensing available meant that we didn't have to worry about the infrastructure setup or scaling. You can start with a small number of licenses and robots, with little infrastructure requirements, and gradually, as you need more robots and more powerful infrastructure, you can scale up. It has great scalability. 

Even if somebody is using the community edition, we are able to build a PoC for them. In fact, using this approach gives us a pretty good idea of how the automation will proceed. Based on this, we get an idea of what the infrastructure will look like. Then, if everything fits into the customer's budget or request, we will go with the enterprise edition and implement the solution. Throughout the process, scalability is not an issue.

In my department, we have between 70 and 80 people working with UiPath. Out of these, 80% are developers, perhaps between 10% and 15% are business analysts, and the remaining people are solution architects or tech leads.

We use UiPath extensively because it helps with quick implementation and a short turnaround time. Deployments are very quick and easy to do. Given the current pandemic situation, I don't see the demand for UiPath or any other RPA tool going down.

I have been in contact with technical support many times and they are very good.

The issues that we typically face are related to Studio and sometimes licensing. The support has a fast turnaround time and if the organization is large, with a lot of licenses, then they have dedicated support for them. It is not necessary to deal with customer care, for example. Instead, dedicated technical support is available and they are really good.

The companies I have been with did not use another RPA tool prior to UiPath.

As a developer, I have not been directly involved in a UiPath installation or implementation. It's generally the responsibility of the implementation team that every organization has, and developers don't have the authority to simply download and install or implement UiPath. That said, I have given my input in the past.

Every company has a QA team and once they identify and finalize which automation software they want to install, the implementation team takes care of it. In my experience, the developers are given an instance of it to use after this.

It used to be a very simple installation, although, as I have seen UiPath change over time, it has become very complex. They have now Studio versus Studio X. They also have the Automation Cloud, which is different from an on-premises deployment. Somebody who is new to UiPath will not be able to do anything.

In terms of how long it takes for deployment, it depends on what process you want to automate. A very simple process can be automated, end-to-end from process analysis to deployment, in about a week. Complex automations have been taking us between six and eight months to complete. It all depends on what kind of automation you are doing.

In general, the implementation strategy is simple. Again, it depends on what kind of process we are automating. If the process is very complex and it involves a very high volume of data to be processed and stored, then it will require greater network bandwidth and more database storage. It may also need a fast server, with regards to processing speed. 

All of the implementations that I have seen have involved an in-house team. There are different departments involved, such as the networking team, the database team, or the IT department. Also, for the latest implementation that we did, involving Automation Cloud, the UiPath team helped us.

UiPath has reduced our overall costs. For example, if you are replacing 25 to 30 humans, where instead you only have to pay for licenses, the expenses are much less.

The company and our clients see a return on investment through savings in time and costs.

There are different licenses available, including variations for an on-premises versus a cloud-based deployment. For example, an on-premises installation is very easy and not very costly, and is suitable for a client with a simple optimization that does not have cloud-based requirements. Generally, companies do not have to worry about infrastructure because of the different options that are available.

Different licenses are used to activate features that the organization wants to use. For example, they offer licenses for UiPath Studio X, attended automation, unattended automation, document understanding, and so forth. They also have customized licensing and packages available. For example, if a customer requires 50 attended and 150 unattended licenses, but it does not fit into an existing package, then UiPath will create one for them.

They have an on-demand, floating license available for companies to save on costs. In this case, if a company wants 40 licenses and is only using 10 at a time then they only have to pay for the ones that they are using, with the remaining 40 triggered only when requested.

There are other automation tools on the market, such as Automation Anywhere and Blue Prism. Of these, UiPath is very strong and this is because of the UiPath academy for training, the UiPath certifications, and other things that impact the RPA developers.

The company that I am with did not evaluate other products before choosing UiPath.

Over the time that I have used it, the number of resources available in UiPath has grown to a very high level. For example, with the advent of Automation Cloud, the organization no longer has to worry about protecting against on-premises failures.

I have used the UiPath Apps feature but have not yet put it into production. I have completed a PoC and done some self-learning, but I haven't yet come across a scenario or process where we have to implement it.

We completed a proof of concept where our client was looking for customized input forms for their client. In that case, if I had to write the code for this customer's input form, I would need to hire additional resources at an extra cost. It might be, for example, code that has to be written in Java. In UiPath Apps, we were able to create a customized form for our client within a span of two to three days. It would be able to handle their various survey-related inputs. This feature is very helpful because it is much quicker than writing customized code for the client.

The Apps feature did not affect my IT department's workload but it did reduce the work required by my team. This was important because our client was not originally seeking to use UiPath for this part of their project. Instead, they had confidence in us and asked how it could be done, and whether Uipath could accomplish it. When we completed the input form using Apps, it definitely helped in reducing my organization's workload and in turn, reduced the overall cost to the client.

In summary, the features are very good and there are plenty of tricks and tips available, depending on what it is that you're trying to do.

I would rate this solution a nine out of ten.

Our current use case is primarily to automate business processes pertaining to finance, HR, and IT. Finance and HR have been bigger players, and other supply chain areas are currently being targeted. It's still in the ramp-up phase. We do not use it in a contact center environment.

In my former employment, not my current employment, we implemented some banking processes during the implementation phase, and last year, when the lockdown happened, due to the automation, things were much simpler, much easier to manage, and it was less dependent on people. This was not an Indian client, however, I could see that in the Indian market, Indian banks were actually struggling with the same function. That is where we could see a very significant difference. A lot of banking processes are dependent on manual processing.

For our organization, the Orchestrator has the most useful setup. All automation is more or less the same. With UiPath, the difference is the Orchestrator. The amount of integration it has is actually what makes it different from all other vendors.

I would rate the ease of building automation using UiPath at a nine out of ten. For automation in UiPath, you use a package. For example, if you want to do MS Office automation, you have an MS Office package. If you want to do Outlook automation, you have a certain set of packages that support that. If you have the package for that purpose, it's very easy to manage.

For ServiceNow, they did not have a package until last year. There was a UiPath team-supported package that was an unofficial package developed by a UiPath employee. Last year, UiPath came out with its own package, and that helped. Now we have standard automation for ServiceNow. That's actually made things more streamlined.

In terms of implementing end-to-end automation, the process analysis is currently outside of UiPath, but everything except that can be done by UiPath. For us, creating end-to-end automation using UiPath is not that very critical. Process analysis is a bit of a situation-specific thing, and at times, it's usually better to keep it outside of the tool. It always helps within the tool, however, it depends on the convenience and comfort that the client has. I wouldn't want to expose my ERP data directly for automation.

Typically, it takes two to three years to see the breakeven. The difference between on-premise and on-cloud is that the lead time is a little less. That's about it. Therefore, the amount of trouble and setup and that sort of thing is the only item to consider.

The Automation Cloud offering helps to decrease the solution's total cost of ownership by taking care of things such as infrastructure, maintenance, and updates, however, only to some extent. It's not a lot. In the long run, it makes it easier to get breakeven from the initial implementation. The maintenance happens a little less as well. When you're updating the Orchestrator, that is where your major maintenance jump comes in. If you're not upgrading your Orchestrator version, it's more or less the same. From an ownership perspective, if you're not upgrading Orchestrator, only your VM license and hosting cost will be different. This depends on the client.

If you already have an Orchestrator in place, having an automation cloud doesn't really increase or decrease the ability to scale. That would only be only in the case where you want a complete separation environment. In that case, you'll have to use a multi-tenant kind of setup. If you do that kind of a setup, it's the same if you do it on-premise or on-cloud. The time to ramp up should be the same.

We use a mix of attended and unattended automation. Attended automation is primarily helpful for a few things like where the application's less stable, where things like Citrix are involved, which already have their own set of infrastructure issues.

UiPath has reduced human errors in the organization. The lead time is reduced, as well as the lead time to activity and the lead time to develop. Specifically, if you do development in UiPath versus any other OEM, you see a very significant difference in implementation lead time from a development perspective. They're much simpler to develop and manage in UiPath. If you go to other OEMs, it's very complex at times. If it takes 10 steps in another OEM, UiPath takes it in one to three, max.

The solution has freed up employee time by as much as 30 minutes per day. It's allowed employees to focus on higher-value work. The primary benefit of automation is doing low-complexity repetitive work outside of working hours. That's the biggest advantage that I've seen. Even if you're sleeping, there is already work being done in the background, so that the next morning, when the employee comes, he has more relevant work in front of him. He doesn't have to do any paper-pushing jobs. Automation can do that instead. That's the biggest advantage.

The fact that UI handles infrastructure, maintenance, and updates for Automation Cloud saves some time in the IT department. It is a trade-off. The biggest challenge that we've seen with Automation Cloud is primarily with documentation. At times, we raise it to UiPath, and after that, documentation comes up. I'm not saying that's bad, however, that's something that UiPath can work upon. This is a consistent behavior that I've seen.

Back in 2018, I was with another employer, not EY. I started using Orchestrator API within 10 days of its global release, and we had struggled at times for documentation. It's a theme with Orchestrator, with the new Automation Cloud, specifically on the Orchestrator side. For Tableau reporting, there was nothing. We had to raise it to UiPath saying, "Hey, do you have something for Tableau reporting?" They said, "No, we don't have anything for Automation Cloud." Very recently, they came out with it, however, before that, there was nothing.

The documentation isn't the best. It's pretty difficult to search. We would have to raise a ticket to the UiPath team, and they would have to come back with the relevant information. It's difficult to try and do a day or two of research only to have to raise a ticket to UiPath as a vendor.

I've struggled a lot with automating Citrix applications with UiPath. I know how Citrix is not very stable when it comes to automated logins. In that case, attended automation is good. We've seen some good use cases. However, it depends on the consultant's choice and the business's goals.

I've been using it since 2018.

The solution is very easy to scale and allows users to scale whenever they want.

In general, UiPath support is good. It is better than other OEMs. They're usually really good.

I have experience with other RPA solutions. The development time is the biggest difference. The amount of automation one can do with it, that's the main difference. It's huge. It's not even a small difference.

I've looked at leading vendors in Gartner's Magic Quadrant. I've actually worked on all the vendors that you can see in the Magic Quadrant. There is a reason why UiPath is leading. Development is great, and, if you want to integrate a third-party application, UiPath has a lot of integrations set up either in its Orchestrator or in its Studio. Something that takes 15 minutes in UiPath would take one day in most of the other options. In Automation Anywhere, for example, you have more trouble.

The Orchestrator setup doesn't take a lot of time if you have everything in place. Cloud deployment is a good option for smaller clients, or small to medium clients, that are just piloting or don't have any very sensitive data out there. They should go on the cloud.

It's a straightforward setup. It's pretty easy. That said if it's a new solution to you and if you don't know it, it might take a little while. Even then, it's easy. It's not complex.

Prior to StudioX coming in, it was very easy. Within 15 minutes for just a Studio client. However, with Studio, things changed a little. If you install StudioX and do not want to revert to the regular Studio, you'll probably have to uninstall the installation. StudioX usually comes with a separate installer and so on. With Studio Pro and the regular Studio, they come with their own thing.

UiPath is already working on providing an integrated installer for all of its offerings, so that should make it easier. If there is a wrapper application, and if from there you can select which one that you want to install, it'll be smoother. You'll be able to just click and go.

I have seen ROI in the past. My previous clients love UiPath. The current client is not in a spot to say just yet, however. It's a very new setup.

To see the ROI, that's where the off-work hours come into play. The automation works outside of working hours, and that actually speeds up a company's business processes in general. For those kinds of things, it's good. It shows a clear ROI.

The pricing is okay. It can be reduced a little. It's still fair, however, pricing can be reduced by the company if it wants to spend less. Depending on the industry, or depending on the features that an organization is going to get, it's possible to scale down. For example, if I don't want to use the AI set of features, I just want basic automation, I don't have to get what I don't need. They've already done a good amount of corrections in the product offering. If somebody wants only a certain section of the offering, they should be given modular pricing, especially for the managed cloud, which should be pay as you go. If I don't want that service at all, why should you pay for it? If I want something, it's a different situation and I should be charged, however, if I don't want something, it's good to have the option to opt-out and save money. You can't really put the whole cost on a customer.

SAP IRPA has a good model whereby their offering is based on the number of hits. The more API hits that you're asking for, the price per hit reduces. That should be the typical model. I'm not sure what UiPath is doing in that respect, however, I feel that is the best approach.

My organization has a business relationship with UiPath.

In the current setting that I'm working in, it's basically an on-cloud deployment. We have these Automation Cloud Services, to which we have been subscribed. In the past, I've used the on-premise UiPath deployment.

Since it's a SaaS offering, it's always available online.

We are using a relatively new version.

We do not use UiPath's AI functionality in our automation program currently. We also do not use UiPath's apps feature. That said, I am aware of some organizations that use it.

I would advise new users to fix up their processes first, check if their applications need to be upgraded or digitized. After that, they will be in a position to then take a long-term vision with UiPath and have a strategy, have a long, two to three-year strategy. It's not a good idea to take a "do as it comes" approach. There needs to be, ideally, a three-year strategy in place in order to get a lot of business benefits. 

I would rate the solution at an eight out of ten. If the pricing was better, I would rate it higher. 

Specifically, if you see Automation Anywhere's pricing, their basic automation is cheap, however, if you want to use the intelligent aspect, the intelligent aspect comes at a very good premium. That's most important. If I want to do simple process automation and if you're running a company at that scale, you need to understand your competition. There are a lot of players coming into the market and a big differentiator is going to be the cost. Power Automate is going to be successful based on that logic. It has high availability, big integration, and low pricing. It can disrupt UiPath's space.

It's on multiple platforms like Oracle EBS and other IT applications. We have a few of the local government applications that the client uses. We have worked on multiple use cases with all of these applications. All of the client's major work is all through Oracle EBS. We have finance-related use cases. They have Seabridge applications, which are one of the applications that we are automating using UiPath.

Oracle itself has been very helpful when using this solution, thanks to the redundant task they've currently defined. All those are being automated. We mostly use the UiPath Assistant, Video, and Orchestrator. These are the only three products that we use day-in and day-out for our clients.

The ease of building automation using UiPath is great. It technically provides good features in order to develop, automating different kinds of applications using UiPath.

UiPath enables you to implement end-to-end automation, starting with process analysis, then robot building, and finally monitoring automation. It's usually very important. In some regulation cases, redundant cases, it’s been very useful. Instead of avoiding human intervention digitally, we are utilizing the UiPath to build up automation and run those in unattended mode.

If we could use the UiPath Apps feature, it would increase the number of automation and reduce the time it takes to create them. That said, at this time, I do not use this aspect of the solution.

UiPath has reduced human error in some cases. For example, a client has monthly payroll activities, which have to be done for multiple entities and in multiple in order to ensure the reports to be pretty good. It's a huge asset, having these multiple entities. It takes a lot of time for a human to execute the task. Here, automation plays a key role and it creates everything automatically through unattended mode. Of course, when a human is involved, there are chances for errors, such as missing the entities and updating the parameters. All of these things are instead being taken care of by automation. The likelihood of error is removed when the human intervention is.

The product has freed up employee time. It’s likely freed up more than a day, an average of 12 hours at least. That’s 12 hours per day. It allows our employees to focus on more high-value work.

We do use the Apps feature, however, it hasn't really helped reduce any workload. Everything is dependent upon the client's local language, which is Arabic. That is the major reason why we could not implement or utilize much of the Apps. It's not able to recognize Arabic versions properly. That is the challenging area which we are observing currently.

The solution is helpful in terms of speeding up or reducing the cost of digital transformation for our clients, however, the license cost is a little high. We are facing some challenges in the form of money. The license is costly. 

While employees can now focus on more high-value work, I would not go so far as to say it has improved employee satisfaction.

In UiPath, we have multiple products and recently there have been many product videos. There are videos around customization, deployment, et cetera. are all scattered all over. There are different products and different server setups and various other things, however, it is not organized. If it was simplified, it would be much better.

It could be more user-friendly. There are so many offerings and configurations and customizations that make things a bit complicated. Streamlining it would be ideal.

There are a few small things that should be included in UiPath. There are a few, although I can’t remember all. One, for example, is, when we are sending an email, we should be able to set up options and customize it a little bit. At this point, we need to create custom code and then go through APIs if we want to customize. It should be a built-in functionality, however.

I've been using the solution for two years now.

Stability-wise UiPath is good, however, it releases twice yearly. Therefore it will be a little hard for people to upgrade in-house each and every time. Clients also question why it's necessary every six months to upgrade. It won't be reasonable for the management. Every time when an upgrade is available, we have to complete the regulation for the previous use cases and whatever we already have deployed at production. 

When redeploying, everything is kind of a hectic task. Once in a year is okay, however, multiple releases in a year is a bit much. Clients would not be aware that yearly this many releases are happening and every release will have something more to add, that there are changes. Having to adapt to changes is something that is very difficult to make the client understand.

The solution can scale. 

You can use the application to automate any kind of application or any kind of use case. A few of them require some customization, using other technologies. 

Already we have some 25 bots running in production and a few of them are about to deploy to production and the client is looking for some more use cases. We are looking into a few more use cases that are in the discussion stage as of now. We are increasing our use cases and expanding usage.

The technical support is very helpful, however, there have been cases where we have had some urgent issues and support seems to move at its own pace. They won't rush for you. They don't seem to understand our concerns and they seem to only focus on their own timelines. 

Our SLA expectations are not always matching theirs. Even when we mark something as urgent, still there's a timeline of two to three hours. In that time it'll be hard to hold on.

Our clients did not use a different RPA solution before UiPath.

I do not have any other RPA solution experience beyond UiPath.

I am the solution architect who setups.

I was working on the 2018 version of UiPath. The 2018 and 2019 versions are very easy and very straightforward. There were not many changes or many complications in order to set up or upgrade. However, when it comes to 2020, from 2020 onwards it's very complicated.

Now there is an IAS. There is no connection string update. We cannot update any connection strings, and yet we could in the 2019 version. From 2020 we're not able to do the changes at all unless we go further and do another upgrade or something like that.

Earlier it was straightforward. Maybe there was a little bit of conflict, fine, however, now that it's split into multiple things with a conflict DLL file, orchestrated DLL file, identity server file, then an app setting the adjacent file. That is gathered completely into all of these things, where until and unless you have both end-to-end documentation understanding, you cannot go ahead and do anything.

On top of that, there is the SSL certificate. Until 2019 we didn't require each and every robot or a development machine to have the same SSL certificate. Now, we have to export and import to all the machines and add the user's perspective.

From the licensing perspective, licenses were straight, and there was no migration required for the license to be utilized in any of the versions. From 2020, there is a license migration required from the UiPath end. We now need to contact UiPath for that in order to get this migration done.

All of these changes, as well as the identity server database creation, everything has a kind of impact on the ease of deployment.

Upgrading doesn't take much time, however, users deploying the solution should have a ton of knowledge about each one of the steps. They need to remember everything in order to perform the upgrade or else something might be missed. Even if you miss one step you will have to spend hours and hours in order to rectify that.

For the 2020 version, for the initial deployment, I did not actually do it from scratch. I just upgraded. That said, if a user wanted to do it, I would estimate it takes more than a day to complete.

The implementation strategy depends upon the requirements of the client. For example, if it is on-premises versus if it is on cloud and/or if the client is looking for Elasticsearch or Insights or test automation, et cetera. All of these things will be dependent on the other. If you ask for Insights, you need to have an extra server setup for that. The same thing follows with the test automation and SQL database. What we call roles and responsibilities also will be dependent.

The unattended licenses are a little costly. That's the challenging part for us. That said, with the continuous support to the client, as we are increasing the use cases, it will lessen the cost probably by the middle of next year. At least, that’s what we are hoping for. We hope to see an ROI then.

The license cost is a little high. Unattended modes are really costly. If it's not as costly, then we could propose and purchase the licenses. Of course, we get discounts from UiPath, however, just for 10 bots, not even 10, if we load 5 to 10 unattended bots within the production orchestrator with the three development licenses, we have to pay for them twice. I'm not sure how much it is exactly in terms of the dollars, however.

My company does not have a business relationship with UiPath.

We do not use UiPath in a contact center environment.

We use completely unattended automation. 

We do not use attended automation at this time, or AI, although we are aware those are options. We're looking forward to AI and it is part of the reason we recently upgraded to the 2020.10 version.

It's one of the best tools where you can work for automation. If you have more redundant work, then it is very helpful.

Except for this upgrade and installation initial steps, apart from that, the solution is pretty easy to use.

I would rate the solution at an eight out of ten.

We have worked on multiple use cases, but most recently, we have worked on a payroll system. Previously, every month, we had to manually get certain details from HR, and we used to do the pay run for all employees in the organization. Now, we automatically extract the required information from the current system by using UiPath. We then prepare a sheet by using Excel, and the entire Excel sheet is processed by a bot. The final sheet is sent for the payslips for the entire organization, and the entire pay report is sent to the bank for payment details.

Automation reduces dependencies. When I have a process that is done by humans, there are dependencies. For example, I need to make sure that the required number of people are available in different shifts. Any process that is done by a human has to be split into eight to nine hours of work. After every eight hours, I have a replacement happening for the same work. So, multiple people are working in different shifts. In addition, any work through humans can only be done from Monday to Friday, or I have to get the team over the weekend. Making our team work over the weekend requires special permissions or approvals. With automation, I am at ease. I'm not dependent on anybody. UiPath is easily accessible from mobiles for the orchestration part. So, if I have a critical process that I need to execute and get the results, I can do it from my mobile. Even when I'm traveling, I can get real-time statistics. 

Previously, I used to get a request at any time to do the pay run for an employee. If the employee was on a leave on that particular day or was not available, I used to miss my target or deadline. Now, we are not dependent on anybody. We are completely independent. If I get a request, the robot is automatically going to process it automatically. I don't even have to tell the robot to run a process after getting a request. All my rules and validations are taken care of by automation before the deadline. If I'm away from the office, my robot can automatically trigger a process on receiving a request. So, we are able to meet all the deadlines, targets, and standards set by the company within the given timeframe.

It has helped in minimizing our on-premises footprint. We work for multiple zones and across the globe. If I have a UiPath architecture, I can deploy it anywhere. Irrespective of the country or continent or zone, I'm able to use the same deployment or the same architecture at multiple locations. It has reduced my cost of infrastructure and maintenance. The cost of everything has come down. Previously, we used to have servers country-wise and continent-wise, but now, we don't need multiple servers and multiple teams to maintain them. I can do things from a single location with a limited set of resources.

The majority of our processes are in the unattended mode, but we do have certain processes in the attended mode where certain end-users provide me the real-time information. We have designed a process where we give a specific form to the user. When the form is filled by the user, a process is automatically triggered, and the robot starts processing. It gives real-time statuses and information to the end-user in terms of what we are doing, how are we doing the calculations, and how are they going to get the benefit by opting for certain features within our organization. I can run my processes in the attended and unattended mode. So, I'm able to trigger both modes of automation very easily.

I am able to keep my customer data integrated. With humans, a data leak can happen, but in the case of robotics, my data is very secure.

The way the processing happens is also very smooth. For example, if I'm on leave or on a break, and a customer calls at my help desk, I won't be able to respond. Now, we have chatbots or robots running throughout the day. When the executives are not there and anyone calls the customer support team, customers are able to get a resolution. They don't have to keep calling or wait. Automatically, the bot is able to respond to their queries and concerns. We have been able to reduce the response time. My customers are pretty much satisfied with it, and they don't have any complaints. Previously, the satisfaction level of the customers was not that great.

The best part of automation is that we can easily integrate multiple technologies within a single tool. I can do it at ease with all of my data flow. Automation is happening across the globe, not only in my organization. Every time we do automation, we feel that there is something overlapping in every process. If I automate a process for my organization and your organization, 50% of the things would be the same. I can very easily maintain common things in automation tools through common libraries or common components. For the remaining 50% of things, we use different technologies. We are integrating optical character recognition (OCR) technologies for document processing. We are also using multiple machine learning methodologies to do pattern matching. We are using artificial intelligence to give a response that is comparable to a human response. 

We use its AI functionality in our automation program. We get multiple requests, and they can be through telephone, emails, or documents. When a request comes through the telephone, the robot or automation is designed to convert that to text. When a request comes through a document, we are using AI features. The document might not have a proper structure, and a customer can give any set of data in any format. So, we have built a special template or format, and this AI is helping us to extract the document with the most accurate results possible. We are getting an accuracy of 95%. With this, dependency is also gone. A human has to properly go through a document. Then, we have to convert the data to the file and process it. With AI, irrespective of the size of the document, which can be 100 pages or 500 pages, we are able to exactly locate the data that we're looking for, and we are able to extract and then process it through automation. We are able to smoothly integrate multiple things within a single process.

Its AI functionality has enabled us to automate more processes. It takes a human 23 minutes to process a 500-page document. With AI features, it hardly takes 7 minutes to process the same document. There is a great reduction in the time taken to do the same task, which is a huge benefit. With AI, I can look for, find, and extract specific information in a particular document, and then I'm able to process the information at ease. I can have documents in different formats. For example, each insurance customer or service provider can have different formats. A human would have to scan through multiple pages to reach the conclusion that this is the right data. AI can easily process different formats, whereas a human being has to be trained for different formats. Humans might also understand something and forget something, but that's not the case with AI or automation tools. They always remember the instructions given to them, which has drastically helped us in making our processes more accurate.

It has contributed to end-to-end automation in our organization. End-to-end automation helps us in completing things in a shorter span of time and utilizing resources in a better way. Previously, for every step of a process, we used to have a different team. We had a separate team for the following:

• Requirement gathering
• Answering the queries for the customers
• Responding to the queries by the ticketing system
• Responding to emails
• Processing particular processes at the backend
• Supporting the infrastructure in real-time

Now, all these things are done by robotics. I only need a few people to maintain my infrastructure. 

We use the UiPath Apps feature, and it has definitely helped us. If there is something that is not available within our team, we can directly use all the apps and features given by UiPath. We don't have to dedicatedly set up a team to design that app. If I have to design a new app or a chatbot for my customers, I can easily integrate the UiPath Apps feature instead of recruiting people, training them, and expecting them to give me the output. UiPath provides help and documentation, and if I require any licenses or support, UiPath's team is always available to assist us.

The UiPath Apps feature has increased the number of automations that we can create. It reduces the time to create automations. We can easily create automation. For a small process, we're able to roll out one automated process every 21 days. We are able to roll out an automated and complex end-to-end process every three or five months to our customers. Previously, it used to take us at least six months to one year to roll out the new features or new functionality to customers, but now, the time has drastically come down. 

It speeds up or reduces the cost of digital transformation. Every time we automate, we are able to speed up automation. We are able to do more things, and more people are working on automation. By using new features that UiPath is bringing and the learnings from my past experience, we are able to automate very quickly. Four and a half years ago, a process used to take four months. Now, it only takes 25 days for me. They have added many features, and I don't have to sit and design those features. They are constantly providing new features in their quarterly releases, and I can simply make the best use of them and implement them in my process.

Previously, I needed people in different shifts, and every human being might not have the same speed or enthusiasm. Humans also need breaks. A robot works throughout the day, and it has a consistent processing speed, so we are able to process more and more. I can plan a target with my robot, and I am able to achieve that. If I'm adding new customers, I just have to integrate one or two more licenses, which is very easy. I can easily create or configure a new robot and start processing. With humans, I have to train them again and again, whereas with automation, once a process is ready, I can use it in multiple robots. I can use it for 25, 50, or 100 robots very easily. I can scale my process rate very fast.

Previously, we were able to process 5,000 customer requests in a month. By using automation, we are able to do the same amount of work within 10 days or even within a week. If we add more human resources, it increases the cost for my organization, whereas, with robotics, I can configure 10 robots or 100 robots. It doesn't increase the cost a lot for my organization, and I can process everything that I want. I don't have any backlog.

It has freed up the time of our employees. This additional time has enabled employees to focus on higher-value work. I am utilizing resources in a much better way, and I am able to give them the work that is interesting for them or is relevant to their growth. When people in my team started working, they found the job interesting. After working for more than two to three years on the same thing, they don't feel that they're doing something new or learning something new. By using automation for a lot of things, I am able to train my team on the new things or technology that they are interested in or want to work with. I am also able to give the work that they're looking for. It is bringing more satisfaction, not only from the customers' perspective but also from my team's perspective. I am able to keep the same resources in my organization for a longer period of time because they're very happy. They are not dissatisfied with the organization.

It has definitely reduced human error. Our accuracy is 99.2%. With humans, our accuracy was 96%, and by using robotics, we have brought the accuracy to 99.2%.

It has also reduced the costs of our automation operations. In the initial year, we saved 10% of the day-to-day operational cost that we had when we were doing things manually. In the second year, it was 30%, and it has increased in the subsequent years. So far, almost 60% turnaround in the business profit has been reported.

It has saved costs for our organization. Previously, for a process, I had to train, for example, 100 people and keep them in multiple shifts. I also had to give them multiple facilities to be a part of the organization, whereas with robotics, I only have to design the process once, and I can use it in any number of bots, such as 10, 25, or 50. It also helps in scaling at no extra cost.

By using automation, we need fewer people for support operations. If the customer queries are taken care of by chatbots, my data and patterns are being analyzed by using AI and ML, and the scanning of the documents is taken care of by OCR, I need very few people for support operations. I need only 10% of people for providing support around the clock.

We are using the entire automation process most commonly. We are also doing scheduling. Our processes are running on a fixed date, so we are also using schedulers or timers. 

We are also using AI technology. We have AI Fabric, and we are doing the entire extraction part of the document through UiPath, which is very helpful. We're able to do everything within this single tool, and we are not dependent on other tools. We don't have to license more tools from the market and go to multiple tools to do the same work. Within this single tool, we have every feature that we need for our organization. 

It is a very simple tool to work with for anybody. Simplicity is the best in UiPath. It also has the best community support. If we are looking for any solution, we can directly reach out to UiPath at any point in time. 

The new features or functionalities that come with UiPath upgrades don't work perfectly in the initial days. Their new releases are not stable. We always find some set of issues. I have to work with the UiPath team for a week or so to resolve the issues, and then I'm able to use it. The stabilization should be there. We expect UiPath to reduce the number of errors before rolling out new features to end-users or customers.

In addition, many times, the apps or activities that we use within UiPath for designing are no longer compatible when a new upgrade happens or the version is changed. We want UiPath to look into it.

I have been using UiPath for almost four and a half years. 

It is one of the very stable tools. We don't see any breakdowns happening within the tool. 

We only have to design the process once, and we can use it in any number of bots. It helps in scaling at no extra cost. After we design a process, we can reuse it in subsequent designs. I just have to work on the things that are not already designed. So, there is a 10% to 30% reduction in the new processes that we design. Scalability improves with each and every design.

There is a user base of 100,000 users who are benefiting from automation at the moment. With manual processing, if I had a team of 1,000 people, then with automation, I would need 50 people to automate all processes. I would have four to five solution consultants or solution architects and around 15 to 20 developers and testers. There would also be people who are doing the business implementation, giving guidance to the customers, and doing the production rollout and handover preparation for the customers. 

Our usage is increasing. With every new process that we design, we are able to integrate more and more. Previously, we only used to integrate with OCR, and now, we are also using chatbots, AI, and ML. So, our processes are increasing, and we are definitely expanding.

The support that we get from UiPath is one of the best. We are a direct channel partner for the product. Every time UiPath comes up with new features or functionalities, they come and demonstrate that feature and help us to understand them so that we can help our customers with their implementations. We get direct support and the licensing, pricing, and certification benefits from UiPath.

It was pretty straightforward for us. We were able to build the entire infrastructure within a week. This includes getting licenses, doing the installation, and configuring the robots. We found the UiPath documentation very helpful while doing the installation and configuration. 

If I design a process today, I can deploy a process to production within 30 minutes of time. It is very quick. In terms of the implementation strategy, we go to the customer and understand their pain points. We then identify the processes that can be automated and tell them about the benefits and the timeframe for implementing a particular process to their server. We also tell them when will they start seeing the result and how they can achieve what they need by using multiple integrations of the tool. They don't have to spend multiple licenses on different tools. Everything can be done within a single tool.

We use a tool called TFS. With a single click, I can deploy my process from development to QA. In the same way, I can move my process from QA to UAT, and then with one more click, I can move it from UAT to production.

As solution architects, our role is to help the design team understand the design that has to be built. They take care of the design and testing. For the production rollout, we have an infrastructure team. We also sit with the business team to make them understand the process, how robotics works on a day-to-day basis, and what are the things that they have to monitor. Whenever we design a process, we make sure that all the complexities are handled. We are also handling all the compliance, and the integration is done smoothly. After a process is designed and approved by our business team, our accuracy stands at 99%.

In terms of maintenance, it doesn't require expensive or complex application upgrades or IT application support. UiPath is pretty simple. The basic infrastructure works in most of the servers, and we don't need frequent upgrades and maintenance. It is very easy to maintain.

We have seen an ROI. In the initial year, we saved 10% of the day-to-day operational cost. In the second year, it was 30%, and it has increased in the subsequent years. So far, almost 60% increase in the business profit has been reported.

There is no additional cost apart from the standard licensing. There is a one-time cost for the infrastructure setup.

We did evaluate multiple RPA tools such as Automation Anywhere and Blue Prism. In terms of the ease of designing, the ease of use, and from the cost perspective, we found UiPath to be the best tool for our customers.

Anyone who wants to automate processes should understand the process, its complexity, and the volume of the processing or the number of transactions to be processed. You should do proper analysis before you select the tool and licenses.

UiPath provides a lot of benefits and reduces the cost for an organization. It is one of the best tools in the market. The support that we get from UiPath is one of the best, and most of the features provided by UiPath are simply amazing.

Initially, people are hesitant to use automation because they don't know what automation can do. Anybody who uses the technology in the right way will get lots of benefits from any technology. Your implementation strategy has to be proper. You should check the feasibility of using a particular technology with existing processes in the organization and the benefits you can get.

It helps us in reducing the time, and we are also able to bring more business to the company. By making my processes digital, I'm bringing more revenue to my company. We visit a customer's site and try to find out the processes and pain points. After that, we analyze the entire solution within UiPath and tell the customer about the best solution and what would be the reduction in time as compared to the normal process.

I would rate UiPath a nine out of 10.

UiPath was used in-house in my first company for automating processes. We had deployed it on-premise. In my current company, we are giving UiPath automation as a service. We help companies with automation. We set up UiPath from scratch and help them achieve their automation goals or strategies. As a service, we have done on-premises and cloud deployments.

From a service perspective, we deal with a lot of clients who are predominantly in the oil and gas sector and energy sector. They have SAP systems for their ERP, and their use cases mostly revolve around automating SAP processes such as invoice automation, joint venture reconciliation, balance sheet reconciliation, and intercompany netting. So, the use cases usually revolve around the finance tasks, but sometimes, we have also seen use cases related to the supply chain and planned maintenance, such as purchase order closures, work order closures, and comparison of the work order plan with the deviations. 

In terms of the version, we always have the latest version. I've also used 19.4 and 20.4 on-premise versions.

UiPath enables us to implement end-to-end automation, starting with process analysis, then robot building, and finally monitoring all of our automation. They have created a platform to handle everything from process analysis to deployment. If you just had UiPath Studio, you would have to procure something for your attended or unattended robots. You would also need a tool to capture the process or task itself. Similarly, you would need a tool to collect the ideas from subject matter experts. If you don't have a platform that covers end-to-end automation, it becomes very challenging, and you'll have to find ways to procure those applications. With UiPath, you don't have that headache.

It has reduced human error and saved time. These two are probably the best things that we achieved from automation. We recently did a deployment for a customer who had purchase orders and other stagnant stuff from 2011 onwards. These purchase orders were not closed even though they have been receipted and invoiced completely. We did robotic process automation to takes care of these purchase orders. It is a recurring job that takes care of all POs that were created in the last one year and closes them automatically. It used to take 5 to 10 minutes for the customer to close one purchase order and recheck everything. There were probably 22,000 to 23,000 purchase orders every year. The business benefit that the customer got was close to 1,200 hours in a year, which is a massive saving.

It has freed up employees' time. It has definitely reduced the time for our clients. The time saved varies based on the project. It has saved the time of associates in completing their tasks, and they can focus on a lot of other things. In one of the use cases, an employee was spending 10 hours every month to complete a process, which is 120 hours in a year, whereas the robot takes just one hour every month. So, the robot takes 12 hours as compared to 120 hours taken by a human, which is one-tenth of their effort. It has reduced around 90% of their time for this project. For the purchase order closure project, the robot has saved close to 1,200 hours in a year. That's a huge saving.

There are other use cases where savings were not huge in terms of the efforts or hours, but the robot was very much compliant with a company's processes. It eliminated any sort of human errors that could have occurred. For instance, balance sheet reconciliations always had some sort of issues and were prone to errors. The robot completely eliminated all those issues.

We use attended and unattended automation. We have a couple of robots on the finance team's laptops, and they trigger the process as and when required, such as for month-end clearing, which is a process where the end-users have to do some kind of clearing task in the SAP system. They can trigger it as and when required. This attended automation has helped in scaling RPA benefits. The overall benefit was in terms of the efficiency with which the robot gave them the mismatches. At the end of the day, it is giving the end-user satisfaction. They don't have to repeatedly do the same steps for every company code and intercompany code. It has definitely saved a lot of time for the end-user and provided satisfaction with the process.

With cloud offerings, UiPath handles infrastructure maintenance and updates, which saves our time as well as our clients' time. The clients do not want to worry about the infrastructure and other such aspects. We are generally the ones who provide services to the clients and deal with these things. When they use the automation cloud, it is definitely time-saving because we don't have to install patches and other things. If there is a new service that they introduced, such as data service, we don't have to install anything new on the automation cloud. It is all taken care of pre-default. We just have to enable it or disable it as per our need. That definitely saves some time for us.

Their automation cloud offering helps in decreasing time-to-value. It definitely reduces time as compared to on-premise because all that you need to do is procure an automation cloud and the licenses for the UiPath team and enable them. With the on-premises setup, there is an overhead of installation of orchestrator on the virtual machine. In this aspect, an automation cloud is better than installing everything on-premise for the client and setting up the orchestrator and things like that. The automation cloud doesn't have any other thing that reduces your time. Other solutions, such as Blue Prism, provide the same benefit when you use a cloud-based orchestrator.

It has a lot of features, but the ones that I'm really interested in and focused on are the Automation Hub and the Task Capture tool that they have created. Automation Hub helps you in gathering a lot of ideas, and Task Capture helps subject matter experts in capturing the step-by-step processes. It helps them build their SOPs or a document system wherever it is not already available. 

The Uipath Document Understanding framework is also very nice in comparison to Abbyy and similar sorts of OCR technologies. 

In terms of the ease of use, I would rate UiPath very high. If you have some kind of coding background in C#, .Net, or VBA, the development in UiPath is very easy. You can customize it as per a customer's requirements. It has an easy-to-use Studio where you can build complex automation. On the Citizen Developer side, people without much technical knowledge and coding expertise can also automate their basic processes. We have done some training internally within our management, and they found StudioX very easy to use for their developments. 

Licensing is one area where UiPath could do better and can be more competitive. It is a little expensive. Their bundling of products is a bit confusing. For instance, if we want the UiPath Apps license, it is bundled with Action Center, so you also have to procure the Action Center license. These bundles are not tailored as per our company's requirements. If we reach out to the UiPath partners who deal with the accounts, they usually take your request into consideration and see what best they can do, but it is still not easily customizable.

I've been using UiPath since the beginning of 2018. It has been three and a half years.

It has been reliable. We haven't had any reliability issues as such. Only the automation that we create could have inherent issues based on how a developer develops it. All of the out-of-the-box functionalities available in UiPath work as expected.

We have seen customers starting with PoCs and scaling up to have running production bots. There are around seven to eight bots per client, which is good. From a scalability perspective, UiPath enables you to scale things quickly. We could quickly procure all things and deploy an attended or an unattended robot from a PoC to production. So, its scalability is very high.

We have used their support. Most of the time, we reach out to the usual support logins that they have given. We also have a partner whom we keep in the loop if there is something very urgent. The support team has its own defined SLAs. If it is a priority one case, they get back within 24 hours or something like that.

We've always got a resolution for our issues, and they've always been helpful in that regard. They have got some technical guys who joined us over the phone and helped us solve some of the issues.

I have used Blue Prism and Automation Anywhere at the PoC level and the initial setup level. I've not developed any enterprise-level robot using these. So, I'm not qualified to tell the differences between these solutions.

When new clients ask us to implement UiPath for them, the implementation is almost always straightforward. We know whether they have a cloud of their own, and what they need to procure. We have that very neatly outlined, and UiPath has also given us step-by-step instructions that are readily available on their documentation portal. So, if you want to install anything, everything is very well documented. It is very easy to follow the steps and install it.

If you have everything in hand, it would take a couple of days. If your virtual machine is ready, we just have to install the orchestrator. We also have to install Studio on the machines of the developers. It definitely takes a couple of days.

Its price is on the higher side as compared to the other players in the market. They are tying up with a lot of other products such as Druid, but they are independently also very expensive. That's what the customers say when we start giving them options of UiPath.

Apart from the FKUs or the licensing that UiPath provides, if you are implementing an on-premise kind of solution for a client, you have to look at all the things that would be required, such as the virtual machines and the user IDs that the robot might use. We mostly deal with SAP, and if you are using SAP, the robot would have to log into the SAP system to get some data. So, the username that you would create within SAP is also licensed. There are a lot of other costs and related things that you need to focus on. There are a lot of things around UiPath that you need to deal with.

I would also advise using best practices while implementing the solution. Every developer has his or her own way of developing automation. A lot of times, we have seen a gap in the understanding and the kind of deliveries that teams do. So, it is very helpful to understand the skills and capabilities of a developer and see how that could impact the final deliveries from an automation perspective.

We provide solutions depending on our customers' use cases. For on-premise or cloud deployment, we follow the same sort of process and project plan. There is no huge difference in whether we use cloud automation or on-premise automation. At the end of the day, a robot has to do what is expected as per the objectives.

We don't use UiPath's AI functionality in our automation program. So far, we haven't seen any use case where we had to use any sort of intelligence or incorporate any sort of machine learning. We haven't had a necessity for that.

We are going to use UiPath apps in a new project that is coming up. We haven't used it so far. We did a PoC to see if we can connect the cloud apps to an on-premise orchestrator and if it is feasible, but that's about it. It is going to be implemented soon.

I would rate UiPath a nine out of 10.

I use this solution to automate business processes that are rule-based. This includes the automation of different applications and background processes, such as posting invoices.

UiPath makes it very easy to develop automations. The interface is user-friendly and makes it easy to perform operations or use services, whether it is a database or another product. We can perform tasks on Microsoft Azure, for example. Many operations can be completed using inbuilt packages.

For whatever activity we want to perform, it only involves using the drag-and-drop capability, so it is easy to do. Anybody can do it. No programming-specific knowledge, like .NET, is required.

It is easy to develop custom components, which makes life easier.

UiPath allows us to implement end-to-end automation starting with the process analysis and ending with the monitoring. This is important to us because for any new process that we identify, using the task capture methods helps us to gather the documents that are required to automate it. After we develop the automation in Studio, we can easily monitor it using Orchestrator. It is helpful to have a complete solution from start to end, with all of the features that it has.

Using automation means that we increase our process output with minimal effort, which is something that every company wants to do because there is a saving in terms of manpower. It is definitely helpful in our organization.

The amount of time or cost savings depends on the process. For example, some processes that take four or five people to complete can be done using a single bot. Also, people can only work six or seven hours a day, whereas, with automation, the bot can run 24 hours a day. Not only is the process done more quickly but at less cost.

Attended automation has helped to scale RPA benefits because we have some scenarios where human collaboration is required. These are business-critical processes, so any level of automation is important for us.

In addition to savings in time and cost, UiPath further saves us money because of the reduction in human error. When a human is performing a task, mistakes happen. When the bots are used, there are no errors and when the number of mistakes is reduced, the business has more income.

UiPath has helped to speed up digital transformation, although hosting it requires IT support. For example, if UiPath needs to be updated or our infrastructure needs to be expanded, then it requires the help of IT support.

One of the things that I like is that they keep adding new features, such as machine learning models. For example, if you are reading a PDF copy of an invoice then the RPA should be able to identify and understand it. Rather than using rules to identify different formats for different kinds of invoices, machine learning and AI should be involved.

We are using the AI functionality and it gives us the ability to have more automation, saving more time and manual effort, and at less cost. This is possible because UiPath provides pre-built and pre-trained AI models that we can import, depending on the use case.

Some of the processes we have implemented are very complex, and these are the ones that we need AI for. Some of them involve human interaction and cover use cases such as taking different formats of invoices and pushing them to SAP. We have had good success when working with the machine learning capabilities.

The Action Center and Task Manager are very good for business users. The features are helpful because these days, business users are expecting more than a simple rule-based operation in RPA systems.

UiPath Studio integrates well with third-party tools such as Git. It is easy to maintain code from within Studio.

Many of the features that UiPath has are good, although better documentation is required for them.

I have been using UiPath for three years.

I have had issues with previous versions but the latest updates have resolved my problems. As of now, the stability is very good.

Scalability is very good in UiPath.

We have five UiPath users in our project; one is a lead, another is a manager, there are two developers and a consultant. At this point, I'm not sure if we plan to increase our usage.

I have been in contact with technical support in the past, and I would rate them a ten out of ten. They respond very nicely and help to resolve our problems.

When we deploy processes, it takes about half an hour. It varies depending on the process but half an hour is the average per activity.

UiPath is easy to maintain and support. We have a support team and QA teams, and they are responsible for monitoring the processes and the bots. They will check the activities that take place in production.

The number of staff required for maintenance depends on the architecture that the client has.

The licensing model is very good.

We chose UiPath because it is more flexible and has better licensing terms than some competing products.

We use some third-party tools in conjunction with UiPath. For example, to maintain the code and for versioning control, we use Git. We have two or three years of experience with Git and not only is it compatible with UiPath, but it is also easy to use.

My advice for anybody who is implementing UiPath is to start with the documentation. There is a lot of good documentation that includes best practices and plenty of examples. Using the documentation, one can easily learn UiPath.

I would rate this solution a nine out of ten.

I have worked on a number of use cases, and one of them that I can discuss was used in a contact center environment. This is a project that we had done for an automotive insurance company, and it had to do with incident management. Our contact center received the first notice of loss (FNOL) from incidents, such as an accident.

When an accident occurs, they raise a ticket to our customer service representative. This can either be done using a chatbot, which is integrated with our ServiceNow platform, or they can call the customer service representative. In the latter case, the customer service representative will pick up the call and get the details. This includes adding their insurance ID and a couple of other fields, and that is integrated into our system.

Our system was acting as an intermediate between their existing platform and ServiceNow. Part of the system included a database, where they were checking to see if the insurance amount the claimant is asking for is above the limit. There were other similar business rules, as well, which the bot was responsible for checking. Based on the result of these checks, the claim was automatically approved, and then a corresponding ticket was raised in ServiceNow.

There was also a manual process, where there was a person who would go to the site where the actual accident took place. They do their analysis, and then they create a review report, and that report would automatically be handled by an attended robot. The robot would take the detail from the agent and based on the review, fetch certain details like the approved amount.

The bot is responsible for sending other information to ServiceNow, including, for example, details about damage to the vehicle. If there are scratches on the front or scratches on the back, then these details are all posted to ServiceNow. At that point, ServiceNow has a workflow that is initiated.

The workflow uses the information taken by the representative and moves from the review stage to agent verification, and then to a mainframe. The system running on the mainframe is responsible for generating checks, according to the amount that is approved, and then mailing them to the claimant at the address they have on file.

In our FNOL process for the insurance company, we use unattended robots quite extensively for both chatbots and IVR. We use the AI capabilities for language understanding and based on the user sentiment, it will trigger the unattended bot. If instead, they want to speak with a representative then it will trigger the IVR process.

In terms of the robots prioritizing and correctly routing a transfer to agents when necessary, it is a work in progress. From a priority perspective, if you talk about chatbots, let's suppose a customer sale is highly urgent, the AI model can use language understanding to determine an urgent message and in turn, create an urgent ticket. It is something that we can do but it is not 100% accurate. I would say it's 80% of the way there, because of the different types of sentiment that people express during interactions. As an example, when a customer says "I need to have this resolved as soon as possible", there are a number of different things that can happen. According to our business rules, when somebody says ASAP, it should be treated as a high priority, but 20% of the time, this does not work. Overall, at this point, the AI models and machine learning models are not very accurate.

The robot-enabled self-service channels have definitely increased the resolution of issues through self-service. Prior to using the robots, 90% of the calls would need to be addressed by a representative. Since implementing the bot strategy, only 10% have to be handled by a human. We have used UiPath Apps for this and also created some web pages, but those are just to help the bots. Definitely, self-service is one use case that has really benefited because of UiPath.

The Studio is where the development takes place and the interface is very user-friendly. You have the ability to drag and drop components, and this is part of why I think that Studio is the best feature in UiPath. The next best feature is Orchestrator.

The Orchestrator is quite good because it is a one-stop shop where you can run robots after creating them using Studio. You can create queues, monitor the bots, and if there are any issues then you can debug them at the Orchestrator level.

UiPath has a low-code feature called Studio X, which is specifically for business users. They can just drag and drop activities like reading emails, retrieving email attachments, reading data from Excel, and posting data from different sources into different platforms. It is a very good platform for business users who don't know much about coding. It is customizable in the sense that business users can have the system follow a set of simple steps, although it won't do complex things.

UiPath Insights is a feature that has everything from a tracking perspective, which tells you how the bots are working at the production level. It provides statistics about the live environment including how many processes are being run, how much time the bots are being used, and the productivity in general. There is more analytics available from data services, tests, and the AI center. All of these features really help when it comes to analyzing the data, not only from a development perspective, like tracking data on how much a robot is at a log level, but also from the end-user level in a production environment. Reporting on productivity in a single day will show how much time the bot was run, for example, 80% in terms of time or 90% utilization, and other such details.

The UiPath App feature is something that we can use to create simple apps, and these can act as integrators. Suppose there is a process that uses 10 different screens, we can create an app that will be integrated with all of them. As a developer, all 10 screens are used in my workflow, and instead of going to each of them, I can create an app that uses all of the fields that are relevant to me on each of the screens. 

The speed at which we were able to create automations for our contact center was very good. One of the reasons that we choose UiPath over other tools, such as Automation Anywhere and Blue Prism, is the ease of development. When it came to setting up the contact center, it was only the connection between different platforms that took time. The bot creation and the workflow creation were quite easy. It took approximately one and a half months to create the whole automation for the contact center, which is quite good.

The AI and machine learning capabilities need to be improved.

The task mining and process capture methods are capabilities that we use, but they sometimes miss part of the task. For example, let's say that for one of my tasks, I need to open my email 400 times a day. This is something that we can automate but for some reason, probably because it is related to email, it is not accurately evaluated. In this regard, the process mining could be improved and lead to better results.

The built-in OCR is only 60% to 70% correct if you're analyzing a PDF that has images in it, so this is an area that can be improved. Different companies use their own OCRs; Google has one, and Microsoft has one. The UiPath one requires that we use a validation step between workflows in order to improve the accuracy.

I had been using UiPath for three years, up until a few months ago when I joined a new organization.

From what I have seen, the biggest factor for availability is the strength of the internet connection. Whether the deployment is on-premises or cloud-based, they both are the same in terms of stability. I have not seen any deviation between deployment types.

Scalability is not an issue. In my previous company, we started with 10 machines and then after one year, we had 85 machines. There were no issues and the implementation was not a headache.

The technical support is very responsive.

Prior to working with UiPath, I was an automation expert with Selenium for web testing. I was not able to fully automate a website because if there was an image that was used as a security check, where the person had to click an image to get through to the next page, I wasn't able to do it.

However, when I switched to UiPath, it was pathbreaking for me. I was able to accomplish what I couldn't do with Selenium and since that time, we have deployed more than 100 production bots.

The installation is pretty straightforward. We usually get issues when we upgrade to a new version but I think that is a different discussion. Strictly from an installation perspective, we have not had many issues. We had no major issues and when we contacted technical support, the team was quite responsive.

The length of time required for deployment is about half an hour per machine. However, if you have 100 machines then you can do them concurrently.

For some of our projects, we used an on-premises deployment, whereas for others, we used Orchestrator and they were cloud-based. Cloud-based deployment gives us the ability to run bots from anywhere, including outside of our network.

Our clients with the contact center did not see a very large ROI in the first year, although that was because of the consultancy costs that we charged to implement the system. From the second year, onwards, they definitely saw a very good ROI.

We had different metrics to calculate RPA implementation ROI. The first is productivity, which increased by more than 60%. If I recall correctly, their investment was between $110,000 and $200,000 after the first year. I don't remember the exact numbers but it was a huge improvement.

It was not just productivity, but also other things like a reduced error rate. The quality of the processes improved quite drastically.

We analyzed and compared the costs of RPA from different vendors and we found that UiPath was the most cost-effective in the long term. An unattended robot costs approximately $8,500 annually. 

We evaluated other RPA tools including Automation Anywhere and Blue Prism. One of the reasons that we chose UiPath is its ease of development.

In terms of ROI, we found that UiPath was the best when you consider the long term.

The length of time it takes to develop and deploy bots for a process depends on its size and complexity. We categorize processes as simple, medium, and complex. Based on how they are classified, we estimate the deployment lifecycle from one month to two months.

My advice for anybody who is planning to implement RPA is to begin by doing research on the vendors. You need to speak with each vendor and start planning, but don't think about clients at that moment. Rather, think about yourself. Consider that you want to implement internal automation, and consider the ROI you would garner during the first year or during the second year.

Once you choose a vendor, as we did when we chose UiPath, you need to make sure that at the very start of your project, it begins with low-hanging fruit. Don't start with all of the complex processes; start with some simple processes. That's why we have divided ours into three sets of processes. Then, don't think that you will achieve a hundred percent automation because that will never be the case. My thinking is that if you achieve more than 70% automation, that is a very good target. Keep your expectations clear.

Another thing to make sure of is that you secure your bot at the workflow level. UiPath provides very good security features that you can use, such as assigning permissions for who can access your workflow. Also in terms of security, be sure that you have all of the required certifications.

Once you have implemented some basic processes and you are getting good results, hyper-automation is something I suggest. Start expanding it to different technologies, such as AI. Also, engage all of your employees as much as possible.

Start with the community version of the software. Although this review is based on the licensed version, the community edition is free and you can create your bots for free. I always say that even one hour saved because of automation will yield a good return annually, and your results will be very quick.

If you keep all of these things in mind then RPA will be fruitful for you.

I would rate this solution a nine out of ten.

We have automated tasks within our organization and are automating our marketing applications. Internally, we have automated in-person and webinar event creation for Microsoft. Whenever there is a request for creating an event that is covered on, for example, either on Jira or the Dynamics 365 application, the task makes an API and pulls data from both sources. It then creates an event on Marketo. It runs totally unattended. We have actually saved the build time that was previously around 45 minutes and we have reduced it to just four minutes.

Previously, we had a build time of around 45 minutes just to process one request. This was kind of a disaster because even in 45 minutes of build time, and this is the average build time, people were making mistakes. When these errors happened, the company had to actually pay money to the client. For example, if a company has an event at 3:00 PM on September 1st, and due to time zone issues, someone manually wrote \ 4:00 PM then people would arrive at 4:00 PM, whereas the event had started at 3:00 PM. Mistakes like that could become a very, very big issue.

Using UiPath, we were able to reduce these kinds of errors. We were also able to reduce the time by more than 90%, just by deploying the bot that could do API calls in order to complete a specific point of data gathering.

For the portion that we automated, the errors that were happening were reduced to 0% and the efficiency was up to 90%.

We've found the usability of Studio very easy. It's simple to understand everything. It's very simple to just start developing within UiPath. 

The Orchestrator is fantastic in terms of usability as all you have to do is just need to deploy your bot there. It gives you several options of how to schedule it, how to monitor it, and it also gives you the dashboard that allows you to see the performance of your bot.

I really like the fact that we have a cloud model, where we can actually go ahead and use their cloud to run our bot. That is a very good kind of feature. 

I really like AI fabric and the documented understanding model, as that actually allows us to do a couple of very complex POCs. They went very well and right now, those prefaces are currently in the pipeline. Hopefully, they will get started with them next month.

The ease of building automation using UiPath is very easy. When it comes to comparing it against other tools, UiPath might be the easiest one. It's totally subjective, of course. That said, there are scenarios where automating certain kinds of scenarios with UiPath is not that easy. Overall, it's pretty good at automating all kinds of stuff.

UiPath enables us to implement end-to-end automation. End-to-end coverage is very important. While working with clients like Microsoft and Google, we have to actually go ahead and make sure that you're actually providing all of these kinds of services. With services such as documentation you also need to be on top of the latest market trends. UiPath actually provides us with not only the ability to handle all of this but to also document all of these kinds of things. That is available, either as a part of some other products or is embedded within the Studio itself as a part of an extension. That is something that I really like as that actually reduces the time that I invest in the creation of the documents. That, and the client actually requires all of these documents before even we can go ahead with the contract, makes having them on hand so important. 

The Automation cloud has helped decrease time to value. Earlier, the deployment of an on-prem Orchestrator took around two to three days for proper configuration and for making sure that there's a disaster recovery mechanism. Automation cloud has everything built already within it, which makes things faster and easier. This reduces the amount of time that is required by us to deliver. Within our area of work, within marketing, time is everything. Once you have taken on the project, the client expects you to deliver it as soon as possible. The requirements that you're getting from the client are very, very time-sensitive. If you're essentially not delivering it on time, that is going to be an issue. Automation Cloud actually helps us to do that without thinking about other things. It actually goes ahead and does a couple of things for us that we don't have to worry about, such as deploying the Orchestrator on the cloud, making sure that everything is properly set up, and making sure that the disaster recovery option is there. These kinds of things actually save us days of time for installation, if not days of debugging time. 

It's very important for our company to scale up automation without having to pay attention to infrastructure. There are a couple of projects that we have where we don't really care about the infrastructure. If it is handled by UiPath, it's absolutely fine. However, for example, in the case of some of our elite clients, what happens is that they actually need to know the details and how data is being propagated amongst different servers. If we're not controlling the environment, if we're not handling the entire knowledge, we won't be able to give them the same thing and the project might go away just because of this fact. Therefore, I'm not saying it's not very important. It's actually very, very important. That's why we use both services that are provided by UiPath - both on-prem and cloud. That said, if we have projects where we don't need to worry about it, it's nice to have the option not to.

UiPath has helped us minimize our on-premise footprint. Their customer service has actually helped us reduce that. UiPath was released in 2015. There are experts on this particular thing in the market, and most of those experts are found via UiPath only. When help is provided by UiPath themselves, that can actually resolve the issue in a matter of hours rather than days.

We use attended automation. We usually use attended automation within the HR department. Basically, we're using it for onboarding, for monthly salary management. It's great for automating some of the basic SAP projects as these are the places where we require human interaction, either to handle the credential part or to provide some inputs. This actually helps bring confidence into the process and also phases out the work of a particular human. Automation has integrated with some human day-to-day jobs so well that now when employees come in, the primary thing that they have to do is just to trigger the bot and start providing input. Work that they used to do for the first half of the day, is completed in the first hour of the day. That's the kind of benefit that is being provided by attended automation.

There is good AI functionality and we use it for some proof of concept projects. That said, we haven't yet used it for more complex or involved automation or processes just yet. We have one project in the pipeline that we have to start working on this month. 

We use UiPath Apps. We use UiPath Apps as a form. Essentially, we have created UiPath Apps in such a way that helps HR people to onboard individuals. For example, whenever someone has to get onboarded, they have to actually provide some details in terms of who they are, their previous company, and some other basic details. Also, HR will need to provide some extra details, in terms of who will be the individual's manager, et cetera. Finally, IT has to assign some kind of role. What we have actually done, is we have created an app where a user or a new individual has to actually provide all the information. Then, HR just needs to select the particular role. Everything is pre-configured. We automatically assign specific roles. In terms of IT, we can now automatically assign specific resources such as laptops, monitors, or headsets to that particular person. Since everything is automated, within a couple of minutes of registration the person receives his new ID password and details. Instead of waiting for an entire day, it happens in just a matter of one or two minutes.

UiPath Apps has increased the number of automation we can create while reducing the time it takes to create them. Earlier, we used to create automation, in terms of forms. Those automations were types of attended automation. A person had to have specific access to that particular computer before doing this kind of work. In this scenario, the issue we had was that every time it was not possible to handle manual steps if we were onboarding ten people at a time. Everyone had to wait for their turn and that was not very efficient. What we have done is we have actually deployed UiPath Apps whose links can actually get loaded onto an individual's mobile. One just needs to open it on their mobile and get started. That's it. Everything executes parallelly. We have also made our system scalable so that multiple VMs can learn the process at the same time.

UiPath speeds up and reduces the cost of digital transformation. Doing so does not require expensive or complex application upgrades or IT support.

We have found that UiPath has reduced human error. We were getting some human errors related to time zone issues and some of the other issues such as daylight savings. There were several other issues related to accidental typing or of people not focusing properly, even after several integrations. That's part of the reason we went ahead and automated processes. Obviously, a bot only follows what you have programmed it, what you have programmed within it. The errors are literally reduced to zero within that specific section.

UiPath has freed up employee time. We have actually retrained the freed-up employees into UiPath to act as support engineers. As a rough guess, I would say that we have saved around 120 hours a week just by deploying UiPath.

The additional time enabled employees to focus on more essential work. For people who were actually acting as build personnel, we have re-deployed them as a person who actually interacts directly with clients or who does QA work. This is a higher position that comes with a higher salary as well. There have been promotions simply due to implementing UiPath.

Employees are pretty happy. Initially, everyone was scared that they might lose their jobs. However, but adopting UiPath methods and retraining people, some are even getting promoted and we find that they are actually encouraging automation processes so that new work can come in and the remaining people could also get on better.

The product has reduced the cost of our automation operations. In terms of marketing operations, for example, it has reduced the cost. Along with the help of similar investments, we need fewer people and more bots currently. That's definitely a big thing for us. We had a cost reduction of approximately 20% in our operations. This is just a ballpark. That said, overall, UiPath has saved our organization a lot of costs. I cannot speak to exact savings, as that requires business knowledge, which I do not have complete access to. 

The AI Center area could definitely improve. The StudioX model could also improve just a little bit so that the introduction of variables is better and would make it possible to pass on a similar kind of data in between multiple activities. This is a very simple concept, however, this kind of feature is not available within UiPath. 

From the business perspective, a little bit more insight on the dashboard that is currently available in Orchestrator would be ideal. I agree with UiPath having a dedicated tool for insights, however, right now, it's a paid tool. 

If I can get a little bit more data and a little bit more customization on Orchestrator, that would be really great.

I've been using UiPath for three years and eight months. I've used it for the same amount of time the company has used it.

The product is quite stable now. There are certainly some places where UiPath has to work, specifically in terms of actual stability, where there are still some unknown errors that are coming in. 

In terms of Orchestrator, I have noticed there are some places where there are glitches. Things are not very clear at first as everything is changing quite quickly, I'll say that. Even in the enterprise version, everyone wants to be on the very latest version. However, there is a drastic change between the versions themselves.

For example, 2019, 2020, and 2021 versions, all three are drastically different amongst themselves. This kind of change is definitely good for the provider in that they are doing something better. However, as a consumer, I don't really want to go ahead and go through an entire learning curve all over again along with handling my current job of handling all the work, just so that I can cope up with what changes the product team has made. It should not be necessary to go through this level of adjustment for each and every release. At this point, I have been through three to four migrations and in each migration, I have gone through some kind of a learning curve.

Automation Cloud actually helps us to rapidly scale up. We don't have to invest time now in configuring Orchestrator, or the cloud version of UiPath. All we have to do is we just need to basically request for a particular package and, maybe, either with the help of a package or with the help of the UiPath team, it is pre-configured for us. That way, we just need to utilize it. Therefore, scaling is simple.

The scalability is great. It has actually allowed us to schedule the bots or maintain the bots in multiple VMs without having any worries about how to utilize licenses, or how to actually go ahead and deploy the bots manually or install the bots manually on certain VMs. Everything is automated within the UiPath environment.

If we talk about attended users, right now, we have more than 10 people using attended bots. Their roles are essentially from the recruitment team, from HR. Some of the marketing staff are also using it in analyst positions. 

We definitely plan to increase usage and we're using UiPath pretty extensively. We have a couple of projects in the pipeline and currently, we're also working on some of the more complex projects within the team.

All the projects are having a specific date of delivery. Everything is running parallel as we also follow an Agile method. In this Agile method, if something is stuck, it will eventually impact the date of delivery. And we really don't want that. UiPath actually helps us a lot by providing 24-hour support and it helps us in setting a lot of the items we need to use. They do it quite easily and quickly.

On the scale of one to ten, it's definitely a ten. Whenever I have a doubt, they are always there. They even offer to get on a call with them and actually go ahead and resolve the issue themselves, if they know how to do it. 

Many times, there have been scenarios where the issue was unique to us. They actually presented us with some debugging steps that we can do on our end. Most of the time, those debugging steps actually helped us to resolve the issue. When none of these options work, they were very keen to figure out how they could actually improve the experience and what could be implemented by the developers within those specific parts of the product in order to resolve the issue. We have given them feedback in the past and in a couple of future versions, we were able to see those ideas implemented.

We were using AutoHotkey before this product, as well as Selenium. However, after implementing UiPath, we have not used anything along with it.

The initial setup was straightforward. The installation of the Studio was quite straightforward. We just had to go through all the legal terms and everything. Once we went through those, we just had to install it. The same thing is true for Orchestrator as the on-prem installation of Orchestrator is pretty straightforward. You just have to get the setup, link it with the skilled server, and then install it. 

Apart from that, the configuration within Orchestrator was very simple as there is only one file that allows us to log on to everything. It made it pretty obvious.

The deployment took somewhere around two days for the entire setup. 

In terms of the implementation strategy, firstly, we decided to set up all the databases and all the dashboard-related services such as Power BI. We decided to do this first due to the fact that the dashboards and databases are the base of any application. 

We decided to implement it first in Azure. On the same day, we decided to get the cloud version of the Orchestrator as well. It was quite easy in terms of Azure. There's a three-way plugin that is available there. We just had to install that on the specific VM and we were done. Finally, on the second day, we went ahead and installed all of the Studio. Once Orchestrator is up, we could install Studios and link them to Orchestrator in order to get the license. That was our strategy and our approach.

We essentially have one dedicated resource for maintaining all the deployments and to watch if anything goes wrong. We have three dedicated resources for maintaining all the bots that are currently running as well. We don't need a big team to maintain everything. 

In one of our projects, we actually used Azure Cloud for the deployment of Orchestrator and the deployment of packages. The experience is quite good. Azure provides the DevOps side of our service that allows us to set up the pipeline and automatically deploy any kind of project to the Orchestrator as soon as it is committed.

While the company has likely been looking at ROI, I don't directly deal with those details.

A couple of our clients cannot actually go ahead with the initial investment of Orchestrator as it costs quite a lot. The thing is that we don't need that much of a license in order to automate our processes. Having a free version of a cloud or having a cheaper version of Orchestrator has actually helped a lot.

Automation Cloud helps decrease UiPath's total cost of ownership. However, overall, if we talk about scalability, once the number of licenses that I need increases, ultimately, Automation Cloud might be a bit expensive. It depends upon the version you're using. Yet, since the license cost is increasing, what happens is if you go ahead and buy more than five licenses, then essentially you would have been in better shape if you would've actually bought the paid version of Automation Cloud and installed it on-prem. That would've been a cheaper option. It's subjective. Our scenario is just that we need two unattended licenses to do the job.

Some of the clients do consider the initial investment of UiPath to be expensive. It's seen as expensive specifically from the cost of getting a licensing for an on-premises setup. For some projects, UiPath can be overkill. However, it is the best software a company can invest in for automation purposes. 

I cannot speak to the exact cost, as I don't handle licensing directly.

It's paid per year. We get licenses not directly from UiPath. Rather, we get them from a vendor.

There are additional costs as well. For example, the cost of an SQL server is one. We are definitely using the Azure product suite as well. We had to actually invest quite a lot in SQL Server in terms of database management, just to make sure that everything gets logged properly and that the Orchestrator is functioning properly. 

We switched to UiPath after we compared multiple tools. We looked at certain parameters such as the ability to automate marketing tools, the ability to automate quickly, and how user-friendly it was. Out of all these three parameters, UiPath stood on top.

We looked at Automation Anywhere, Blue Prism, and PEGA.

I specifically have been using the community version of UiPath. The company has been using the enterprise version.

We do use the Automation Cloud offering.

We do not use the SaaS version of the solution. 

I'd advise users to give it a try. I started my career in UiPath and since then I've been loving it. I became a UiPath MVP as I really enjoy working with the product so much.

That automation does not need to be very complex, so you don't need very complex tools to automate any software. Tools like UiPath can do most of your job.

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

We deal in banking and finance. The use case is based on the transaction dates. For example, how customers are using credit cards, net banking, transactions, and what components they are buying. We gather this information in order to provide a CIBIL score. 

We do have multiple applications, which are provided to the banks so that they can work without taking much time. We have a set of test cases that need to be automated and we'll run it up. 

As of now, we test and we usually have a CSED pipeline as well. We are not only restricted to any one of the features in UFR. We are using Citrix, among others. 

The solution makes it easy to build automation. Earlier, we used to collect the data and create a hard copy. Now, these are all processes that are automated. There are fewer human interventions that are required to collect the data from the email or collect the data from the hard copy. It is auto-generated through auto-generated mail. It will collect all the details and save them to a repository. Based on that, our support team is providing the solution to the customer, and it's much easier.

UiPath enables us to implement end-to-end automation. These processes are very complete. Where there's not a single person is in practicum, however, it's only deployed in our productions. 

They have included the chatbot. Therefore, if the customer is having any issues related to any of the products, they will raise their queries. We will log these queries through a bot system, and this will get notified to the escalation team. They will locate into it through banking domains or through the solution of it and providing the solution on emails. It's very helpful.

End-to-end coverage is one of the best features. If their service display is not good enough, or if they are facing any issues, we can sort things out faster, which makes customers very happy. They are getting the solution on time, and they are running 24/7. Human workers are not able to provide each and every solution on an immediate basis, however, by using the solutions, we have got a solution for the end-user that responds immediately so that they are satisfied and their needs will be fulfilled much faster.

As of now, we are using attended automation, however, we also have created some of the use cases, which are going to be linked through unattended automation. Attended automation helped to scale RPI benefits in our organization, by automating department or all specific processes that require human-robot collaboration.

For example, in one project, which we used as a test, typically the turnaround would have been 15 days, however, with UiPath, we were able to churn out this product in 30 minutes.  It's amazing how much we are saving in terms of time. We've been able to shrink timelines.

We do use UiPath's AI functionality in your automation program. The complexities are always a part of the banking industry as data is from many places and over a large amount of time. However, when we talk about the calculations, it's when human beings are involved where it really takes a while to get a task completed. With automation, we can shrink that down to 15 or 20 minutes and know in that short amount of time a person's complete financial background and if they are credible or not. This customer doesn't have to wait so long to get the results they need. 

UiPath's AI functionality has enabled us to automate more processes overall. Now, for example, it's feasible to process data, and, if we have to, get the data explained very simply to calculate a score and find out if a person is genuine or not. We can look at credit histories, transactions, et cetera, and based on that, be able to process requests in order to enable users to get loans in seconds instead of days or weeks. 

UiPath both speeds up and reduces the cost of our digital transformation; it increases processing speed and saves costs that would otherwise be taken up in longer-term tedious tasks.  

I've used the UiPath apps feature, however, I cannot say it's fully required for our processes. That said, it was very helpful when we did use it. 

UiPath has helped us reduce human error. We can achieve our goals, as mentioned, in 30 minutes, without having to manually go from one stage to another, which may cause errors. It frees up our employee's time as well, to help improve their focus. That, and, within a week's time, we can save 30 hours on a single resource. It allows those employees to really focus on higher-value work. Employees are happier as they now have the time and space to build their skills.

Overall, UiPath has reduced the cost of our automation operations. This reduction is around 30% savings. 

The product is well-integrated with different tools that can help with logging, et cetera.

The task capture is great in that we have all of this data we are receiving that's automated and we don't need to invest much time in creating documents.

For a few of the projects, we have saved money, however, on a few of these projects we've noticed less revenue. The orchestration cost is a bit higher when we are working on smaller projects.

From the improvement perspective, I am from the testing background, and UiPath has recently released some announcements related to scrums. I would be happy to see their products be involved with scrum teams.

Just like they have data for the JIRA automation, maybe if they can include some of these options in the Rally solution. It's a tool that is used locally for various projects and having automation activity included there would be useful to us. 

From a migration perspective, if we can get something better than the manual process that would be great. It would be nicer if it was smoother for those doing implementations. 

I've been using the solution for five years. 

I can say it's a very good tool from the RP perspective. It is helping us to get our work faster, saving time as well as offering multiple functionalities. We haven't had any issues with it. 

Everything is good - except the capture part. They could improve on that as we are getting less accuracy as compared to the other functionality. Other than that, the rest of the components are fine.

The scalability is very good. 

On my team, somewhere around 14 people are working on the UiPath product. There are several other teams also on it. Likely, there are around 50 plus people in total on the solution.

We are regularly using this product. I cannot say I'm not using a single day. 365 days a year this solution runs, as these processes are basically used on the weekends as well. Based on the schedule, it is pretty much always running in the UAT or QA environment. 

How much we use it depends on the products. If we get more products, we will increase usage. 

The customer support is very nice. Most of the time, we are getting a resolution from there.

I would rate them at more than eight out of ten. Over the last three years, I've been interacting with the web team on customer support. I tend to get an immediate response from their team for the assignment of my ticket, and they schedule a call. However, in some of the operations, it's not possible to directly interact on the WebEx.

It's important for us to have them extend their communications or extend their environment. Not every organization can get support as they offer it. Using Microsoft Teams or Zoom or a more popular platform may be helpful.

We did not use another solution that is similar. We previously used an automation tool that was purely used for the testing perspective. We decided to move to UiPath as it was an easy-to-use solution. However, I was not a part of the RPA tool decision-making process. 

Earlier, it was a bit complex as we had to configure our robot with the orchestrator or the studio that was providing details. Now, when we are installing, everything is taken synchronously. We don't need to enter the required areas. It is automatically catching that from that environment.

The time it takes to deploy depends on the system resources or the system specifications. Usually, it will take around 23 to 40 minutes for the installation, however, now that they have improved their installation time as well, it may only take 20 to 30 minutes.

For us, the deployment plan is basically to focus on the data perspective. We don't want to lose any of the aspects of the data, which is already running, so we do take a backup first. The orchestrator has a different environment structure, which has already been configured like a development rather than a UAT.

These are the phases that we are using on a regular basis. Once it is certified for the first stage, only then does it move to the next phase.

We require 22 people to maintain the product. They are largely comprised of the DevOps team. 

While the solution is a bit expensive, we do see ROI. When we compare the ROI with the expenses differently, ROI is on the higher side. Of course, for the organizations who have a small product base, who may have less automation required, will find that expenses are higher. The more you automate, the more you save.

However, in relation to sharing actual data points, that's a bit tricky.

As compared to the licensing costs or the pricing of other tools like Automation Anywhere or Blue Prism, it's a bit cheaper, however, when we talk about the open-source tools such as Robocorp or Robot Framework, the cost is on the higher side. Microsoft Power Automate is also cheaper.

There are no other costs beyond the licensing. 

We are just customers and end-users. I'm an RPA lead.

We are using an operating system related to Microsoft and several other features related to Microsoft. If they offered this type of product on a regular basis, that was less costly and had the same compatibility, security, and features, we'd likely adopt it. 

I'd advise those considering the solution to check the processes and compare them to their potential ROI. A company needs to consider if the tools will help them based on their environment and goals. It's important to first analyze the internal capabilities before jumping in. If they don't think they'll be getting the ROI they desire, they should look at another tool. 

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

I have been using it for a couple of different things, mainly insurance-related. As of now, we are using it mainly in insurance platforms, insurance portals, and doing some admin support in terms of the backend insurance tasks.

I've used it before in payroll where it was processing the payroll, generating the payslips, creating the payments for our outsourced invoices, processing invoices, making payments, sending reports to banks, and more.

In terms of improving the functions, we had to have a lot of time-critical tasks, which we have seen improvement on. In insurance, it is mainly around the claim processing and then paying the invoice to the third parties or doing the payments to the end customer. Most of the time it is missed, and then there are SLA penalties involved. This solution offers good savings for us in all those areas. On top of that, there are fewer errors now. Previously, there were many manual errors due to the time-critical aspect of the tasks. People were trying to put in their best efforts while working quickly against time, which caused them to work too fast and make mistakes. We get savings on two fronts now. One is mistakes. There are no mistakes anymore. The second thing is we are doing tasks faster and can run 24/7.

The orchestrator is one of the good features they have.

Internally, internal queue management is another feature that is really helpful when it comes to managing the work and checking the workload.

The latest thing that they added is reports that show the handling times and all those things.

The ease of use of building automation using UiPath is good and I would rate it and an eight out of ten with the version I am using. If we move to the latest version, there may be a couple of new features, such as modern variable management, that would bump it to nine out of ten. 

UiPath enables us to implement end-to-end automation, starting with process analysis, then robot building, and finally monitoring automation. With the new versions, it does, at least. We are not using those features in my current organization, as we have some other tools in place. 

End-to-end coverage is important to us. We use the older version. We started using it three years ago, which is why we build a lot of items ourselves. If the features were released two years ago, we'd likely use UiPath for everything.  

It is important that we can scale automation without having to pay attention to the infrastructure of the automation. We're very interested in the cloud. It offers many benefits. Even though we are on-prem now, in terms of managing the infrastructure, it will likely be really helpful to move to the cloud, so that we don't have to bother about all this infrastructure stuff in the future.

It reduced the cost of digital transformation and it is allowing us to actually move to digital items, as, most of the time, when we were trying to present things and things were not digital, it helped us to advance very much into a digital space easily.

It does not require any expensive or complex application upgrades or IT support. For some applications, it requires some modifications. Even if it's 10% or 20% digitized, we are trying to use UiPath to do the stuff for us instead of doing the application, upgrading, all those things. In most cases, it's not very costly for us.

UiPath has reduced human error. It does all the time. In claims, there used to be a lot of human error. Especially in payments, sometimes it would pay more or less or the wrong person, and now, it's all automated and errors have stopped.

The solution has freed up employee time. It depends on the process, however, if I had to take an average, it is probably freeing up one full-time person, which is eight hours. On a monthly basis, around 150 hours are saved for a medium process.

This additional time has enabled employees to focus on more important work. Employees are happier, and, depending on the process and what they were doing, what kind of involvement it requires, the solution is motivating employees. 

The product is reducing the cost for other operations, as it's an automation tool. While we are paying for automation, it is reducing the overall operational cost. Not specifically automation operational costs, but other operational costs. We are seeing an average savings of around 30%.

UiPath hasn't really helped us minimize our on-prem footprint. We are still using the on-premises deployment and everything is on-premises for us. We have, however, used some machines on the cloud. Still, the on-premises footprint in terms of UiPath is not lower.

There are a couple of minor items that could use improvement. Overall the tool roadmap looks fine. They have improved a lot from 2019 to 2021. In two years, there have been lots of additions. It seems like there's no particular improvement which they need to make. They have already improved a lot in the 2021 version, which is adding a modern framework and then modern folder structures. 

They can probably focus more on attended stuff or creating a UI around that. We are not using the attended bot a lot, however, I have seen some use cases in other organizations, as I'm working in consulting. I've seen in some other areas where an organization wants to use attended automation, however, the feature is not very well designed which makes it difficult to use.

I have been in automation for almost four years. I'm using all of these different tools, not only UiPath, and moving around within tools. For example, I'll use UiPath for six months, and then do three months on another tool, and then eight months again on UiPath.

However, overall, in terms of automation, I've been familiar with various solutions for three to four years.

It is very stable. It can perform very well for small to medium complex processes. It takes a little bit of time to adjust for very complex processes, however. It takes some time to build and to develop and deploy for very complex processes. That said, it is very stable overall, with the caveat that, for very complex processes, it's difficult to build or manage.

Scalability-wise, it is good in terms of connecting the bots and the Orchestrator can support thousands. 

In our case, we have around 137 to 140 registered users on the Orchestrator. Most of them are developers. I would say it's around 20 odd VAs or other staff, however, most of them are developers. Around 100+ developers, with the remaining users being process analysts.

We are always trying to find new work in the pipeline, and, as of now, it is not used across the entire organization. It is currently used by 50% of the teams and the plan is to take it to 100%. 

I would rate technical support at an eight out of ten as of now. They're not always right on the first try, however, most of the time we get what we need on the first or second try.

I'm constantly jumping back and forth between various automation tools. 

I previously used Automation Anywhere. I'm working in consulting, so I switch between tools, and for one of the clients, it could be Automation Anywhere, for another it could be UiPath.

Each tool has its own pros and cons. An ideal tool could be probably a mixture of all of the tools on the market as some have some great features. UiPath is great for its ease of use. Anyone can quickly jump in and start learning it. Some of the tools take a little bit more time to understand and probably need more time to deploy or build code. Some others have better debugging. I would say UiPath debugging can be better. This is one of the things which can be improved. It is improved in the latest version, however, if it can be compared with others, such as Pega robotics, it can be improved. That said, Pega robotics is not an automation or RPA tool. It's basically RD. It's a front-end tool.

I have set UiPath up from scratch for one of the companies I worked with in Sydney, Australia. It was in 2017 or 2018 when I was comparing the tools, and deciding which one is better based on the roadmaps. At that point, I set it up from scratch.

The time when I did a setup, it was very complex. 

When I started doing it in 2017 or 2018, there were a couple of issues with installing the SQL server and configuring everything for the Orchestrator machine, et cetera and it was very complex.

Now, they have simplified it. It's a one-time installation, and the cloud makes things really easy. With the new versions, it is better. For me, the support was not very good at that time.

The deployment took us a couple of days. It was complex. The documentation was not really very great, and the support was also not very good. It took us a couple of days, maybe five to ten days, to implement it end-to-end and then set up multiple instances.

In terms of the strategy, we have followed the guidelines, whatever the document said, and then took help from UiPath support. Other than that, it was a standard installation.

For deployment and maintenance, it depends on process counts. Usually, when processes are stable and running for a long time, one person can support four to five processes in general. In our case, we have a mix and match model for supporting production. Overall, I would say that there is a different team for each different support platform. A platform team is just supporting the infrastructure, and overall there are around 20 people, which offer support.

I did not use an integrator. I work with a consulting company, and we help with the installation. However, at the time, UiPath didn't have a very good presence in Australia, which made it difficult.

I'm not very involved in pricing or licensing.

We are mostly using developer licenses and they have unattended, attended pro and developer licensing. We also have development and production licensing as well as licensing for the orchestrator. Different licenses have different costs.

We pay our licensing fees on a yearly basis. 

I'm not using the latest version. We're a little behind. We need to update it.

We do use a bit of attended automation, however, it isn't very much. It is helpful, however, we are getting better benefits with the backend automation. For us, the level of importance in terms of having attended automation is five out of ten.

We have done a couple of POCs with AI. We don't have anything which is in production. It's all POCs and a couple of minor display things. We aren't using AI very much at all. Therefore, we don't have proper use cases. We haven't solved other processes. The first priority is to solve everything practical instead of moving to experimental tasks.

At this time, we do not use the UiPath apps feature. I haven't seen it and I'm not aware of it.

The support is really good now compared to what it was a couple of years back. Support teams are really helpful when it comes to upgrading or installing the new versions, and it is very straightforward compared to what it was. I would say planning is important however, UiPath support is always there when they are required to be.

The biggest lesson we have learned is it's important to have a roadmap. We've connected a lot of tools and built a lot of things. We invested a lot. However, it's important to be flexible enough to adjust so that you can change if you need to, as it's hard to predict the future.

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

Currently, I'm dedicated to working within a finance organization. It develops processes in the scope of five months. I do not use the solution in a contact center environment. I work on projects for shared services.

It's FTE-saving. Since the beginning of this year, I have covered more than four FTEs. That means that for half a year, I saved three FTEs. That's a huge benefit.

The easy development process is very useful for us. I know how to use it, and I'm able to prepare and add to a solution in one or one and half weeks. It depends, of course, on the process, however, largely, if it's a simple process, it could be developed from the beginning very quickly.

It's very important that I can create end-to-end automation using UiPath. Thanks to that, the business is free to do more advanced processes and is not overloaded by less important, repetitive tasks.

I've noticed that UiPath has reduced human error. The first benefit is FTE saving, however, the second is quality of work. Human work, if it's repetitive, it's very often related to human errors. That said, if something is programmed really well and automated it works without the need for human intervention.

I had a problem with one thing and that was exporting activities packages between the test server and the production server. I'm not sure that it's my own issue, or a general problem from the global perspective of UiPath, however, I have a lot of problems with packages, using the test server and production server.

I've used the solution for quite a long time. I started using UiPath at the beginning of 2017. It has been more than four years.

The stability is good. Everything works well and I don't have any production bugs. I only have positive feedback, It works and there are no unexpected errors.

The scalability  depends on the developer. If we have an advanced developer, it is really easy to scale. If someone's preparing, for example, components, it is quite easy. From UiPath's perspective, it is easy to scale, however, that said, everything depends on the person who uses it and how familiar they are with the product.

I had a chance to contact UiPath when UiPath licenses needed updating. I had close contact. I wrote a ticket and I had contact with them in less than an hour. I was quite pleased with their response time. 

I made the right decision to go with a solution that can scale automation without having to pay attention to the infrastructure and to develop my skills in terms of RPA.

I had to do tests with Blue Prism and UiPath. Currently, I use UiPath, as I find it's much easier to use than other RPA tools. For example, I really like Orchestrator, from a user perspective. The control of both is really easy as it's centralized in NonProduction Orchestrator, and it's really easy to operate it. There's general ease of development. In Blue Prism, for example, if you want to develop something, first you need to prepare the object layer, and after that, you can go to the business layer and connect it in one solution. In UiPath, we create just a component and connect components together which is more logical.

I was not exactly involved in the initial setup as when I joined the company, UiPath had already been set up. Therefore, everything was prepared to start development. That said, for a few months, I worked in UI as a consultant for external clients. During that time I had the chance to install UiPath for external clients. In that sense, I've been involved in the installation of UiPath previously.

The initial setup's level of difficulty depends on a client's needs. At first, we need to think about the strategy of the client. In general, UiPath provides different types of architecture and it's generally straightforward.

The setup could take weeks if you need, for example, to order servers. However, if servers are already on-site, we can begin the installation. As I recall, I set up Orchestrator in a few hours.

We have calculations for that and we are on the right path. There is an ROI when using UiPath, however, I thought it would be higher. That said, we can calculate costs related to the UiPath environment and compare it to the automated processes created and we can see we are on a good path. It's hard, however, to provide exact numbers at this time. 

I'm not sure if UiPath has sped up or reduced the cost of digital transformation. It's a tough question, as the license for the solution is too expensive right now. In Western Europe, it may be okay to pay such money for a license, however, where I work now, in Poland, the license cost is too high for the local market.

We have a connection to ServiceNow. In ServiceNow, there is an approval process to publish UiPath processes on the Production Orchestrator, and that's easy. I'm able to set schedules or run a process model from our Production Orchestrator.

We have different servers for development, including a different server for Orchestrator and a different server for production. However, everything is in my company environment.

At this point, I only use unattended automation. Currently, there are no projects for attended automation as it's more for the business side. I am just a developer from the IT side. I am not involved in any business department.

I'd advise those considering the solution to find a really good developer and maybe a solution architect. Some time ago, UiPath had marketing such as, "everyone could be a developer," and so on. That said, it does not work like that. UiPath developers should have a large IT background. During my career, I've seen a lot of projects fail due to developers' lack of skills.

My biggest takeaway from the solution is that automation is a process that doesn't have a start and end point. It's an ongoing process.

Overall, I'd rate the product at an eight out of ten. If the licensing price matched the local market's capabilities, I'd give it higher marks. I would like to start deploying the UiPath solution in Polish companies, and there is huge scope to do it, however, for now, it's too expensive.

We primarily use UiPath for outsourcing. Customers call us when they need extra people to fill positions, on a temporary or permanent basis, similar to a temp agency.

The biggest use case that is running right now is that we get job openings or requests from a lot of different third-party brokerages, customers, clients, vendors, et cetera. They all arrive through different platforms. We get an email saying there's a request, please check it out and let us know if you have someone to fulfill the position, and the request is implemented through UiPath. It's automated. We've created all of the mailbox folders based on the sender and the subject, so we know which customer or which broker it is. Then, we make the email follow a link to the information for the job opening or the inquiry and we put it into our Salesforce system.

There are a couple of smaller use cases as well, where we have task operations that have to be done weekly or daily. Mostly it's reading emails or reading schedules and making changes in files.

The automation of job inquiries has a lot of sufficiency on how we operate as we used to have multiple people need to be available throughout the day to manually check if an email with an inquiry came in, and that would require them to drop work and open the email, check it out and maybe take action immediately. Now that the robot is running and taking care of the need for filtering through all the results for them, employees can stay focused on the other tasks that they have. They don't have to keep an eye on a second monitor every time and drop everything they're doing to read an email only to decide what is relevant or not.

I understand work has to be tested. It hasn't impacted the entire company yet as I've been here a little short of a year now and we haven't made that big of an impact just yet. 

The most valuable aspect of UiPath is the community in terms of the way they open up their platform to the community and make it freely available for people to try and to practice. The amount of feedback from that community makes it very easy for us to get into UiPath and if you're trying something that you've never done before, you at least have some insights. There's almost always someone who has done it before or who has asked the question. I would say the community is one of the biggest extra treats for UiPath. 

From a technical perspective, I like the learning curve in the Studio and in the orchestrator - or the Cloud Platform as they call it now - due to the fact that it's easy to get into. It's easy to grasp the basics and to get started. You can scale up as fast and as far as you'd like or need to for your customer. It can do everything. You don't have to learn everything in advance to be able to work with it. It makes it really approachable.

Building automation can be really easy. The biggest challenge is to find the easy use cases as the use cases in the company can get quite complicated quite fast. That said, using the recorder in the Studio and then converting that to work in a mobile office is quite easy. I started in 2016 or 2017, and between then and now there's been a lot of changes. It's always been easy for developer-minded people to get started. However, now with the introduction of StudioX, it is even more focused on the different users and they have a different entry point for them. What I like about UiPath is that the training is really comprehensive. You can almost just record what you do by hand and then StudioX will translate that into a robot and then you can fine-tune it to make it more robust. Smaller costs can be easier steps. Just press record, do what you do, and then you're able to work with teams. 

Scaling automation without having to pay attention to infrastructure does make my job a lot easier for now. What I do see in companies is when they've taken the first steps and they start to scale up, a lot of them have policies or ways of working in place where they want to stick to the ways that they know. A lot of time I see customers will, in the end, do it by themselves anyway, so they use all of the upscaling functions that are available as they want to do it the way that they always did. 

UiPath enables us to implement end-to-end automation starting with process analysis, then robot building, and finally monitoring of automation. However, while it does facilitate end-to-end automation, it does take a lot of the development and running and monitoring of the robots on itself. That is something that is facilitated really well by UiPath. The process discovery and the analysis is rather newish within UiPath. Maybe it's not as well integrated into the community platform.

At this time, UiPath has helped to minimize our on-premises footprint as it is a cloud-based solution. It's important that the on-premise footprint has been minimized as it makes it easier for us being a small company. We have 160 people working for us in the Netherlands and then a couple in the Caribbean. Bringing new technology in like robotic process automation and then asking from the IT department to get me free service and results of my configuring and have all the discussions about what goes where, how the security works, how to find the work, who gets access, et cetera is easy. This is due to the fact that UiPath is offered on a cloud basis and I don't have to do all that on-site work, which allows me to get to building and talking about RPA quicker. 

The fact that the vendor handles infrastructure, maintenance, and updates saves time for our IT department. It helps us to implement a lot faster. The client companies can have a reliable cloud solution to help them do at least the first steps to get them acquainted with the product. It makes it a lot easier. It helps me a lot, and it helps our customers in starting out as well.

UiPath has decreased the time to value in that since it's cloud-based, I can deliver faster than I would be able to do on-prem. If we have an idea, or if we want to scale up, we can do so faster in the cloud solution than I could on-prem.

The product lowers the overall total cost of ownership by taking care of things such as infrastructure, maintenance, and updates, however, I'm not sure what would happen if we scale up.

The automation Cloud Platform has definitely helped reduce the time it takes to create automation. It brings a lot of things together. It's easy to use for clients and customers. It makes it easy to bring different disciplines together, so I don't need to think about how to reuse my code, or how to explain to the customer, and I don't need to share the processes to be able to release, run, and monitor and to get reports on the results. 

UiPath has reduced human error. There are fewer errors and the processes are less error-prone and once the technology has proven itself within the company, within the customers, people start to trust the robots to do what they do. Employees don't need to check the work that had been done as they know that if the robot reported that it was done correctly, then it was done correctly. In that way, it has saved a lot of time by not having to check anything. 

It has also freed up employee time. It's a three-person team and it saved them a couple of hours a week doing the work that they used to do. It saved them a lot more focus as they didn't have to monitor the email inbox all the time. They were able to apply more focus to the other things that they were doing. That said, it's hard to quantify the gains. However, overall, it has made them happy. That's one guarantee. They absolutely love that they gave the mundane work away to the robot because it was bothering them to be monitoring an email inbox all the time. It's given them the time to focus on cases that match the right people to the right inquiries or openings. I don't have any metrics on it, however, anecdotally, they tell me that it helped them to do the rest of their work better as they could apply more focus to more important tasks and placements are better attended to. There's much more focus and attention and better matches being made.

The solution has saved costs for our organization.

I'm trying not to sound negative about it as I like them a lot, however, the process mining and the process mining features stem further away from the development of the robots and the monitoring. The development, run, and monitoring are really closely knit, or really close together, and then process discovery is starting to get there. It's on its way, however, I don't see that it's as closely connected as the other three parts.

The automation operations have not brought down any company costs. Automation operations have gotten more expensive due to the fact that we added UiPath to them. That said, you do get gains at a different branch of the company. We didn't replace anything with UiPath. We weren't able to skip a step or program or tool, which makes it an added cost.

More documentation would be helpful, as they change rather quickly. There are two yearly stable releases and then a couple of community releases and data releases in between. Sometimes not all documentation is changed as quickly as the features are. Sometimes you can find something in the documentation that is not the answer, or not available in the product anymore. That's simply a side effect of how fast they develop the product. 

Sometimes it's not entirely clear what features are, for example, available in their community edition, or in the on-prem, or in the cloud. The difference between the on-prem and the cloud has become clearer in the past few weeks, however.

I've been using the solution for three years now. 

I started out at my previous company with systems integration. We started out with discovering robotic operations, discovering the tools, and suppliers. We chose UiPath and one of the competitors, as we found them to have the best suit with our customers. That was the end of 2016. That's when I started doing training in UiPath and started doing some custom integrations.

Now, I switched to a new job at a different company where they want to start an RPA practice as well and they chose UiPath solely for RPA.

From the operations standpoint, the stability of the cloud it's very good. I haven't had any issues with stability. The Studio will crash at random times. I've identified two scenarios where I'm able to make the Studio crash every time by just doing the same actions.

However, other than that, the automation was really stable, and I haven't had any issues or incidents. In Studio, I'd say it is good enough, however, there is some room for growth there.

Scaling automation without having to pay attention to infrastructure is a bit pro for UiPath as I'm starting an RPA practice. We don't have a lot of infrastructure engineers to build the project yet. Therefore, a lot of the time, with new customers as well, it will be a bit of a one-man show. Yet, what we can do is communicate to the platform and then make sure the infrastructure is there and then implement the platform and build a business analysis basically in an un-built realm. I have to do a lot of things by myself, so the fact that UiPath brings in the Cloud Platform and the Studio and it's all integrated and you can scale up without having to have too much. You need to know something about infrastructure to understand what it does for you, however, you don't have to do it all by hand. I don't need like three or four DP-trained individuals to be able to scale up or scale out. It's helped me get further faster.

Once you build the infrastructure and you know what you're doing and you know where you want to go with your platform and scaling, it's rather easy.

The only people really using it at this time are me and six trainees. There are a couple of ops people as well that are able to log in. We might have a total of ten people on the solution.

It's not being used too extensively now, however, that's for a large part due to the fact that most of my colleagues are working with our customers, so there are not too many internal processes or tasks. However, we do have plans to increase its priority as the tasks that we do have are at some points largely repetitive. We do a lot of operations and maintenance for our customers as well in different fields, so we are mainly looking at that for further automation opportunities.

Technical support has been pretty good. 

I get a quick response and it's usually constructive. I manage to fix my own problems a lot of the time using the community forums and information from there. I haven't had too much interaction with UiPath tech support.

We did not previously use a different solution. 

I personally implemented the solution at my company. 

We currently have it running, so some internal processes. And, we're looking to expand that into the customer landscape.

The setup is simple. They deliver it in a cloud environment, I didn't need to do any installs or make any arrangements.

You need to make an account and get started and watch a couple of training videos that will help you through it. The adding of the robots is very well documented in the forum, in the community, and in the training sessions. They have made it really easy to get started and to get the information you need to take the first step.

The deployment question is a tough one as I started out at this company while already having a communicators subscription on my own account. Therefore, I started out using that one and then gradually shifted toward using more automated resources. I don't have a clear overview of how much time it took to deploy. It might have been a couple of weeks overall, however, I was doing different things at the same time, and I never took a metric of how much time it took. I'd say starting out if the prerequisites are in place at the company, it could be a matter of days.

Tasks such as setting up an account, getting some service, et cetera, if you know what you're doing and you know what to ask a few questions before starting, it's a couple of minutes or hours. That said, in reality, there are always things you forget or things that they didn't do, so it always takes a little extra time.  

My implementation strategy was basically to figure it out as I went, which is not the best strategy, however, it was the best we could do due to the fact that the company didn't really know what they wanted to do with RPA. I was figuring out my own place in the company and then their wishes with robotics with RPA. There were a lot of things at the same time, so there was not a closed strategy other than to start up quickly, as soon as possible, get feedback, and then try again.

For now, I alone handle deployment and maintenance tasks. That will be the case until our trainees finish training.

We did not use a third-party service such as an integrator or a consultant.

We have not yet seen an ROI and have no concrete plans for any in the near future.

While I have one or two sheets from old presentations that have pricing information, they are over a half year old. I have no current insights. I wasn't included in discussions between the company and UiPath in relation to licensing. 

The company might have looked at other options. However, they did this before I was hired. Ultimately, they did want to choose UiPath, and I was hired based on my experience with the product. They chose UiPath at that time as they were working together with Oracle and that company has always been very Oracle-minded.

I use the community Studio and the Cloud Platform. I take the cloud from UiPath. I'm not sure where they host their solutions. I use the automation cloud from UiPath.

End-to-end coverage is not too important to my work at this time. Maybe if they were more closely integrated, I would be able to offer it more easily to my customers. However, now, due to the fact that I often go in at the first interaction with a customer or at a company, I have to introduce the concept of RPA, I have to introduce the product of UiPath, and I have to introduce or orchestrate the Cloud Platform and Studio. What I've seen is that that's enough for the first steps, usually, the company will have a pretty clear vision of what they want to start out with in terms of automation. However, introducing the process mining capabilities would add an extra step to the start-up that we have to do and what they want to see is faster results in the early phase. It's short the time from when I come in to initiate the first value, so they can appreciate the value and start the business cases and go from there. Maybe, once they are a couple of steps further on and they have a couple of automations, then they go look at the process of task mining as they have the infrastructure, they understand what the process automation is about, and then they start to see the value process or task mining. Therefore, the end-to-end factor, for my job, for now, is not too important as I don't truly use the end-to-end approach. I do the start by myself with the customer and then we go from there. Then, in the next phase, I will build them practices and they will start to automate the beginning of the process discovery as well. There is not something that I have initially do. Once companies start beyond that first phase and the first steps, then process discovery and process mining can be really important in automation. In a later stage, it becomes more important. However, in my case, I work a lot in the early phases and haven't seen too much of the process discovery products in that phase.

Attended automation hasn't really helped us scale RPA benefits as we are a rather small company and there's only a small group that works with the product, and therefore, we haven't been able to use the assistance in the same way a larger organization such as a bank or insurance company might use it.

We don't use the staff solution yet and we have not taken advantage of the AI functionality. While I have played with AI, I haven't had any use cases to implement the AI sensor.

Overall, I am quite satisfied with the product.

I'd advise new users to start by doing instead of only reading. Start small, like finding small processes or if you're an individual, look at your own work. Find something you could do and automate that as it gives you the best appreciation of the value. Try it out in your own environment and just explore how it goes as that gives you the best insights. For me, when I started, it was a great feeling to watch your screen and watch your cursor follow the screen without doing anything. 

Keep asking questions when talking to users. When translating the biggest use case into other processes, spend more and more time talking to the users and going through the processes, and defining and understanding what happens. Otherwise, it's going to cost you a lot of extra time figuring out why you've got all these weird exceptions that you didn't expect. Everyone always talks about how easy robotic process automation is. However, only once you understand your processes from a user's perspective, you'll run into a wall. It's never standardized. It's never the same. I need to warn my customers more frequently about this pitfall, due to the fact that, yes ultimately, it's very fast, but it only is once you know exactly what you want to automate and that's why most of the time it's time-consuming.

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

We do not directly use UiPath in our organization but we do have some use cases. One of those is sending bulletins. These are the notification emails that go to users on their birthdays, on their work anniversaries, sometimes they are sent after some sort of achievement, like if they have a baby. These notifications go via UiPath. 

The way it works is that the data is maintained within our tracking sheet, which is sometimes on SharePoint, and UiPath uses this tracking sheet to check the data in addition to the user and will cc everyone within the organization. For example, when we receive birthday emails, it goes to the person whose birthday it is on that day and cc's in everyone within the organization or within the relevant department. 

In the case of one of the clients I've worked with, they're working on a process where they need to provide students with a student visa pass. It's within Singapore and every student that has joined this institute needs to apply over a website. 5000 applications are received every year. These applications need to be manually added to the government website.

We automated this process, starting from the beginning to the end. There's a lot of interaction required. The team worked on an Excel sheet. In fact, a number of people work on these Excel sheets. With many people, there's always a chance of misleading data, as I might at one point be doing some more revision on the sheet, and someone at the other point might be doing more revisions. There is the chance that data will clash. In order to make sure that this won't happen, we came up with a SharePoint list where we could add the data, and if anyone changes anything, there's a simple and clear record of who made the changes, and what the change was.

At the same time, the bot can work on the SharePoint list as well - and there is no chance of a clash occurring. We can create a process and a number of steps that involve reading the data and extracting data from an application while swapping or extracting data between two forms. 

There's a lot of swapping. We extracted the data via the backend, via the database, and directly put that into the IC application. The processing time for this application previously was somewhere around 20 minutes. Per record now, the time has been reduced to three minutes. Previously, there were 18 people working on any particular application. Right now, there are only two bots working on this website, and they are doing work like magic. 

If we look at the development part, UiPath Studio has been great due to its ease of use and its UI. The availability of the UI store helps us understand the complete pre-hierarchy of the UI elements that's available on the browser or website. It's easy to use and it can be manipulated in the way we want it to. It allows us to do more work on the browsers. 

The integration aspect is very useful. Right now, I'm working on SharePoint and that integrates nicely with UiPath. The integration model is really, really great, and 99.9% of the time it works. While technology can fail occasionally, UiPath has a great track record. 

The ease of building automation using UiPath is quite good. The kind of projects or processes we have been able to automate has been helpful. We need to determine if it's a complex process, which is dictated by the number of steps. We look at the number of steps and work to determine if we can improvise and reduce the number of steps, and, if so, how. We look at if the process ever requires human intervention and where. The type of human intervention might dictate the complexity of the process, as well, for example, the number of applications we are working on. We might have to write some code on the backend or maybe we are working with an API. Everything needs to be assessed before going into an automation process.

UiPath has reduced human errors. Previously, everything was manually tracked with changes noted on the tracking sheet and we would do a copy/paste from one place to another. There was always a chance of human error. However, when this process is automated, there was zero chance for mistakes. While there may be exceptions, it would be only in rare instances the automation itself would make an error.

The product definitely reduces cost. If a company deploys automation within their organization, they need to understand that automation needs some time. One process will not necessarily reduce the cost. They need to see there will be results in the long run. It just takes time and they have to understand automation. They have to implement automation within the organization. Often, organizations will start the automation process, and then they leave it as they believe the cost is going up. They perceive this due to the fact that they need a separate system for development, a separate system for testing, and a separate system for operation, plus they need three servers for the Orchestrator. However, in the long run, automation actually lowers costs. It's just a hard up-front number to look at.

Whether or not the solution has freed an employee's time depends. If you talk about the business level, definitely not, due to the fact that, for them, it might be a burden. To the business, it might be a burden. However, if you talk to the IT department or IT level people who are working differently from users they would say that the best thing is that deployment is easy, debugging is easy, logging is very easy, and tracking is very easy. Anyone from IT can easily track how things are going. Yet, if we are talking about it from the point of view of business, for them it's not their cup of tea.

For example, if the system freezes on a person, they just close the browser, however, if the system freezes on a bot, from that moment everything must be manually re-initiated. For a regular business user, doing that process may go above their head and they may not understand how to fix it.

The Orchestrator portion can be difficult. Previously, the Orchestrator which everyone was using, was quite simple to use. However, the new one is quite complex to understand. Even with developers, they sometimes don't understand it either. 

There's a lot of things coming up that need to be learned. They need to put some more information into the academy to help others understand the Orchestrator end-to-end, especially for the new version. The previous one was quite easy. The new one is very inefficient in terms of the user interface. That's the area that I find still needs improvement.

I would suggest that they should provide a more disciplined document where users can see what exactly needs to be done in case of failure. For example, there's a very clever document on the deployment of the setup, but there's no documentation on what happens if there is a failure. Users need to be made aware of what to do if exceptions happen. 

UiPath is already aware of these exception scenarios, and when you call support they know what needs to be done. These details need to be on documents somewhere, maybe in the form of knowledge articles. That way, if someone has some issue, they can go to an article and see what's going on. 

I've used the solution for about four years now. 

Stability-wise, it's really good. When it comes to backend automation, it's amazing. With the UI automation in mind, I would say it's quite stable. However, there is a chance of errors. I would say, if you're doing a process based on a UI interaction, the stability it gives is somewhere around 5% to 10% on each process. Again, it depends on a number of things, such as the start-up package you are working with and/or what is the response of that individual. It's something that somewhat falls outside of UiPath, in terms of stability, however, when it comes to the process, everything counts. Even, for example, electricity counts. If there's system slowness or a system crash, it can affect everything, even if it's not necessarily caused by UiPath.

Attended automation has helped to scale RPA benefits. It is scalable, as, moving forward, there are multiple processes in relation to the same person, and right now it's done manually by a number of users. Probably, in the future, we can help develop a direction for that. Right now, the client is happy with what they got.

The solution is quite scalable. It's easy to scale a process or a UI. With big automation, it depends on the number of people who are going to utilize it. In those cases, we need to make sure that that network is available to scale. If you don't take into account the number of users, or if there are a lot of people using it, then the chances of failure can go up. That said, it depends on how big the organization is and what sort of licenses were bought from UiPath. 

I have not really used technical support, and therefore cannot comment. With Studio, we've had maybe a few minor interactions. It's the same with Orchestrator.

I have worked with a number of tools including Automation Anywhere, Blue Prism, WorkFusion, Kryon, and Kofax. I have knowledge of a lot of other tools. 

Kryon, for example, has a process discovery feature, and UiPath also started up with this process development. However, what Kryon provides is amazing. The way they capture everything, the way output comes, the way each step is explained with the process, et cetera, makes discovery on Kryon amazing. In comparison to UiPath, UiPath just isn't as good in this area.

WorkFusion integrates well with the part where we have to read documents, especially bot scanned reading. UiPath does not have these capabilities, as of now, on its own. You can integrate Abbyy with UiPath, however, that's a different tool altogether. With Fusion and with Kofax, these features are amazing. On top of that, their invoice capabilities are amazing. There's a vast difference between UiPath and Kofax and Fusion when it comes to reading documents. 

That said, when it comes to working on the backend automation, when it comes to working with the UI automation, UiPath stands out from the crowd. It's amazing. The way it writes, the way it provides precision handling, the way it works with the queue, et cetera, is amazing. There is no other tool on the market that offers these capabilities. 

The one feature that I believe should be better with UiPath, however, is storing data in an independent manner. With UiPath, even though you store your password on the Orchestrator with the credentials, or even with any credential manager if you get at the end of the day and somebody has not reviewed your quote, you can tell your boss to send his password in a simple text format. This is where the UiPath lacks, and this is where Blue Prism comes into the picture. It's just better at securing data. People prefer Blue Prism for this reason over UiPath. 

With my current organization, the department model is quite simple. We have three different environments for this: development, testing (what we call acuity), and production models. We have these three stages of deployment that we deploy robots and the Orchestrator based on the requirement of clients.

The deployment took a maximum of one to two hours from one machine to another machine. A complete department deployment, however, depends on the process type we are working on, as there are some features we need to develop. Apart from publishing these packages, the deployment of the server, or of the Orchestrator, or the deployment of Studio, will take a day or two to do the complete setup on one machine.

In terms of the implementation strategy, the first thing to do is the pre-checks. We need to figure out what sort of system we need. Therefore, we need to first confirm the prerequisites. Once that is done, we need to download a package and install it, and then apply the license. After all of that, we just need to create one small robot just to check that everything is working fine. There are some tools that need to be installed with that. For example, if we are working on UI automation, in that case, we need to install an extension. If we need to install the network load balancer as well, we need to install some of the prerequisite packages on the machine, on the server, to make sure that this runs smoothly.

While the licensing models are quite simple, as a developer, I don't handle details about pricing or cost.

My company does not directly partner with UiPath, however, it's a partner via a client. If anything happens with the client, it goes from my company via one of those stakeholders who take care of these things.

Currently, we use attended automation. The reason being is, it's more about password prediction, as the company does not want to store the passwords. There are a number of options that we have given to users where they can store their passwords in the credential manager. However, the company does not want to do that. The only reason we are using attended is for this, which is that the user has to manually go and insert the credentials.

I have not yet used UiPath's AI functionality in any automation programs. I have done some POCs for this, for documents in this setting. However, we've never practically implemented it within the organization.

With the current organization and with the current client we are not using Orchestrator at all. We only use attended robots and not Studio and Orchestrator. However, with other clients, we have used the cloud-based enterprise Orchestrator and have had the Orchestrator installed within the premises of the organization. I've used both.

I would rate the solution at a nine out of ten.

Earlier, there was no integration of PagerDuty. In any process, we had been working with many stakeholders and many other clients, however, sometimes if any process needed to be done at a particular time, for example, 8:00 AM in the morning, and was not running at that time, we would get a failure message. Now, we instantly get an alert on our phone, or we get an alert on Teams or Slack. This UiPath integration, with all the features, is very beneficial as it is keeping us up to date and on schedule. If there are any failures the production support team can know and handle them immediately.

All the features, all the packages, everything, have been great. All of the artificial intelligence which we are getting is super-useful, as are all the needed updates.

All the features are valuable as, much like any application, it cannot work without just one feature. For example, we have PDF automation, we have Excel automation, Citrix, SAP, and we have SharePoint automation - which makes it so that we can automate anything. All the features combined allow us to work on multiple projects or one specific project. 

The ease of building automation using this solution is good. I really enjoy the flexibility. It's also very easy. We do need a few coding skills with languages like C# or Power Automate. However, it's got a good UI, with drag and drop functionality. That makes it easy compared to other tools, like Prism automation. UiPath is much better and it's highly recommended.

Scaling automation without worrying about the infrastructure was easy. I simply did some googling and looked to see which automation tools were out there and which was the leader. There were multiple training portals - including UiPath Academy, where I was able to pull all of these tutorials and insights. There's also a free forum where queries are answered. It made everything quite easy. 

The solution enables us to implement end-to-end automation starting with process analysis, and robot building. This end-to-end coverage is important to me as we follow an agile methodology. We have an RPA development life cycle. This product gives us all the tools and everything we need. The requirement gathering and document preparation come as standard models. We have UiPath Studio for testing and UiPath test features for maintenance. We have the Orchestrator where we can maintain everything as well. We can see where things are working or not. In fact, we have integration with PagerDuty that gives alerts if something is failing or not working. It's really important that UiPath has integrated across all the life cycles, and that all the phases are working properly.

UiPath has helped to minimize our on-premises footprint, which has been very important to me. It's very important due to the fact that we can build a robust and scalable solution for an enterprise and have security in UiPath. It's very important that customer satisfaction is there, no matter what we are developing. It's very important to our organization.

It's a very fast solution. It can provide a result or automation to a business process within seconds. If we have an API, we can integrate EPS as well instead of using the UI. Basically, we can get any solution we need within seconds. It's very fast.

I have noticed that the solution reduces the cost of digital transformation as we are saving on manual hours. It's reducing them. We don't have to hire more people to do these manual jobs, which has helped us reduce the cost.

We did require application upgrades and IT application support. We wanted to update and get all the latest features that UiPath often releases. I've seen every month or every year we get all of these new packages. It's better to include the latest version to get all the latest features.

With UiPath, we have reduced human error. Humans are prone to making errors that they can make at any time. The bot does not. It's continuously given proper feedback. The lack of human errors has affected business a lot. The bot allows for complete confidence that perfect work is being done. It has also freed up employee time. We've saved thousands of hours. We have ten processes that are running in production. Up to this point, with those running, we have saved up to 1,918 hours from the automation. On top of that, employees can now focus on higher-value work. It has improved work satisfaction. There is more self-motivation that boosts the work, which we are doing.

The solution has reduced costs overall via automation. However, I cannot speak to exact cost savings. As a whole, it's saved our organization money.

Right now, we don't have many use cases in the field of NLP, natural language processing, or artificial intelligence. There are not many tutorials or any videos or enough insights shared by the UiPath Academy. If we could get more insights, that would be great.

With artificial intelligence or natural language processing, we need to get in touch with the servers, however, we cannot do it without getting a proper license. Maybe a mode of artificial intelligence and natural language processing should be included without needing a different license.

I've been using the solution for the past three years. I am currently working in Rackspace Technology. It's been two years looking at it now and one year in my previous organization, which was essential.

The solution is very stable. 

It is scalable. So far it's not been getting into trouble, and we haven't tested the boundaries, however, it's scalable.

I've been using the solution for the past three years myself. We also have a developer and some bigger production staff. There might be a few people who use it here and there. 

It's been extensively used in our organization. We are getting in touch with many internal clients, internal business units, and getting more projects. We are in the process of expanding it. Right now, we have five to 10 business units, such as accounting, et cetera, and we are trying to expand further out to other departments. 

I've never used UiPath technical support.

I did not previously use a different solution. 

The initial setup was easy. We basically had to install UiPath Studio and the tool, as well as the orchestrator. It was quite straightforward and easy.

The deployment process was just a couple of minutes. It was maybe five minutes. Not more than that.

We didn't have much of an implementation strategy beyond setting it up and working with a model via the deployment team. 

We handled the implementation ourselves. 

While I have noted an ROI, I cannot share specific data points.

I don't know much about the buying, the pricing, and other cost-related details. 

I did evaluate other options, such as Automation Anywhere, however, I have found that UiPath has a better interface and all the activities can be seen more visibly on the screen.

We are just a customer. 

At this time, we have not automated departments or role-specific processes that require human-robot collaboration. Mostly, we have unattended automation such as NOMA inclusion. We do not use the AI functionality in our automation process just yet and we do not use the solution's automation cloud offering. We also have not used the UiPath apps feature.

I would advise users considering the solution to try it once. The community edition is free. You can explore and download the community edition and take note of all the features which UiPath offers. If it suits the company, I would advise users to go contact the UiPath technical team or support team and get more information on how to implement UiPath.

The more you explore, the more you'll learn. It's not just the straightforward drag and drop functionality. Many people say that UiPath is just for a person with no technical knowledge. However, the more knowledge you have of the technical side, with an understanding of languages like Java, Python, C#, the more you'll excel as it's based on a .NET framework. 

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

I am an API developer and I use UiPath for development. I use it to develop solutions for banking problems, like banking automation.

For example, in my previous company, I used the API for developing automated reporting solutions that take a lot of Excel files, check their data, and try to generate a web page containing many graphics based on the Excel data. It's basically translating the data on the web and it's made automatically every month. 

For my current company, it's a banking company, and I'm working on the banking solution. It's a process of verification of the user identity or the client's details. This process is based on taking the ID card of the person and digitalizing the data. It's a technology meant for reading data from documents. After reading this data, we automatically take this data and put it into the database and create accounts for the user or do a lot of automated things. 

At my current company, the use case is for the process of managing the relationship between the client account and any fees. A robot always checks if there is something to pay for the client and can take the fee automatically if that is the case. Then there is a transfer of money based on the request.

For example, when someone wants to do a transfer they add the money and sign a paper. This paper contains the information of the client's account, including details such as the client name, the account number, and the amount of the transfer. We take the data and the robot automatically takes the data and, via the web, goes to the apps of the bank in order to search for the client, search for the account, say the amount, and take the proper amount from his account, et cetera. We're able to save steps as everything is automated.

The actual company has three environments. There's one for development, one for pre-production, and one for production. Every element has two UiPath robots and one Studio. We have in total three studios and six robots, and each one has its own lessons. 

In the first, there was only one robot and one studio. They upgraded the solution from one studio one robot to three studios and six robots and they have found a good benefit in that. They know that it will give them more opportunities and more advantages within the banking environment. They made an investment in this technology to make their work easier so that they could be the best in the market of banking. It's helped them become more efficient.

There is an additional library that I discovered that allows me to work with the previous version of UiPath. There are some libraries that are new on the UiPath Studio, which are also helpful.

In terms of the ease of building automation using UiPath Studio, I must say that I used Automation Anywhere once as well. However, the way the UiPath connects the idea for development makes it so easy to build with the components that we can just drag and drop in. It's the easiest way to develop a solution and is an easier tool to use.

UiPath helps implement end-to-end automation starting with process analysis, then robot building, and finally monitoring of automation.

Being able to implement end-to-end automation is important for me. As much as they make me work, they make the work easier for me. For example, I use it to make the connection between ABBYY Studio, a solution for OCM, and writing scripts inside. I try to launch the script and take the output of the file and try to do a lot of things to make a connection between UiPath Studio and ABBYY Studio. UiPath Studio has given us a strong and new plugin, that we'll put some parameters around and we are done. It makes things easier like that. The features added into the latest update are helping a lot.

UiPath Studio has helped minimize our on-premise footprint in that there's less staff required. Previously, the company had three or four people doing the same thing. Now, only the robot does it. The four people are doing something else now. It's allowed them to focus on other tasks. The robot did not replace them, however. They still work in the same company, however, they are focused on doing different jobs - specifically jobs that can't be automated. They work on jobs that require a human operation, human intervention, and that's it.  The employees are happier too. The current company recently won an award based on employee happiness. In 2021, they were awarded excellence in employee condition. Automation hasn't made them bitter or changed their work ethic.

Robots started doing a lot of tasks that four people take one week to finish, except they can do it in one day. It's saved lots of time. For example, if we have 52 weeks, every week the robots can do a week's task in one day. A human may only be able to do 52 tasks in a year, whereas a robot can overperform by roughly 86% over the course of a year. 

UiPath speeds up and reduces the cost of digital transformation. The robots are extremely helpful, as they can work 24 hours a day, every day. They can do processes faster than people. It makes everything ultimately speed up.

The product has reduced human error. Even the robots make some errors, however, at least we are aware of them. The errors end up being fewer than that of a human counterpart. The issue with human errors is that we can't know if and when an error is made. At least with the robot, if it makes an error, the person is blocked somewhere and therefore we know that the robot missed something or it found a wrong account number, for example. The robot will notify us of an error whereas a human might miss it completely. 

Between version 19 and version 20, the Orchestrator tool interface has changed a lot. It totally changed. The menu changed, the place of the button changed. It took me a week to understand and to make myself used to this new interface. In the end, I found it's a good change and it's helping so much in understanding what the robots are doing in terms of checking logs, extracting some data there to make some analysis, and giving reports to the director.

The scaling could be better. There are so many parameters and options to check and so much to do before the solution is ready to use. Not everyone knows what to do at the outset and it's all a little bit complicated.

I've been using UiPath for one year and a month. The company may have been using it for longer than that.

While the stability is fine, with a license that needs to be paid yearly, UiPath will put out a new version annually. That way, when companies go to renew, they often need to upgrade or pay for a new license. The product does this to keep earning money year after year. 

For me, having the ability to scale automation without having to pay attention to infrastructure is okay, generally, however, even though I find that the company can use the tool to make the process automate well, I don't have so many people working with process automation. There are now just a few people developing in the APA and the licensing is still expensive and clients aren't excited to do anything even if it's a good solution for automating the process.

If you have a lot of money, you can put it all in UiPath and make the robot far bigger. I heard about a company located in Qatar that has 3600 robots. They buy it every year. It's a banking company and every year they pay for it. They are not using all of the robots, however, they've given their developers full reign of the environment.  

In my current company, I'm the only one using it. Many companies actually spend a few years testing it before they officially start using it. However, the company does plan to increase usage and does plan to add three or four more people to the team who would be working with me. I would manage them and provide training as we expand. 

There's a third party that takes responsibility for troubleshooting. They made the environment, and they are in charge of everything. Personally, I go first to the UiPath forum if I need help. I've found a lot of answers there. If I don't find something useful or helpful, I write an email to the third-party provider so that they can take charge of the problem and solve it.

They are good. There are three people who assist me typically. One is from the Middle East, one is French and the other is from India. Their way of communication, their way of giving information, and giving support have been great.

Both companies I have worked for that use this product have never used an automation solution before. 

I have worked with the solution for two enterprises. One was a Canadian company. I implemented the solution for them. I met the organization's boss, and I also put the training together too. I made the environment and I developed the solution and did the full implementation. 

The second, which I am actually working for, is a combination between Europe and Africa on the main. In both companies, the solution is already implemented and I work with it. The solution was started by another department. We don't share or manage the site of escalation or choose which kind of installation. The installation in this case is on-premise. We have constructed on our IAS, local server, and that's it. It's on the server, and we're not using UiPath's cloud.

The initial setup is good. There are no problems. Setting up the robots is also good. For the Orchestrator, sometimes I face some issues surrounding not UiPath, but the OS. For example, installing the Orchestrator on Windows 10, version 19.02, it's not the same process as it would be with Windows 10, version 20.82. Sometimes the visuals of the operating system change and it affects the installation too. This is well documented in the UiPath community. You'll find that many people face problems while working with the Orchestrator.

The deployment sometimes took me two hours. Sometimes I come across an issue and it takes more time. However, often, it can be deployed in 30 to 50 minutes if all goes well.  

With the installation for a Canadian company, I have a very simple installation experience. The environment was already prepped and ready and I just needed to start the installation. 

There is an IT team that does perform the maintenance as required, for example, if there are any updates or upgrades. I don't handle that aspect. I'm only a developer.

We might study potential ROI in the summer of 2022. We're still on the development part and therefore we still can't make reports. We don't have statistics.

There can be costs related to digital transformation. There are two ways this can happen. The first is when the robot is using an internal application, the application made by the company. There often is some modification to the interface of this app. There are some options that become available only for the robots. The second is when the robots use the websites of external companies. Internally, we made some changes to the robots to ensure they work well. In terms of the expense and how much it costs, the information is managed by another department. I don't have information about that.

I can't speak to the exact price, however, recently I heard in a meeting that one license for Studio Path costs 2,825 Euros per year. This price is approximate and may fluctuate.

The license is always per year. They don't show the pricing on the internet. You must contact the support or a seller. 

For the company I currently work with, I was in the meeting that chose the automation solution and they put the UiPath blueprint and Automation Anywhere on the table. The company wanted to choose between them. They found that, in terms of money, performance, and popularity, UiPath was the best. That is why they choose UiPath.

We are not resellers. We are customers and end-users.

For now, I am fine with UiPath Studio and I will likely keep developing automation solutions on this tool.

For the attended robots, we are not using them yet. We are only using unattended robots. First, we must make the financial employees understand how robots work. They need understanding or training as a first step before we can use attended robots in development. We are going to use attended robots in the future, however, for now, we're focused on unattended robots.

We don't yet use AI functionality. We're going to start using artificial intelligence and also the machine learning solution of UiPath via AI sensors. We'll use it to measure credit and to gauge the likelihood of clients paying, however, for now, we are not yet using AI features.  

We are also not using UiPath apps.

UiPath Studio has reduced the costs of our automation operations, although I don't have an exact statistic that reflects this.

Sometimes, when you come to a company and you tell them that you will make a robot to do their job, the first thing they will start thinking is "we're going to lose our job. They're going to fire us." With that mentality, they often aren't cooperative. 

For example, in a Canadian company I worked for when I was working on the process, the parts of the activity for Excel automation, I kept notifying them that they should keep using the same name of the file so the robots can read the file. However, I would get files in different names with letters off or symbols in them as if the staff was trying to get the project canceled by trying to show the robot wouldn't work. However, over time, as they came to understand no one would lose their position, they became cooperative. They weren't happy at first, however, they came to embrace the project.

UiPath has a huge marketing strategy, and they have been the first in the world with a lot of this technology. If a company wants to integrate automation into its processes, it will likely start looking at UiPath first.

If a company is considering UiPath, they should know exactly which process should be automated. When you know what kind of processes will be automated, they will understand better if they need attended robots or unattended robots, and then can proceed with a purchase. What one recent company did is they went and bought one studio and one robot. Then, later, after understanding which process was going to be automated, they figured out that they needed three studios and six robots. It's better to know which process to develop to make it automated, then later go to buy solutions for it.

We will still always need human workers. Of course, there are some tasks that can be automated 100%. However, in the end, and specifically in the banking domain, we always need humans to understand some things that make the work easier. if we combine automation, things like robots, and human intervention, then we can get great results.

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

We are an auditing firm who has a certain level of tasks that are open for automating. These are complete steps, which can be performed by anyone, standardized, and do not involve any human intelligence. These are just basic human tasks. It is a long process, where in-between there are certain validation and verification steps as well as certain steps that involve a lot of documentation to go through. The organization is targeting all these tasks, which are completely static and can be automated, so they can get rid of them. Then, employees can work on something more useful as well as more productivity-oriented tasks.

Currently, I am dealing with our internal COE, providing RPA solutions to internal and external clients. UiPath is a driving force in our COE.

It is on-prem. There are a couple of discussions going around upgrading UiPath because there has been so much advancement with the solution.

Document Understanding was a game-changer. One of our clients has manual billing that needs to be processed. With the help of Document Understanding and UiPath Action Center, we created an excellent workflow for our client. It also gives us better accuracy. Now, there are hardly any exceptions in the client's billing documents that are being processed.

In my previous role, I presented some clients the end-to-end installation design of UiPath, e.g., building a PDD using Task Capture, going to UiPath Studio to build the actual solution, and then later going to post-production Insights. 

UiPath has helped to minimize our on-prem footprint. Most organizations prefer on-prem because it reduces the risk of compliance issues.

Attended robots have been very beneficial for our users. UiPath saves one robot for every user. We have a couple of clients who are using attended automation for their day-to-day tasks.

From an organizational point of view, the most used feature is Orchestrator because that is how we manage more than 100 users. When there are more than 100 users, it is important, and probably better, to have some place to manage them. Orchestrator is doing that for us very well. 

The most exciting new feature is UiPath Apps. I have explored it in-depth to get a better understanding. I think this product will be a game-changer for my organization as well as for my clients. It will revolutionize the way that we are providing licensing and proper access to a user. It also revolutionizes the way people are using it. Everything will be on the cloud, which I think is the most interesting feature of UiPath Apps.

UiPath Apps will definitely help to reduce the workload of our IT department by enabling end users to create apps. If you are creating an app and sharing it over the cloud, that removes the dependency of having UiPath installed with the correct version as well as Internet connectivity. Or, you might have a global server in the background that is not functioning very well. There are multiple issues related to connectivity of the UiPath robot when deploying it on a user's machine. 

If you are giving access to a group of users and adding Azure container or any other container provided by UiPath, then this reduces 10 to 15 hours of work from the IT or support guys who are manually doing all these things by themselves. Not every user must have the new step of getting the UiPath license and software installed, it is really static. You are eliminating that task completely by having UiPath Apps on the cloud. This is definitely convenient for users to use.

We are not using UiPath Apps in my current organization. About two to three months ago, I created UiPath when I was at TCS. It was there that we demonstrated the power of UiPath Apps versus normal, conventional methods. It reduced our work through scalability. It helped us to easily scale and was more convenient, because giving new or temporary access can be a pain. 

It is very easy to share UiPath Apps. When you want to start or remove it, you can do it with a simple click within the cloud. It is not that complicated. Also, the usage is better in UiPath Apps compared to the conventional UiPath robot. In UiPath Assistant, you can access the portal and simply run it over there. Therefore, you will not have a problem with the background functioning of the UiPath robot or even connectivity issues. Scalability and ease of use are favorable for users when they are using UiPath Apps.

Recently, I have been exploring Automation Hub. Its idea to pipeline a feature will be very useful for our guys managing RPA products on a large scale. 

When it comes to debugging, there is some improvement needed for UiPath compared to other RPA tools. There are features to edit the workflow or content of the automation file while we are debugging. For example, we have 10,000 lines of code that we have integrated by 10 different users. So, there is one integrated code and you are debugging it. After some time, you might find a line which is not an error. You may have forgotten to remove it or change the value to your desired criteria. It is really a pain to stop the entire debug session and just edit it, then start again at zero. It will do the same steps again just to reach that level or step where you were actually stuck previously. Whereas, in different automation tools, whether you are on the findings step or in-between a debug session, you can actually edit that information. This is good because sometimes the developer also forgets to add or remove certain values in-between a long code. I think this should be improved in UiPath. This should already be in consideration because I have been in touch with UiPath a couple of times because of this.

My current company is currently looking at the end-to-end solution. However, Insights and Task Capture are major concerns. Task Capture will give you a skeleton of the PDD, then you have to edit it. The skeleton is only there for simple automation, and we have complex scenarios. It is so complicated that the PDD generation using Task Capture will not give you even 20% of the output. While Task Capture is something promising, people are looking at it with greater expectations than it provides. People are not using Task Capture or Insight because of their limitations. These features could use improvements and enhancements.

I have been using UiPath for three years. I recently switched companies. I worked with Capgemini and TCS prior to this company, where I was in their COEs and providing solutions to clients. This is the first time that I have been on a project for PwC. Since the start of 2018, I have worked mainly in COEs and have interacted with around 30 clients up until now.

PwC, as a firm, has been using this technology for four to five years.

I have been using UiPath on a different powerful system that has high-end RAM. Sometimes, it crashes due to the use of multiple components at once. For example, when I was using Druid with data service and another UiPath product. Developing was quite easy. However, when debugging, sometimes it would freeze. I don't know whether it was because of my system and its compatibility, my system's configuration, or the fact that we were using so many high-end tools and products at once. 

The robustness of the tool, when it comes to using high-end products, is something that I am currently exploring. This is something that is currently a bit of concern for other developers as well. I have been interacting with a lot of developers around the globe. As a part of that, I tend to share my experiences. They have shared that it will sometimes freeze, even with simple automation. Because we are using new features or products all at once, it freezes. I think this should not be the case. If you are using long, heavy code, and it gets frozen at one point, I can understand that. However, 10 simple lines of code, while using three or four products at once, is getting frozen. That should be taken care of or improved.

To troubleshoot the system crashing, we contacted UiPath. They were kind enough to reply and have a discussion. They are working on this and trying to make it more convenient so future releases will solve this problem.

As a part of a COE, we get clients who expect us to present the entire proof of concept as well as a PPT or presentation. For example, why they need to go with UiPath, what are the advantages/disadvantages, if any, and why we should not go with another tool or solution as a whole, not just RPA. The main point for us when presenting UiPath is the ease of usability and scalability. We don't need major infrastructure changes, just two or three URLs to be widely fitted. Then, they need to decide if they want unattended or attended robots. The scalability is the major driving force which excites our clients and us, because there isn't a need to have media-heavy software or heavy processes changes.

Clients don't want every user in their organization who joins to have a long process to get through the start up. Automation Cloud is something they were very much interested in exploring because of the scalability. They find it very easy to use and scale, because not all the clients have a certain set of users using robots. 

I have seen user usage explode from zero to a bigger audience of 22 users.

UiPath is used extensively in my current organization on a large scale. There is also a plan to scale it to more users.

PwC has their internal teams providing a "help center" sort of infrastructure to them. If there was a need for any help, or some basic doubt, it is solved internally. PwC's internal help center exists already. However, for major issues, we reach out to UiPath, as a customer, so that we can receive a response and clarity on issues.

The technical support is really great. I have been in touch with all sorts of UiPath support because I was in the COE and our clients were completely global until my latest assignment. I think UiPath India, France, Belgium, and Canada are timely. They provide a very precise support experience. They were kind enough to let us know the actual reason, because just saying that it is a bug is not something that we can comfortably accept or digest. Also, they have been kind enough to follow back up on updates and bugs that we have reported.

As a whole, I have reported more than 25 bugs across all their products. They were kind enough to reach out to the same forum where we raised the ticket. They were kind enough to reply that these are the updates that they will roll out in the next version. It is good to have this interaction as well as a heads-up regarding your bug reports. I think the technical support is on the mark and doing their job really well.

The learning tools and support are really great. They have the most engaging forum across the globe, compared to other RPA tools. The learning and engagement are really up to the mark. That also brings confidence to our clients and us. We are a part of their global community forum, which is a benefit for us. 

Their marketplace has grown tenfold in the last year. It is because of the developer's involvement as well as involvement from people in the community. UiPath is creating their own statements and usable components, which adds value to our presentation. The tool is growing, and developers and community members are growing with them. 

My previous companies migrated from other RPA solutions, like Automation Anywhere, Blue Prism, and NICE Robotic Automation, to UiPath because of the value of its features and the quality of the overall solution. I migrated my clients from those companies so they could have a better ROI and reduce the cost of maintenance. We also migrated from scheduling tools, like AutoSys, to provide better accuracy and ease of use.

My current company was not previously using an RPA solution.

The initial setup and implementation are standard, simple, and user-friendly. UiPath just requires basic adjustment, then it is plug and play. It is very easy for everyone to understand, e.g., non-technical clients can understand what has been changed.

If the deployment is done properly, you will see better data accuracy with UiPath than manual entry. If the deployment is done by someone without much experience, it will affect the quality of the solution due to bad coding. You can't just leave it to the tool.

Using Automation Cloud makes it easier to deploy.

It takes almost two weeks for us to implement from scratch because we must understand the client's infrastructure, create a solution design, and then present it to them.

We present our clients with a PoC, including a document that justifies the work and costs. We also give them a standard robot that we created for demo purposes. This way, they can visualize how it will be implemented and mapped in their organization.

For deployment, one or two people are sufficient: one from an infrastructure background and another from a technical background. Sometimes, it is complex or hard to understand the client's needs when it comes to the deployment of Azure, Nvidia, or AWS servers on their VPN connection.

The amount of staff needed for maintenance depends on the size of the solution, e.g., the bigger solutions will need more people. However, the maintenance and support activities can also be automated and that reduces the need for support and maintenance. Three or four support team members are enough with the help of a robot.

The last ROI calculation that we did for a client showed that they saved 25% of their time by automating a manual task with an unattended robot for a single machine.

Overall, the cost remains the same to the client and us, when using Automation Cloud, because of the amount of money spent on the cloud migration and cloud usage.

At my previous company, in the best scenario, we removed almost 200 hours per month of client usage, making it automated with almost zero errors. So, about 32 employees were freed up from their work per month, and now there are only two. This has enabled employees to focus on higher-value work that involves human-base interaction. This saved the client money and provided a recruitment benefit.

UiPath has been useful for improving employee satisfaction. Employees are now spending time on more value-add work instead of something static, whether it is boring or hectic, that they have been working on for ages. This gives employees a sense of advancement.

I would rate the pricing as seven out of 10, where 10 is the most expensive. The pricing increased with the latest release. It used to be cheap. Now, it is expensive. However, it does come with supported features, which almost justify its cost.

Building automations is very easy. I have used multiple RPA tools. Developing automation with UiPath is very convenient compared to other tools. 

Development is very easy. I have been exploring certain markets based on the marketplace component and its native integrations with ServicesNow for the chatbot. I think development is where UiPath stands out as a winner compared to other tools because starting to automate is very easy.

Compared to other RPA tools, UiPath is leading with new feature additions every quarter. Obviously, all the new features will not be incorporated into the solution or be helpful for the client. We see the organization putting in efforts to grow at a rapid pace, including ML, scaling, and everything on the cloud, like data servers. UiPath gives us the confidence to present a tool that can be relied on because it is constantly growing. It constantly has certain new features added which can be beneficial.

With UiPath, not everyone needs to understand the code, which is great. This makes it superior over other tools because it is easy to understand. This contributes to profits because clients prefer UiPath over something else because they have more confidence using it.

Blue Prism has the ability to edit in the middle of a debug. As far as I have explored, Blue Prism is leading on the debugging front and stands out against UiPath. Debugging in Blue Prism gives users a lot of usability to edit the workflow. This makes it easier for developers to run things once and get things done. Otherwise, debugging multiple times can sometimes be a pain.

People migrate to NICE Robotic Automation because they were having difficulty maintaining their software with a limited number of staff. 

It is easier to become more proficient with UiPath than other RPA tools, especially Blue Prism. Training can be done at almost no cost.

I would suggest automating a policy that is not a requirement and follows a process. As an RPA user, it is your responsibility to get things done in an efficient way. If a user is doing A, B, C, D, it might not be required that the robot do the same thing. There might be a shorthand that can take you from A to D directly using the robot. For example, it can go directly to a page and not have to click 10 things like a human.

If you use it properly and consciously, it can increase accuracy and reduce error. If you don't, then it will be the other way around.

As features are concerned, it is reasonably priced compared to any other heavyweight tools in the market.

It is beneficial that there is a SaaS option because this offers a diversified cloud environment. If we expand and explore more cloud options, then having a SaaS solution for UiPath will be beneficial for us. Right now, SaaS comes with a certain amount of compliance issues for my company. 

UiPath AI Center is very useful. I think it is a game-changer when it comes to better usage. However, I haven't had much of a chance to explore it on an enterprise level. Not many clients are using it because of the exposure risk. Once a lot of developers start exploring and developing on it, then more companies will have the confidence to say, "Yes, we can push to that," which will increase the usage of UiPath AI Center.

Everything on the UIPath Cloud is a template. It is just a starting point. You have to dig into it and do more exploration to make it better.

Using Automation Cloud would be very beneficial for us, as a COE, because we are getting rid of the mundane tasks of infrastructure, maintenance, and upgrades, which we do not think are our primary job.

Biggest lesson learnt: UiPath has the fastest growing community with the quickest learning tools. It is easy to automate. It requires basic understanding and effort to get started. 

I would rate UiPath as 9.5 out of 10. I have concerns about the debugging capability, where if I need to edit something while debugging, I can't do it right away without stopping the process.

I have worked on two UiPath use cases. The first use case is for the IT Infrastructure team for submitting server requests. They receive a request from a third-party portal through email, and then my bot reads the email and fills in the details in the company portal.

The second use case is the data extraction from Word documents. The team receives Word documents with some important contract information. I extract those paragraphs and put them in the CSV format given by the customer.

We are using UiPath Studio 2020.10.2, and the Orchestrator version is 2019.

I heard about UiPath RPA in December 2019, and I went to the UiPath Academy website and completed their learning plans. Till March 2020, there was free certification, and I completed the free certification and kept on practicing. I showcased my skills to the management in my company, and I got into RPA projects. The certification has helped me in getting good projects. It has also helped me with my work for the use cases. My position is now better as compared to the previous years, and my work is also good. 

They provide end-to-end solutions. They have UiPath Studio for the development, and they have Orchestrator for package deployment. We can also monitor the performance and execution in Orchestrator. All these are helping us in managing end-to-end automation.

All UI automation activities in UiPath Studio and REFramework are useful. UiPath Orchestrator is also valuable. These features help me a lot in my projects. 

UiPath Studio's UI automation activities help me in easily developing automation. It is difficult for RPA developers to write complex code because no one knows everything about all automation areas. For UI automation, it is not mandatory for a developer to know how to write the code for the element on the screen that needs to be clicked or typed into. The UI automation packages of UiPath provide built-in activities, and developers can directly drag and drop and indicate the element on the screen that needs to be clicked or typed into. 

REFramework is a template using which we can prepare quality workflows for the transactional processes. It has very good error handling, retry, and logging mechanisms.

We can monitor robots in Orchestrator. We can check logs, monitor the performance of each robot, and divide robots into different environments. These features are very helpful for me in managing my work. If I have two or three robots on a set of machines and I want to define my process only for these robots, I can add that process into the environment. My process will be executed only on those robots. This is a good functionality.

For every transaction, there is the queue functionality in Orchestrator. I can go to a queue and add each transaction item to the queue. For every transaction, I can check the logs. I can also check their logs based on the jobs executed. We also have triggers, so we can schedule our jobs with the help of triggers. These features are helping me a lot in managing the performance of my robot and understanding how my robot is performing.

They have UiPath Forum where I can ask any questions. Many UiPath Most Valuable Professionals are on that forum, and they help us a lot. We get quick replies. If anyone is having any challenges, they post their challenges on the UiPath Forum. I can go through them, and if they are already solved, I gain knowledge by reading those solutions. If not, I try to answer them. In addition to gaining the knowledge, I'm getting some visibility in the UiPath Forum. All these things have really helped me a lot in increasing my technical level and expertise and getting good work.

UiPath Studio supports three types of workflows: sequence, flowchart, and state machine. Flowchart and state machine are good. Sequences are also good, and they're for linear workflows. However, in a sequence, as we keep on dragging and dropping the reusable components, the size of the screen increases. If we drag and drop the conditional or looping activities on the site, the screen size increases in length and breadth, and it becomes too complex for a developer to navigate between activities. 

All programming languages, such as C, Java, Python, or Visual Basic, have script-level support. So, we can reuse their functions because they support scripting. For example, if we want to use any reusable components, Python has modules, and there is a way to import packages. For complex automations, if we can write a script, it makes it easy to manage and know the line on which we are getting a syntax error or a runtime error and how is the structure. If I want to modify the logic, it makes it easier to know in which block I need to make the changes. So, it is easy to navigate in the program. Instead of the drag-and-drop blocks, UiPath should have support for scripts such as VBScript and PowerShell. It should support scripting even for complex automation.

The user interface for logging should be improved in Orchestrator. Currently, the logs in Orchestrator show how many hours ago the execution is completed, but it doesn't say how much time it took for a particular execution to complete. It just gives you a rough idea that it started three hours or one hour ago. It doesn't tell you exactly when a particular execution started, and at what time, it stopped. To get a clear idea, I need to click one more button and go to the details of the log. I need to check the start time of the first log and the end time of the last log in the same job, and then I need to calculate the difference to know the exact time it took for completing the job. Instead of doing all that, there should be a column that gives me the exact amount of time in minutes and seconds. It will help me in understanding how much time each execution took and what I should do to improve the speed of the execution.

In my current project, there are no intelligent automation requirements, but I have learned it recently. Just today, I completed the UiPath AI Center course. I also have some basic knowledge of machine learning. They're giving us options to use the out-of-the-box models developed by UiPath and their third-party vendors. With our internal data science, we can also develop our models, integrate them through UiPath AI Center, and deploy them. They're giving us an option to use them as a part of our RPA workflows with the help of the UiPath Studio activity called ML Skill. So, it becomes very easy for RPA developers to integrate machine learning models into their automation workflows, which is very nice, but I feel there should be some more improvement. They should give more visibility into how much time a model takes to finish the training and on how many algorithms it is running. They should also give visibility into which algorithm is best suited for my requirement and which algorithm is giving the best results for my requirement. If they can also give such insights in the same UiPath AI Center, it will help me in picking up the correct model and algorithm for my requirements.

When it comes to intelligent automation, machines use machine learning. No machine learning model can reach 100% accuracy or give 100% accurate output, which is a limitation. However, there is a possibility to increase the accuracy by tuning the parameters. So, UiPath should give more visibility into their models, how the pipeline is running in the AI center, and which factors can improve the accuracy of my model. Such insights will be useful for me in improving the accuracy of my intelligent automation.

In December 2019, I started learning UiPath, and I became an RPA developer in November 2020.

Until now, I have seen good uptime. There were no disruptions in data. I've seen the services running properly 99% of the time. Their logging mechanism, job schedules are also running properly in Orchestrator. So, it is a stable environment.

We're getting good support from UiPath. I would rate them 75 out of 100. Most of the time, I get fast and good replies from the support team. Sometimes, I receive late replies, or they don't understand the question properly, and I need to explain multiple times, but they are mostly good. 

I have worked on different IT process automation tools in the past. Their support did not respond as fast as UiPath's support, and they put the tickets in the suspended mode for a long time. They also didn't understand the question a lot of times and took too much time to analyze the issue. 

I also have the advantage of talking to my Infra team because we've deployed it on-premise. They can act as the first level of support and check if there is anything wrong with the on-premise server. If it is related to UiPath functionality, then we raise a ticket with UiPath support.

It was already set up when I moved to this team. I was working in IT process automation, and I moved to the UiPath development team. The setup and licenses of UiPath Orchestrator are managed by our Infra team members. They provided me with the licenses and links to the UiPath Orchestrator. So, I make use of the resources already deployed by my team. I just build and publish the packages to UiPath Orchestrator.

I have not deployed anything in the live environment, so I cannot comment about the return on investment. I've seen my colleagues deploying it, and with the help of data automation use cases, they have reduced around 10 hours per month for each support team. For my use case, we will be able to reduce at least one or two FTE for the support team when it goes live. I'm able to predict this because I have developed and tested many test cases for my use cases.

I only know about the community version. They give us two robots as a part of the community version, and they are enough for my practice and personal automations. For the office work, my Infra team checks the licenses needed for a particular use case, and my management team manages the pricing and licenses. 

Nine times out of ten, I would recommend others to use UiPath. I have also worked on other IT process automation tools, and none of them provides the functionality, support, and community like UiPath. I had conducted a survey on LinkedIn and asked about the RPA tool that people preferred. I got 60% of the votes for UiPath.

From the development perspective, I've seen a lot of improvement in the UiPath services in the last one year. They're giving more out-of-the-box models for the AI Center, and they are also improving their courses. They are also introducing new functionalities such as the orchestration processes in which you can use persistent activities, and your robot can wait for the human task to finish, and then it can continue its job. If they make any enhancements required for our current automation, we will make use of new UiPath functionalities to enhance our automation.

They have released two new versions of their certifications. One is UiPath Associate Certification, and the other one is UiPath RPA Developer Advanced Certification. I have completed the Associate certification. For these certifications, we have learning plans. There is recommended training, and everything is given on the UiPath Certification Program website. We have the option to check their recommended training and do the practices. They also guide us about how to book the exam from the Pearson website. Going through the recommended training and doing the Associate certification has increased my credibility. I've gained more trust in the company. It has changed my career. So, UiPath has played a prominent role in my career.

It can reduce errors by 100% because a machine can give 100% accuracy and work faster than humans. Just like all RPA tools, UiPath can provide 100% automation accuracy for rule-based automation. You also get better speed because machines are faster than humans. When it comes to intelligent automation, machines use machine learning, so there is a limitation. No machine learning model can reach 100% accuracy in automation.

I would rate UiPath an eight out of 10. 

I am a UiPath developer and my role in the company is as an automation developer specialist. I'm working mainly in UiPath Studio, not Studio X, and I also work with Orchestrator. We are using attended automation.

We are automating the processes in our company, for example, in the finance department. One of the ones that are now automated is invoice coding determination, which no longer involves humans. At this time, 80% of our processes are completed by robots. The remaining 20% is approved by humans but I think that this will improve later. 

With respect to the ease of building automations using UiPath, from my experience, when you have a basic knowledge of programming, it is really easy for you to start your journey with the UiPath environment. You can do it without this knowledge but then, you will just need to spend a little more time learning the details.

I really like working in UiPath because the programming allows me to do whatever I want. I can declare any type of variable, I can check the locals, and I can add breakpoints whenever I need to check the states. For me, it's a very professional platform.

I really like that they offer the possibility to work with it from two sides. It can be operated from the full-programming side, as well as from the standpoint where you don't need this knowledge.

UiPath has helped to minimize our on-premises footprint, although I cannot estimate by how much because I am not responsible for that aspect.

UiPath has helped to reduce the cost of our digital transformation because it really speeds up the processes. When we compare the time it takes for a human, with perhaps a one-hour task, and it only takes 30 minutes for the robot to do it, we can see the savings. You just multiply this by the salary and we also see the reduction in cost.

UiPath has definitely reduced the number of issues arising from human error. We can confirm this with 100% certainty because we have compared it to when humans were completing processes on their own. I estimate that the error rate has been reduced by approximately 60%.

In my previous company, we managed to save about 20 FTE after our UiPath implementation. It was about two years of work. Thanks to the ease of access, as well as the fact that our employees did not require programming knowledge, we were able to show it to normal employees and explain the automation. After this, they were not afraid that they will be replaced by robots and instead, understand that they are co-working with them.

The most important part of Studio is the debugging feature. It gives you the ability to watch local variables, as well as highlight elements as it is moving through the process. The results of actions are displayed and indicate whether particular actions are performed successfully or not.

Outside of the company, I am using UiPath's AI functionality and it very much speeds up processes and improves accuracy for reading data. For example, the OCR is much better than Microsoft's solution. With UiPath, I was able to read handwriting samples but with Microsoft, I was unable to do it.

The AI functionality has allowed me to automate more processes in my own projects. It adds flexibility and improves process speed. I don't have to think about boundaries when I decide how to approach a project. 

It lacks something crucial, which is a map of the variables and arguments. When we are using a lot of variables and arguments, sometimes, we get lost. UiPath should create a map that connects different files and shows the connections between them. For example, from file A, we have variable B, and file C contains variable D. However, they are actually the same variable, but it's connected by argument and we don't know it. It is something that we have to remember explicitly. In this case, it would be really helpful for me, as a developer, to have this picture of the net. It would show me what is where and how it's connected to everything.

For the on-premises solution, if we ignore any problems that may occur with the infrastructure, such as the network, then stability is very good and the platform works well.

In my experience with cloud-based deployment, I haven't faced any problems with stability.

Scaling UiPath is really easy. When you get to the point where you have to think about scalability, you use the UiPath Installer to extend the Orchestrator by another node. There is an option for it and you don't have to know much about the network to do it on your own.

I am part of a four-person development team that is working primarily with Studio. We have approximately ten processes at the moment, and it is difficult to estimate how many employees are affected by the automation. 

The technical support is very professional and they work quickly. Usually, we are able to get responses in about two hours. Sometimes, it takes one day, but I have not faced a situation that took longer than two days.

The help from their site is also very professional, and well-described.

Overall, it is really easy to resolve errors.

Prior to UiPath, I used Selenium WebDriver. The problem with this product is that you have to know the Python programming language. You have to know everything inside Python, and there is a lot more typing. In UiPath, you have some clicking, and there is some decent orienting stuff, which you don't have to define. You already have some pieces of code that you can use, and this is a really nice feature.

I have also used Kryon RPA and the problem is that it's based on the OCR. This is something that I would never accept with an RPA tool unless the OCR is fully working. Right now, OCR is not a perfect technology and it causes many issues. UiPath allows us to use selectors, so we are able to track the exact area of the display in the program that we want to access.

The initial setup is quite easy, although we faced a few issues. With the help of the UiPath service desk, we were able to quickly fix our problems. The deployment was completed in a few hours on one machine. This included checking everything to make sure that it was working fine.

We followed the documentation provided by UiPath, as well as their guidelines.

At this time, we are using the on-premises version. In the next few months, we plan to move to the cloud environment, so we are currently planning the transition.

In my previous company, I was responsible for moving to the new version of the UiPath, with the Apollo interface in the Orchestrator. Where I am now, this was already done. So, yeah. I was responsible for this transition. Right now, in this company where I'm working currently, the UiPath setup was already done but I helped with the optimization.

With respect to upgrades, once we knew what had to be done, it took about one hour to complete. Otherwise, there is no maintenance required.

I have calculated ROI for our project and it seems that we will reach our ROI point in approximately two years, which is quite good.

Price-wise, it is not the cheapest one on the market, but it provides the fastest automation and the best training that I have ever seen for RPA, through the UiPath Academy. It's really easy to set up a new developer in this environment. Everything considered, the pricing is very good.

There are no costs in addition to the standard licensing fees.

We are currently evaluating Kryon RPA.

My advice for anyone who is implementing UiPath is to always check the documentation before you try to look for answers on the forum. Another good point is that when you have a problem, there are plenty of people in the UiPath community that can help you in a few minutes. This is the perfect solution, in this case.

From the maintenance side, you have to remember to increase your database with the scaling up of the automation because it can really slow down your process.

The biggest lesson that I have learned from using UiPath is to always create a backup copy of Orchestrator before you update it. This was a very big lesson for us because we had an issue with the installation. It is also really important to back up the related databases.

I would rate this solution an eight out of ten.

We are a communications company who works with a lot of clients in our country. Now, we started using automation when working with business clients. Many processes were being done manually, e.g., activation of numbers. In order to alleviate the work of our sales team, this process was automated.

I haven't automated any of my work because the queue for processes that need to be automated is large.

My company uses Studio for our developers and StudioX for attended robots.

It is very important that we can scale automations without having to pay attention to the infrastructure. After one year, we have already automated almost 200 processes. Since the number of automated processes was large, a lot of people's time was freed. This solution is very important because we have a large subscriber base in our country, so we have become very efficient.

UiPath enables us to implement end-to-end automation, starting with process analysis, then robot building, and finally monitoring of automation. This is very important to my company because in the future we will have contracts with UiPath to sell licenses and provide the same experience to other companies, helping them automate their process. Therefore, it was very important to implement the entire end-to-end process in our company.

Attended automation has helped to scale RPA benefits in my organization by automating department or role specific processes in sales and HR that require human robot collaboration. This is important to my company. The department who works on automation of internal processes has had a lot of meetings with our employees. They realized that employees could be against their automation processes and sabotage them. This didn't happen, but they have effectively implemented the attended robots for our employees' work by explaining to them that the robots are not a threat to their job. They would only be helping them, allowing employees to do something more important than doing repetitive tasks on their computers.

UiPath has helped reduce human error. We are working with clients where it is very important to provide them their necessary services. We are a telecom company, so we are providing activation of numbers, etc. If people are doing this manually, it can cause inconveniences for our clients, but it might also put the reputation at stake. For example, because when people do it manually, they can send out the wrong invoice. This is a huge reputation risk, because sometimes we are working not only with just a person, but with a business. When we work with other companies, it is important to do things accurately. When the robots do things, there is almost a 100% probability that they won't make any mistakes, like typos.   

The most important feature of automation is it can automatically detect things where people are doing things repetitively and spending a lot of time. So, people can actually do their real tasks, like making decisions and talking to clients. Therefore, people's time, which was busy with doing manual tasks, is free now. They can spend it on more interesting and valuable work where they can apply their valuable skills.

UiPath Academy starts at the very beginning with how to set up and navigate in UiPath. I noticed that the Studio and StudioX are both user-friendly. It is suitable for people of different existing levels of programming skills, even with those with zero background.

The process mining feature is not being used because my company had some difficulties with it.

UiPath could improve integration with other platforms, like the SAP platform. I heard that SAP has their own automation processes in their platform and they are trying to avoid integrations with RPA platforms. Sometimes, that can be difficult. UiPath's room for improvement is having the ability to integrate with as many platforms as possible.

I have been using it for about three weeks. I have been practicing some tasks and just started learning, but I don't have any advanced development skills.

My company has been using it for a year.

We have automated hundreds of processes.

There are about 30 people on our sales team who are using it. The HR team also uses it.

We didn't use another automation before UiPath.

The initial setup is straightforward, based on what I have seen from UiPath Academy. On the platform, there are videos which describe how to set up. You just go to the platform and download the setup package. You have to set it up on your PC, then open the application. Once the application has been opened, you need to sign in with your email. For the first step, you need to add your email to the application, so email is sent automatically to you when you sign in and the signup is complete. Then, you can start using the Studio and StudioX. It is very convenient because both of them are in the same application, like an all in one software. You don't have to set them up separately because everything is in one place. You can just switch between them in settings, which is very easy and straightforward.

We have people studying how to work on UiPath who are developers. Therefore, we have a whole department doing the setup in our company. I don't think that they are asking a third-party to come in and help. 

We freed up a lot of our sales team's time. For example, they can now spend more time with clients. We have successfully implemented attended robots for our sales team. They now spend half the time doing the job which has been automated. This has made our sales team happy. 

It is very costly to implement RPA. However, I think the benefits outweigh the costs over a long-term period.

Building automations is doable. I understand that it is hard. Some processes need to be adjusted to be automated. Even though sometimes it can take time to create processes for automation, it is still possible and useful to apply automation for many processes. 

I didn't have any background in programming previously. I chose the learning plan for beginners in UiPath Academy. It was very convenient that they divided their learning plans for people with different backgrounds, e.g., beginners or developers. The course is very well-structured and concise. It works perfectly for me and I have the ability to study in the solution without any background experience.

Because we managed to successfully implement it in our company, we now want to help other companies to implement their automation processes.

For my country, UiPath is progressive. It is important for people's mindset that they are able to work with robots and understand they are helpful.

A lot of companies in our country refuse to implement it, or they think it is very expensive, and they don't need this thing, but they should definitely go for it.

My biggest lesson was not to be afraid that robots will do my job. I learned that they are very helpful and can save me time that I can spend on something more useful, like obtaining new skills.

I would rate it as eight out of 10 because of its integration limitations with other platforms. It is also expensive.

We mostly use UiPath in the healthcare and banking/finance sectors. Our use cases depend on the different sectors we use it for. A typical use case would be an Excel file with lakhs (hundreds of thousands) of records that we need to filter and apply some business rules to. We may have to check whether numbers are in integer or alphanumeric format so that they can be accepted by a particular application, or whether date data is formatted correctly.

We use it for end-to-end automation. We take all the input from users, regarding the full life cycle of a process, and use UiPath to create a business solution. An end-to-end project can include taking an Excel file and putting the data into a data table. Based on that, we create some business rules, check things with validations, and then create some templates. We upload the templates for different legacy applications so that they can be automated. A bot will run these scenarios in the backend, in either attended or unattended mode.

We may take student records and place those records into a particular template which we then upload to an application, whether a web application or a desktop application. If a human was involved in doing this, it would take days to filter the Excel and create a template based on a particular record. But by setting up some business rules through UiPath coding, it automatically applies those rules to create the template and upload it to the application. We can then send a notification to the user by email, because we have connectivity with Gmail, Outlook, and SMTP.

A human being can work eight hours or nine hours per day on average, but a robot can run 24/7. With automation, we can save time and money by continuously running things on the same machine without any errors. The accuracy can be 90 or even 100 percent, depending on the logic of the code. It also helps the communication between clients, users, and our organization, improving the partnership. It definitely reduces human error because it's automated and well-tested. It increases work volume because it's very fast. In terms of the amount of time it saves, for repetitive tasks it can save 90 percent of an employee's time. Employee satisfaction has definitely increased.

UiPath is also helping us to increase the number of tasks we can do. For example, if a human being is reading an Excel, doing some operations and validations within it, it will take hours or days to complete. But using a UiPath robot, we can simply create the set of necessary instructions in our code so that it will run within minutes or even seconds sometimes. It is very fast.

We use every component of UiPath, from Studio to Orchestrator. It's very helpful and it is very fast. Orchestrator is very beneficial because we only need to create a particular robot once and then we can simply connect it to machines. It definitely saves time because we only need to maintain the versions of a package and the code, and that can be done locally or via Studio. Because there is a chance code could be deleted on a local machine, the fact that Orchestrator is in the cloud means we can definitely retrieve it from there.

Orchestrator also helps save time because there are scenarios where we have multiple stages of input, where something depends on a value. As developers, we don't need to provide the particular input and again publish the same package. We just go to the cloud, check the process, check the assets, change the value, and it will automatically update. It's a robust solution. Like its name, Orchestrator really does help us orchestrate things.

Also, non-technical people, the users, can see what is happening in their jobs. They can check the status of particular scheduled jobs and see whether they are running or busy, and how many bots there are.

Attended robots are also helpful because sometimes we have a scenario where a user cannot share credentials because everything must be secure. In that type of situation, we need attended automation that can be run on a particular machine in front of the user. While it's running, they can do other work on the same machine. That kind of implementation enables us to automate while keeping things more secure. This is important to us because security is a main concern. It allows users to keep their information safe, rather than making it available on other machines. It's their intellectual property and we respect that.

The most valuable features are some of the panels in UiPath Studio. For example, there is a debugging panel and a Designer panel. The debugging panel is useful because without it we could not solve any problems. The debugging panel provides functionality such as Step Into and Step Out, and we have highlight buttons. It helps us to analyze our code, what is wrong in a solution, and debug from the start to the end, to make the solution better.

The Designer panel is where we create a workflow or step-by-step process, the place where a developer develops the code.

Within UiPath Automation Cloud, we are using Orchestrator in which we can

• deploy the bots and maintain services
• create attended and unattended robots for different versions of machines and manage which robot runs in a particular environment
• use the queue to manually configure the times that bots repeatedly run. Using Orchestrator, we can simply schedule the target application. The queue also has a retry mechanism so that it will automatically take input, and we can specify the number of retries
• store a user's ID and password credentials in the Orchestrator database
• check the Orchestrator home page for what processes and jobs are running, and see any feedback on them, as well as the output
• see the logs in Orchestrator.

They are currently working on most of the things I have thought about that need improvement, such as connectivity with other software and AI/ML capabilities.

But one area for improvement is connected to the fact that it's completely based on Visual Basic .NET and C#. I would like to see some more basic activities that are particular to the VB.NET code, as well as activities based on LINQ queries because that is one of the fastest and most integrated languages. I would like to see pre-written activities so that we could simply drag and drop them into place and use them frequently. It would be better to not have to go into the syntax for that particular language code. I would prefer if we could use activities from the Activities panel, and just provide the input and output, and they would work in the backend.

I have been using UiPath for the past two years. I have very good experience in this particular tool, as an RPA developer. I have created enterprise solutions and business solutions from end-to-end.

The solution is stable because it has been developed precisely and it's already optimized. It depends on the user's input and on the architecture and the environments. We have very good stability.

UiPath is very scalable. It depends on the user's requirements and on the approach we follow. A modular approach makes it more scalable. For example, if we have different VMs, different accounts, or different licenses for the machines on which we are running, we can simply create one package and we can deploy it on the various machines, if we have the licenses for those robots. 

You can create one set of code or a package and run it anywhere, if it is suitable and the requirements are met. That's one reason the scalability is very good. 

We have a huge market and a huge environment. We can continuously run with a multi-bot architecture. If the code is developed that way, it will definitely increase the scalability.

UiPath is used by many users in our company. Their roles are varied. They could be in data analytics or they could just be doing some tedious task.

The business side is happy with the solution because it is decreasing tedious and repetitive tasks. They are happy with the time and money savings. As a result, they want to do other things via UiPath robots. They want to find other processes where the work can be done more productively.

UiPath support enables us to manage issues by creating non-production and production tickets. We can discuss issues in calls and show them examples of the particular issue or activity under discussion. They provide us with support. Sometimes, when activities are not working, we can upgrade and downgrade the version of that particular activity. We can even send logs to them so that they can analyze and troubleshoot issues. It definitely helps.

I have only used UiPath for RPA. I have read about tools like Blue Prism and Automation Anywhere,  but I cannot compare them. They all have their own advantages and disadvantages. I like UiPath because it's user-friendly and it has a very big community in the forums. We can learn from the community. And the UiPath Academy provides training, certification, and diplomas so that a person can learn and develop the ability to create a solution.

The initial setup is a little complex. You need high-end knowledge. You need to create the Studio setup on the different VM environments, deal with the licenses, and the Orchestrator setup. All of that requires good knowledge. You need to understand infrastructure and how things are set up. It's complex for regular users. The installation itself is relatively easy, but understanding the infrastructure is challenging. With guidance and training, it definitely becomes easier.

Licenses are costly, but, in the long run, UiPath will definitely help the business. Developing a solution is a one-time investment, which can be completed in a couple of days. But that work will be done next month, and again and again for the next 10 years. It definitely helps with digital transformation because it can connect solutions and create better opportunities.

UiPath is a good investment and return on that investment is very good. We can create robust solutions with UiPath.

Some licenses might be costly but it depends on the type of work involved and the turnaround time required. If you want to include AI/ML bots, it will definitely cost you more. If you want to use some of the latest features, like UiPath Insights, that will cost more.

But for low-level bots and automation and normal use of Orchestrator, the cost is per-bot.

Overall, pricing of the Enterprise Edition is pretty good. And for practice, we have the Community Edition, which is free. They also provide trial robots for two months so that we can use them for learning.

When it comes to implementation, we think about how to make a solution robust so that it can be controlled and configurable. That way, if something changes in the future, we can work on it accordingly. It should be a modular approach.

You need to focus on requirements-gathering so that you can focus on exactly what the user wants, how the application behaves, and what kinds of errors might happen. You need to check all the environmental factors. Those are all lessons I have learned from creating UiPath automations. You also need to analyze things from the business perspective and think about how much money and time is being invested and what the ROI will be in the end.

End-to-end automation, starting with process analysis, then robot building, and finally monitoring of the automation, is a very important aspect of UiPath. Rather than starting directly with the coding, we analyze the business process so that we know how the business is manually doing something and understand their problems and how much effort they are putting into it. We then start to think about how we can use a bot to save time and money. Each phase of the process life cycle is important because, phase-by-phase, things need to be passed from one to the other as input. After delivering the automation to production, we need to provide monitoring services so that if there is an error or downtime, we can make changes. That is why each phase is important in the life cycle of RPA.

From the business perspective, we check what kind of automation is involved and how much time and money we can save by automating, as these kinds of projects are high-budget. The main goal is to run the business as fast as we can. We analyze whether it is suitable for the business and how it can be profitable. We look for processes where we can save 85 to 95 percent of the time or money involved. We also consider how much human error is involved in the process as it is.

Currently, we are not using the AI/ML functionality. But because I use the Community Edition of UiPath in my personal work, and it has the latest features, I have attended the training for AI Center provided by the UiPath Academy. I tried some analysis with these models, as well as the checking of words by AI/ML, in the Community Edition, and it is one of the excellent features. It's very useful. ML models are amazing. They are using APIs which are connected to Orchestrator and they are running those kinds of models. We can also deploy our own custom models if we know the AI/ML tools.

UiPath is one of the best tools available in RPA and it's currently booming. It's the perfect tool because the UI is very friendly. It is widely used. I believe pretty much everybody in the IT industry is working on an RPA solution, many with the help of UiPath. It depends on the particular business and whether they have the capacity, but everybody wants to increase use of UiPath because it provides cloud-based automation and it's a robust solution. Everybody is happy with the solution. They want to create more automated processes so that they can decrease that time and costs in their overall projects.

I'm working on a supply chain management project, where some of the distributors are eligible for some of their stock to be returned. The beginning of this stock rotation, and the interactions, are through email. It was previously done by representatives, but we are now automating that process so that we interact with the distributors using email. Responses are sent based on the validations that the bot performs. It's an end-to-end process, all automated using the UiPath.

The project I'm working on creates a lot of availability for employees to concentrate on other activities. Human interaction is reduced. Instead of all the management representatives interacting with front-end people, UiPath is interacting through the API. It has increased the time available to our associates who were working on that particular process. If 10 people were working on a particular process, that number has been reduced to three or four, and the other people have been able to concentrate on something else. The stock rotation process itself would usually take a month in a particular region, but that has been reduced to less than 15 days.

We have also automated a few processes that have human and bot interaction, using UiPath Action Center. When there is human interaction in a particular process, it takes a lot of time. But when we integrated a process with the bot through Action Center, the time needed for the human interaction was reduced. It gives time back to the person who would be doing repetitive work. For example, if a value is different from what the bot is expecting, an Action Center task will be triggered and the human will submit the input that is needed. The rest of the process will then be taken care of by the bot. So the time spent on a particular validation is reduced.

Also, if you compare the situation from a couple of years back, when I started using UiPath, and the present, there has been a lot of change in the way UiPath comes up with new products when it comes to document validation, such as Document Understanding. That does speed up the digital transformation process, and I haven't seen any requirements for additional infrastructure as a condition for benefiting from that transformation process.

UiPath has also helped to reduce human error, and that reduces the time that a particular process takes to run.

For beginners, UiPath is a very low-code or no-code experience. They can get started with StudioX. The best place to learn the solution is the UiPath Academy. If they come across any hurdles, the forum is an excellent place to post them and get answers. As a community, UiPath is very encouraging for newcomers. People with no coding experience can automate processes.

Initially, because I was working with Automation Anywhere, the switch was a little bit overwhelming. There are comparatively more Activities in UiPath. The scope is very large; you can automate large processes. But eventually, I have come to feel that building automation is easier in UiPath than with Automation Anywhere.

Also, in my experience using UiPath automation, we have not had to make any changes to infrastructure. It has really been a seamless interaction.

We don't use the UiPath Apps feature yet. I did a PoC on it and it looks like a wonderful product. But when we are using Action Center with Apps, the Action Center stage is built in Orchestrator, but the same field is not built in the Apps. We have to work around that particular process, to make Action Center and Apps work together. Action Center waits for a particular input when a particular task is triggered. This stage is not built in Apps. UiPath Apps should be stepped up in terms of its functionality and integration with other UiPath products.

I have been using UiPath for almost three years.

I did come across an issue very recently where, when I had to update the version of the Activity package I used for a particular deployment, the Data Table Activity, it did not list the way it had been listed. I raised a question in the forum, but there was no clear answer. Apart from that, I haven't seen any other instability with UiPath.

UiPath is scalable. We have deployed bots across many regions. There was no limit in that respect. I haven't seen any issue; the scalability is good.

I work in the automation center of excellence in our company. There are 50 to 60 teammates there, working on UiPath and Automation Anywhere. In UiPath, they work on the automation of SAP. In addition to my work on supply chain automation, there are a couple of projects dealing with our customers' needs. Our organization builds products that are generic and we then customize them to meet those customer needs. There are also some projects where Excel activity is the focus. And we recently started using Document Understanding in a PoC. We generally have two or three developers working on deployment, along with one DevOps person. Not many people are required for deployment.

I haven't contacted UiPath tech support, other than posting that Data Table Activity question in the forum.

I was working with Automation Anywhere for a year or so, but because of the requirements of our company, I had to switch to UiPath. The switch happened because a customer we work for deploys UiPath.

I have been able to learn things like interaction with multiple enterprise systems, including OBI, using API calls. Unlike other automation applications I have used, implementing a process using UiPath is very easy.

In terms of end-to-end automation, there are products that are useful for identifying processes for automation. But for the process I'm working on right now, we did not use UiPath to implement end-to-end automation. Identifying the process for automation was done separately. Only building the bot was done in the UiPath. The process is not end-to-end, except for the bot development. When I think of "end-to-end," it includes identification of the process for automation. From there, you need to build up the process, the documentation, et cetera. End-to-end is important, as it means you aren't switching between multiple tools.

I'm using the product primarily for building automation projects for shared services users. It's for internal customers. It's a shared services center for finance, HR, IT, and all processes like that.

UiPath enables you to implement end-to-end automation starting with process analysis, then robot building, and finally the monitoring of automation.

I use UiPath mainly for building a robot. I always use unattended bots. However, I also use it for task capture. I use the Task Capture feature a lot. It's pretty much a game-changer since Task Capture has become available, as creating documentation takes a lot less time than before. As for UiPath, I'm using it for building a solution and then testing using not only UiPath but also Orchestrator. In the end, we also use some document templates from UiPath. It's pretty much present all the way through the life of a project.

UiPath has sped up or reduced the cost of digital transformation in our organization.

For me as a professional developer, this is an obvious fact, however, people can notice that the robot can do their job a lot faster and they can concentrate on completely different things. They don't have to do simple tasks, repetitive tasks, and that's when they realize that this transformation is happening. Some people did not believe that it would happen so fast, yet, by using UiPath, we can prove to user that a process can be transformed into an automated one in a really short time.

It's reduced human errors in our company as well. I can use an example as a VAT declaration. That's one error that would cause some financial consequence for our business. After creating an automated project process, it is impossible for a declaration to be submitted with an error. It's basically eliminated typos or human errors in the case of VAT declarations and financial consequences.

The solution has freed up employee time. It's difficult to estimate how much as there are a lot of projects and I'm not the only developer on. However, thanks to my bots, we could free up, so far in half a year in this company, two FTEs, two full-time employees. Obviously, it doesn't mean that these people were let off. They are doing their job, however, they've just got different tasks, more complex tasks to do.

Mostly I'm using Studio. This is my main tool for work, and, for Studio, I can say that this is my favorite out of all the automation platforms. 

I like the fact that you can use and customize activities from the marketplace. The fact that even though the built-in activity sometimes cannot cope with some tasks, you can still find solutions outside of UiPath, internal kinds of built-in functions. You can use the third-party package marketplace. 

I like the way it handles debugging as it's very comfortable and it keeps the project under control. 

I'm also using Orchestrator. The newer version of Orchestrator is really very user-friendly and it's easy to manage projects there.

For basic automation, it's very easy to learn and it's easy to use. It's intuitive for basic functions. However, for more complicated automation, it gets more complicated. This is expected. The more advanced the project, the more advanced the skills you need. That said, as a basic product for simple automation, it's very easy to use.

The solution is user-friendly and has great training materials available.

I use the solution for automating my own work sometimes. I work at building small robots to make work go faster. For example, I'll create a robot that will help to create documentation. For example, analyzing arguments and workflows inside a project and outputting them in a DXC file or things like that. It's small ad hoc automation that makes life easier.

At the moment, I'm pretty satisfied with it. Thinking about UiPath, I can't see any downsides and the downsides are in like companies' infrastructure.

At this point, debugging, for me, is lacking the ability to edit on the go. It lacks the ability to stop the process on a breakpoint and being able to edit or even go a step back. At the moment when I'm debugging I'm only able to stop the process, check the locals etc. It is not possible to change anything in the code, go step back and try the changed code. You have to start the debugging process from the beginning. It is just slightly annoying and it was there since I started with version 2016. It's not a showstopper at all, just adds some time to development. I'm not even sure it could be done technically, it's just a wish.

I've been using the solution for about four years at this point. I've used it for a while. 

There are occasional errors happening, which cause the software to freeze up. However, this is not more than once every two weeks and I'm always able to recover the project. I would say it's stable. Regarding working automation, I also have no problems as the errors that we have on ready robots never result from UiPath's issues. They result more often from infrastructure issues or robot problems.

Regarding UiPath scalability, it's great. It's one of the biggest advantages. Over the years, you're able to build a library of modules that sometimes make your work a lot faster. You can use a few modules and you will have 70% of the project done. Every module that you work on, which is new and can be reusable, is very easy to make into libraries and to reuse.

In my organization, closest to me, there are only about five or six people on the solution. However, we also use external contractors and consultants who use UiPath and there are even UiPath MVPs there. That said, in my company, it's only developers, operators, and a project manager.

We have plans to employ more developers and to increase usage. 

We have an RPA department, which is using it and it's cooperating with all other departments in terms of creating automation. We have specialists that are specializing in using UiPath for automation. We create automation projects for every department that requires it. The people who are using UiPath are using it pretty much full-time. It's a full-time development. We are planning to increase the size of the development team as the projects are flowing and the backlog is growing. From the business side of our company, the satisfaction is high. The demand is growing.

The solution has exceeded my expectations over the last few months and technical support overall has been great. The way they approach customer service and help us through issues has been great.

The initial setup is pretty straightforward. I'm not a system admin or anything like that and I was able to set up UiPath on the server. It's pretty good.

How long it takes depends on the database that I'm working on. That said, last time it was not even the one full working day. It depends on how much data you have to back up. Usually, it's a few hours.

While I'm not the correct person to ask about ROI, I can say that UiPath has reduced the cost of our automation operations by making it 30% faster. 

I don't know the exact prices, however, I know that compared to other companies, other solutions, it's the best value for money, at least in our country.

I tried Automation Anywhere and also Blue Prism. At that time, there were only these three available for us. That was four years ago.

We are customers and end-users of the solution.

We use the enterprise edition of the solution.

At the moment we are not using the newest version. It's 2019.

It was not my choice to use UiPath. At the beginning of my automation career, it was chosen for me. However, I was able to test other automation software and give my feedback to the employer and UiPath was the winner for me. At that time I was a finance worker. I was not a developer, a professional developer yet. For me, it was the user-friendliness and the way that you could very easily start your adventure with it, and then learn as you go. I have to say that the training packages for UiPath were very good and are enough to make you start working with it.

In my experience, I would say that it is the best platform for people who are willing to learn to automate. Also, if you want to use automation software, you have to consider hiring someone who has experience in it. Even though UiPath is so user-friendly and so intuitive, you still need to have a professional who has some experience.

It's very important to educate people to make them aware of what the RPA is. To be honest, from my experience, humans are the weakest link here, and people who are submitting, for example, input data for robots, cause the most problems. It is important to invest in the education of people and to raise awareness about RPA. 

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

I am a service provider and developer who implements UiPath for our clients. But in the company that I work for, we also use UiPath to make invoices for ourselves and, mainly, for payroll activities.

We need to get reports from our HR tool and combine them with another source of information where employees are recording the hours they spent with various clients. We then create the documents needed for the IRS. In our case, all the users of UiPath are data entry specialists in different departments, such as HR, finances, and marketing.

UiPath definitely helps reduce the cost of digital transformation.

It also reduces human error. We can be sure, given that our test case is successful, that there are no errors when none are reported. This definitely helps businesses. Errors generally lead to work being postponed. When errors come back to someone at a given point in time, they can rapidly overwhelm that person. With automation working, this is no longer the case because everything is smooth. And if there are errors, they will resolve them one by one.

In addition, it definitely frees up employee time. That is the purpose of automation. Unfortunately, I can't share metrics about this. But the additional time enables employees to focus on more important work and that affects employee satisfaction. Repetitive tasks make people irritated about the nature of their work. When they can work on new tasks that are more complex and creative, it makes an impact on their job satisfaction.

UiPath saves costs in our organization because we don't have errors where it is deployed and because it has reduced the number of FTEs who do repetitive tasks. On average, within a small company, it can save up to 10 FTEs.

One of the most valuable features is that UiPath is easy to deploy, especially for medium-sized companies. It is also easy to scale.

Also, the fact that you can scale automations without having to pay attention to the infrastructure for doing so is quite critical. The infrastructure could require a lot of maintenance resources and affect costs, so that feature is quite important.

UiPath enables you to implement end-to-end automation, with its full range of tools, starting from Automation Hub, which is the initial point for gathering your processes from business lines. It's driven from employees or a center of excellence, and goes on to include implementation, and the reporting in Orchestrator is quite powerful as well. The end-to-end coverage is important, as clients always like one tool that covers their needs and plans.

The only thing missing is something to track the development cycle. We use third-party tools to do that. That is the only gap in UiPath.

Also, scheduling of UiPath robots could be improved. Scheduling is a feature for defining in what sequence, and on what machines, you want your automations to be launched. That area could be improved.

I have been using UiPath for more than three years.

Overall, the stability of UiPath is about average. We do have some instability, because of workloads that are too massive for Orchestrator, but it could be that it was not installed in the right way.

Scalability is connected to the stability. The situation I noted when talking about the stability of UiPath happened for our largest client, where they already have 160 processes running. There are problems with the maintenance of such a large number of bots.

But in terms of increasing our usage, we are in a phase with our clients in which we are constantly enlarging the automation within their companies.

UiPath support is definitely willing to help. They will usually propose a call, if they think that will be easier for solving an issue. Their services are quite good.

We did not have a previous solution, except for Excel macros.

It is relatively easy to deploy. Of course, it's not as straightforward as a simple application installation, but with the help of UiPath, in particular, or with the help of the UiPath Community Forum, which is quite enhanced with answers about installation, it's not a big deal to install it.

Taking into consideration internal IT restriction and internal IT resources, deployment can take up to two weeks.

Our deployment strategy usually involves convincing clients that they need to start setting up a center of excellence for automation and then there are lots of initiatives that need to be undertaken within the center of excellence. Among the most critical are awareness, dealing with IT stakeholders, and of course, the capabilities of developers. Taking care of those things will lead you to a smooth path for digitizing the first processes, which are low-hanging fruit. The further you go, the more you can then enhance your automation with the more advanced capabilities, like AI, Document Understanding, or chat bots, et cetera.

Deployment of one robot takes about three months and up to five people. We need an SME who knows the process that is being automated. In addition, there is usually a business analyst who tries to help optimize the process so that it will work better with robots. We need a developer, of course, and we usually have a data solution architect who helps to ensure that overall infrastructure is functioning. It also helps to have an automation evangelist on the business side.

We have two roles for UiPath maintenance. One is the IT maintenance guy who makes sure the VM is working correctly, and that we can easily scale from the infrastructure perspective. The second role is the operator, whose day-to-day tasks include scheduling the bots correctly, implementing quick deployments by creating assets in Orchestrator, and maintaining things from an RPA perspective.

ROI usually takes six to 12 months.

Licensing is quite complex, and sometimes that's true even when we have to explain it to our customers. There may not be a way to do it more simply.

The only potential additional cost when implementing UiPath involves the third-party tools. It can be a quite big portion, of course, so you should consider that aspect. Examples would be integrating different systems within a company, systems such as Salesforce, SAP, or ServiceNow; all of the main CRMs that businesses use.

We looked at the main competitors, Blue Prism and Automation Anywhere. The decision to go with UiPath was based on contacts we have, clients who had already implemented RPA. We got better feedback about UiPath from them.

The first thing to consider within your organization is whether it's easier to deploy it on-prem or via the cloud version. Then focus on how to structure your development team. It can be either entirely a third-party service provider, or in-house developers, or it could be a hybrid. The third thing to consider is what the cost center will be for RPA implementation in your company.

The marketing side of how easily you can build automations with UiPath is a bit exaggerated. You definitely need some programming skills to do very powerful automations with it. But it still provides various levels of development tools, meaning that you could have zero programming experience and still automate some processes in your company.

UiPath is definitely the market leader in RPA. The biggest lesson I have learned from using it is to start with the low-hanging fruit, and then go on to more complex stuff.

We have a cross-platform infrastructure, where two servers are sitting. We have Orchestrator, which we connect to our virtual desktop infrastructure (VDI). In the VDI, we have a UiPath stationed. 

From India, I work for an Australian client. Previously, I worked for a European client. In order to work with the client network, we have a dedicated Wipro laptop. In that Wipro laptop, we log in and connect via the VDI. In that VDI, we have UiPath Studio. Using UiPath Studio, we are doing development for the client and automating functional business processes.

We are extracting data from Salesforce using a particular report that is sent by the business SMEs. We pick exact fields end-to-end, then we put these values into Salesforce. Next, we extract the value and data from Salesforce, putting that into an Excel application. After putting the return to Excel application, we generate a service request for the business and send transaction reports of the bot's performance and accuracy at the end of the day. The business was taking around four to five hours. Our robot takes around eight to nine minutes in order to automate this end-to-end automation.

For another use case, there is an application that submits invoices for an insurance client in Australia. Right now, the business is doing this. Whereas, the bot operations reads a file on the hard drive, picks up that file, and puts it into SharePoint where the bot performs some operations. After doing those operations, the bot will report the status, whether it is valid, invalid, or an exception. When we get the file, we develop the application that submits the invoice. After that, we capture the data from the Excel application and submit a request. This is an end-to-end process. This bot only runs after business hours, five days a week, so it doesn't impact the application. With this process, we send daily transaction reports, the success ratio to the client, and present the entire picture to our peers and business holders.

We have set up our own cloud, which is internal. UiPath has a different cloud. Per our governance, we are not allowed to use another cloud. We are using our hosted internal cloud, which is hosted on our internal servers in Australia.

With our rule-based tasks, we pick the processes which involve a higher transaction volume and run many times in a week or month. Next, we analyze how much time the subject-matter experts (SMEs) uses to do their end-to-end journey. We calculate that, then decide the scope of the operation and whether to use an attended bot or unattended bot. We do analysis to determine which parts of the operation can be attended and unattended. Our preference would be the unattended bot, because it handles a lot of volume and is uninterrupted. 

In our analysis, we thoroughly check the scope of the application, whether it is a legacy or new application, and the dynamic nature of the data. Based on this, we define certain rules. Combining these rules, we design a complete end-to-end solution and give a presentation to the business that this is our commitment, e.g., this is the amount of Average Handle Time (AHT) and FTE that the bot will do. FTE means that if four people are doing a task, then it will give me back four FTEs. We then calculate the cost, meaning how much they are paying to that FTE and the cost of the bot. We compare the two and present our case. If the numbers are good, and the business agrees, then we proceed further in our discussions with them. This is the power of analytics.

We don't need that much infrastructure. If an analyst is doing reporting with an Excel sheet, then we can give him a bot and capture what he is doing without paying attention to the infrastructure. From the captured information, we give them a bot that will help them to do their regular task. This process helps them to understand automation while not investing in infrastructure. 

We design end-to-end solutions. We have different roles, teams, and divisions. I am part of the technical department, so I design the solution. I am responsible for analyzing and developing the solution. Once I develop the solution, I monitor the bot for two weeks, which is the "hypercare period". After the business is satisfied that the bot is performing, we give it to the support team. This is how our RPA lifecycle flows. It has around nine stages, including discovery, analysis, design, development, support, presentation, and solution. 

We have developed a bot process called "Padlock". In "Padlock", there is security development. It is very important that the user input his credentials. Per the governance of the process, we are not allowed to store the credentials on the cloud. It is very dynamic and encrypted. We have deployed about 25 robots for this particular process. The robot does its job after the SME. After a certain point, there is a CAPTCHA. The robot helps the SME do things, and they need to input their credentials and click the CAPTCHA, which happens in real-time. They verify all the information, giving them more confidence in their regular processes. We have deployed a large number of bots using this process. This has brought a lot of value because we have saved on a good number of costs when it comes to attended automation. 

I have found Orchestrator is UiPath's most valued feature. It has the ability to automate different applications, such as, mainframe automation and Excel macros. It is so efficient. We can download up to seven days back in just one click, monitoring errors.

It gives you the ability to efficiently monitor the bot.

With the new updates, a lot of analytics have come from AI Center.

Its features help us showcase what the bot has done and efficiently delivered to the business.

They are improving the OCR feature for reading text and images as well as the operations for automating that. They have integrated third-party OCRs, such as, SharePoint, ServiceNow, Salesforce, and mainframe automation.

The advantage of using StudioX is I can see how long the bot will take or what went wrong for any particular use case.

In the future, I would like new services that can utilize robots as a service (RaaS).

Our legacy applications are a bit old, so we get issues sometimes in automating those. However, modern applications are very compatible with the UiPath tool.

We have seen that UiPath doesn't have the capability to identify unknown pop-ups. This needs improvement.

The API needs a lot of improvements because it does not give proper results. There are always some issues with the logs.

When it comes to real-time scenarios, we see in production that Citrix automation always crashes. This integration could bring a lot of value to UiPath. Our business could save a lot of time and money if we could automate Citrix effectively.

All of our code resides in GitHub, which is our central repository for managing the code. There was a performance issue using GitHub with UiPath; it was slow. They have recently upgraded the performance so we are happy with it now.

I have been using UiPath for more than four years.

We always design a stable unattended solution that helps the business.

If fields are scattered, then the bot might get confused. 

Maintenance is handled by our support team. When something crashes, our dedicated support team monitors the bot. If the application crashes in production, the bot will send an application link to the support team and business stakeholders because the bot has faced some downtime in the application and kindly look into that issue.

Because I have automated a lot of enterprise solutions, I would go with the UiPath tool. They are frequently rolling out updates to the software. It is very stable compared to other tools in the market.

Infrastructure is quite important at an enterprise level. There are a lot of mundane and repetitive tasks. Once we have the infrastructure, then we set up best practices and governance. Based on that infrastructure, everything can scale up. Though, if we are going to build a lot of bots on a personal laptop to automate something small, then infrastructure is not as important with that.

We started with two to three bots. Now, we have around 25-plus bots. There are around 300 to 350 using both attended and unattended automation.

I have spoken a number of times with the UiPath product team. Initially, we were not able to use Excel, so we contacted the UiPath team. They provided a solution. They support the product well. I would rate the tech support as seven out of 10.

I have previously used Selenium. We switch because of scope. The Selenium tool was good with bot automation. With UiPath, we can do various automations, like mainframes, ServiceNow, SharePoint, etc. In order to increase implementation of automation from my end, I started with UiPath. I liked it because of its ability to automate applications. Those are the main reasons that I switched from Selenium to UiPath and SoapUI to UiPath.

The initial setup and deployment are pretty straightforward. They provide free training, which is a good thing. We do the training correctly and religiously. Once we are good with the training along with a little programming knowledge that we have acquired over the years, it is easy to adapt and work on UiPath because it is structured and organized. 

Our setup is a mixture. Orchestrator is hosted on a server and the application is installed on a desktop or system.

In order to use UiPath on servers, we need to set up two servers: one in Australia and the second in New Zealand. 

The implementation is not that big of a task. It is very organized.

It has been a huge monetary benefit. Since the bot has been running for two and half years, it has given my organization a lot of business. When I joined Wipro in 2019, there was one guy who was developing the bot. We named the bot, "win-back". As the name suggests, 'win-back' means winning customers back. That was a maintenance bot which possessed a lot of qualities. If a person was physically doing the task, then we might need to spend $90,000 on them. This is the difference. While the robot has some costs, they are not huge when compared to the salary or compensation that we give to an SME. This is how an organization can scale up, because the bot works accurately 24/7 without any maintenance. Also, seeing the bot's accuracy, as well as the volume that it handles, motivates other business holders to go for automation.

We automated an internal solution because there were long keywords that led to spelling mistakes, since spelling mistakes don't look good on invoices. Therefore, we input this extracted data to an application, using end-to-end automation. This reduced human errors tremendously. For example, with the "win-back" solution, errors tended to happen because the volume is high. Therefore, we wrote a code that has reduced errors for the "win-back" solution.

Because of the bot's accuracy, it has saved us a lot of time and money, making the life of the subject-matter experts easier. It is a win-win situation. They are making the most of the bot, running it continuously. They don't need to wait for a particular report. For example, people, in our organization, work eight hours then send a status mail, which says, "I have done all these tasks." Instead of having us create the report directly, the bot saves a lot of time. 

The bot marks in the report what is successful and unsuccessful as well as the reason for not being successful, e.g., if it was an application, data, or particular element issue. There are a lot of areas that we call "exceptions". Every day, we are getting all these details in one go. Whereas, a person would be frustrated or bored providing all these figures. That is the cost of human error. If you are not paying attention to a particular task, then errors will happen naturally. 

The bot currently performs four times faster than the SMEs for the tasks that we automated.

After three or six months, we send out a survey to different SMEs in various production areas, asking how the bot is doing. From the survey, we have found that the bot is helping them out a lot. They are very satisfied with it.

The solution has reduced our costs by approximately five percent.

I have seen very high ROI from the processes that we automated. It is very good to invest in automation.

There are three leaders in the market: UiPath, Automation Anywhere, and Blue Prism. UiPath is in-between the two. BluePrism is on the higher end when it comes to pricing. Automation Anywhere is on the lower side when it comes to pricing. When comparing the automation of business processes, analyze the amount of work that your organization will save using automation, particularly compared to the pricing.

You will be compensated for buying the product when you see processes automating.

I also evaluated Automation Anywhere, Blue Prism, and EdgeVerve (which I used in a previous organization).

The trend of the other technologies is moving to the cloud. Other competitors of UiPath, like Automation Anywhere and Blue Prism, have already moved their applications onto the cloud. This brings more robustness to the product, because its performance is significantly increased. It is also very scalable when putting in new features. 

I have attended a lot of UiPath's webinars.

We are in the initial stages of using the AI functionality.

The RPA technology is part of our digital transformation. For example, we are doing digital transformation by automating the Salesforce application.

They roll out an update every three months. With every update, we see a lot of new features. We are always exploring using those features so we can automate the stuff.

Don't rely completely on the UiPath tool to achieve automation. You should have some background and knowledge to understand what can be automated. There isn't a magical algorithm for building robots. You educate the robot on what can be automated.

We always rate a product based on other products. I would rate this product as nine and a half out of 10.

Most of the time, we work with financial services to automate financial transaction monitoring systems. We go through multiple CRM and financial systems, then query the transactions based on the KYC information. We use OCR operations, using UiPath Robot, to fetch information, such as, identification number, passport number, and their tax information. We extract this information, then validate with our financial data or transactions data to ensure that there is no fraud nor anomalies in the system. If there are any suspicious transactions or potential fraud, we do manual investigations. Those manual investigations are redirected from the robot to a human agent, then the human agent verifies the information. If there are any cost validation requests from other systems, such as Salesforce and PeopleSoft, then another bot will be triggered using UiPath Orchestrator. After that, we do the remaining processing. At the end of the processing, we use the UiPath analytics service. That analytics service uses UiPath logs, which helps us to understand how the bot is performing and how many transactions we have validated. From that, we look at how many were successfully processed and how many were manually handled, i.e., exceptions. We identify business exceptions for any transactions during the initial pre-validation stage, such as the user identification number is not valid or input data validation errors. For example, passport information must be an alphanumeric eight digit. If the bot identifies that the value is not eight digits, but four or five digits, then it is an invalid record straightaway. We can see this from the reporting and performance graphs.

We do automation for our HR processes, such as onboarding processes. On any day, there are five or six people who need to be onboarded. This is one of our standard business cases. We have a UiPath robot design using UiPath Studio and then it deploys in Orchestrator. This robot is being used by the HR admin. They can fill in the key information of the user, e.g., name, level, and their package. So, they import all this information, which includes my identity information, mobile number, email, and IDs on an Excel file, possibly along with a few other associates joining tomorrow. Once those entries are made in the Excel file, then the user can trigger a robot. They also need to keep the file in a designated folder. The robot will read the file from the designated folder. Then, one by one, it will read the records or line items from Excel and open an SAP portal. After logging through the SAP Portal, it inputs the required employee information. After that, it will go to Microsoft Azure Active Directory to QA the user, email, and ID. It will then go to PeopleSoft to create an HR record for the salary information, leave information, and the level at which the associate is joining. At the end of this process, it will update the status to, "The associate has been registered successfully." It will then send the updated final report to HR, saying, "The processing has been completed." The bot triggers information with their newly created email ID. They can then access or receive the onboarding information. This is how it works.

Depending on the client's requirements, we use UiPath AI Center and UiPath Apps for custom requirements. Most of the time, we don't need them. There are some times that we do based on the client's requirements.

I am using UiPath Studio, UiPath Orchestrator, and UiPath Robot.

Initially, I used the on-premises deployment model. For the last two years, we have also been using the cloud deployment option, UiPath Cloud, along with the on-premises. This is based on a client's requirements.

We can use the Process Mining tool to identify opportunities. We can then design the robot using UiPath Studio. After designing it, we can deploy it, using UiPath Studio, to Orchestrator. From Orchestrator, we can manage, monitor, and upgrade all the new patches within the UiPath platform.

If we have one place where we can see the end-to-end journey of our automations, then I do not need to manage multiple licenses. I do not need to spend money and expertise hiring multiple people and training them on multiple platforms. Also, when upgrading the systems, if I have a one place where I can manage all my automations at the same time, including UI and background automations, then we can build low-code apps using UiPath Apps. Therefore, I can manage everything within one platform, which is either a UiPath Intelligent Automation platform or UiPath Cloud. This is very important. Because if I have multiple systems, then I need multiple stakeholders to manage, upgrade, and maintain them. So, we do not need to think about all the things that I am using. There is one place where I can manage everything.

It has enabled us to automate more processes overall. In the initial days, we easily automated the low hanging fruit. As our automation journey matured, we needed to automate processes using more complex methods, like AI, machine learning, and advanced OCR functionalities. 

The UiPath package available on UiPath Studio is useful. Compared to other RPA tools, like Automation Anywhere and Blue Prism, we found that this package gives us the opportunity to automate tasks in the shortest amount of time. There are multiple templates available on UiPath Studio. For example, if I need to do multi-setting processing, which means we are going to process multiple records simultaneously, we can use a UiPath Background Process as a template. Using the template, I can run multiple robots on the same system, which will not interact with other systems. It will work in the background. We have found that really valuable. This is not available with other RPA products, such as Automation Anywhere and Blue Prism. This is one of the valuable things that we have found in UiPath.

We use the UiPath recorder. For the latest, modern experience, we have a recorder called App Integrations. Using that particular recorder, I can automate tasks with multiple systems without thinking about having manual integrations between multiple browsers by identifying multiple sessions. Sessions can be used by the same recorder during the entire automation cycle. For example, I have two screens, one called PeopleSoft and another one is SAP. I can do a keystroke, mouse click, and then hit the submit button within PeopleSoft. Then, at the same time, I have another window open being used by the robot. I don't want to think about separating two windows, so the recorder takes care of this.

The UiPath recorder has multiple ways of identifying. For example, it uses UI elements, fuzzy logic, and image recognition at the same time. These three methods are used by only one recorder. Whereas, with other platforms, like Blue Prism and Automation Anywhere, I can use only one method at a time, so one command is one method for selecting or identifying objects. Whereas, with the app recorders, I can use three methods using one command. So, if one fails, another one will back up the scenario. Then, if another one also fails, the third one will help us automate. That is the ease of automation, which is a valuable feature that helps us ensure that automation works flawlessly, without having to look at if one of the methods failed.

One of the 2018 projects was built using version 18.2. We then got a report from users that it was not working. Most of the time, it failed on multiple use cases. When we took the process from the owner to repair and troubleshoot, we found that many packages were not being recognized by the new version, which is 2020. So, we had to upgrade to the latest package, then do a repair. It took a good amount of time for us to repair the package. We had to go back to the UAT environment, then do testing and get approval from the UAT. We then had to sign-off and deploy pre-production and post-production Hypercare. So, the automation cycle being repeated by almost 40% is quite costly to the business, but this is rare.

The vendor had already noticed these things were a big pain for us. With the recent versions, 2019 and onwards, the compatibility between the activity and packages is there. Prior to that, there were some issues. The UI automation package was the one that was mostly affected. Many people who were early adopters of UiPath observed or experienced these kinds of issues.

Sometimes, when we are using Remote Desktop automations, we may need to use a different approach along with the AI functionalities. For example, if I need to recognize the object on the screen, which I cannot do using native methods, then along with the AI functionality, I may need to have a backup method, such as the OCL methods along with AI Computer Visions. This ensures that it works robustly and my solutions deliver 100% results without any manual intervention. In such complex scenarios, we are using AI features along with multiple methods for the backing up of the AI features. We have to ensure that if something goes wrong with the AI features then we have another method which will ensure, if A fails, then B will back up our solution's process as expected.

I have been using it for the past six years.

We use UiPath AI Center, UiPath AI Computer Vision functionalities, and Document Understanding. These AI features came into the picture from 2019 onwards. First, we received updates using UiPath Computer Vision functionalities. Then, we received AI Center, which was not stable in its initial days. However, during the first quarter of 2020, we received version 2, which seems to be more stable. From there, we received general availability versions with integrations on UiPath Studio and UiPath StudioX. These work much better, as compared to the initial versions. So far, all the components of UiPath Computer Vision, Document Understanding, and UiPath AI Center work well. 

I appreciate other benefits, such as UiPath community support and UiPath enterprise product support, because if anything goes wrong, we search in Google or the UiPath Forum where we can find the answer. Even if the answer is not available, and I post a question, I am quite certain that within one day that I will get someone to respond to the question. It may be someone from the forum or UiPath. Most of the time, the answers are readily available on the UiPath Forums.

UiPath Forum is the one place where we reach out to research problems, do troubleshooting, or get some help. If we need some help regarding the installations or licensing, we can create a ticket. Typically, we get a response, email notifications, or support calls within four to six hours.

We hire fresh, new graduates that we are going to train. UiPath Academies offers numerous training tutorials and certifications, which helps us to train our newly hired resources who are completely new to RPA and UiPath. So, the training is really useful in terms of video tutorial practice and configuring our multilingual environment. UiPath Academy does support English, Chinese, Malay, and German. So, our associates from multiple offices, who are already working on the global initiative, can learn the same things at the same time. Or, they can get someone from an English background.

I started RPA using UiPath.

Using the tool for the last six years, the initial setup is like having breakfast every day; it is very simple. I can do it much faster than someone new who started two years back or the new guy. I know what to do and how to do it.

Because it is software as a service, the setup and configuration time are very quick. Within an hour or two, we can set up the infrastructure deployment for a starter package. Configurations can be done smoothly. The infrastructure deployment, which typically takes a week's time, can be minimized to an hour. This saves us a lot of time and money for multiple components.

In the initial days of 2016 or 2015, our automation journey was center of excellence (COE) based most of the time. Nowadays, we changed our strategy, and it is more employee involved. So, an employee can go into UiPath Automation Hub and submit their idea. If they have time and are interested, we give them the training to use UiPath StudioX features for automation. If a process is complex based on our assessment, we pick that process and do the automation so the COE and employ-driven automation work hand in hand. 

With a simple process, then the employee can automate it and do the PoC. If they need help, we are more than happy to help them. However, we found when the processes are medium to highly complex, this is something professional developers should be working on. If they are interested, they can contribute and learn, but it's less likely that a business user would be involved in a complex automation process.

UiPath has absolutely reduced human error. Infrastructure setup and maintenance are taken care of by the product owner or vendor. So, there is 100% assurance that nothing wrong will happen in the system because they are the people who built and deployed the product. Whenever we deploy, there may be a chance that something might go wrong or configurations went wrong. For example, I need to configure the Internet information services port. If I incorrectly configured the port or use a different method, there is a high chance that I might need to redirect the port to some other router or native firewall. If I use UiPath Cloud, everything is taken care of by UiPath. I just log into assistance, then allocate the license and configure our users.

For small to medium clients, those clients have an investment of about $100,000. We see around six to eight months in, they get something around 40% to 60% ROI being returned to them. Then, within a year to 18 months, they get a 100% to 120% ROI realized.

When we implement a robotics process automation solution using UiPath, and if the client's budget is limited, we mostly encourage the automation journey to be done using UiPath Cloud. UiPath ensures that it works fluidly, performs all upgrade security patches, and has 99.9% uptime.

In the initial days, UiPath was more competitive in terms of the license pricing as compared to Blue Prism and Automation Anywhere; it was much less. Currently, the pricing is quite standard compared to the other two vendors. 

We can use UiPath Cloud, which helps us to save a lot of money and infrastructure costs, if the automation journey or project is for a small to medium-sized company. However, if it is a big company, then on-premises is preferred. 

I have also used Automation Anywhere and Blue Prism as well as open-source automation platforms, such as TagUI and Selenium.

The main pros to using UiPath are its user interface, user-friendliness, learning platform, and support.

We have been using the UiPath Apps feature for the last four or five months, so it is relatively new for us. Most of our technical people are experimenting with UiPath Apps. We have planned training sessions for business users to upskill them.

If you are starting or in your initial days, I advise you to use the UiPath community version. Try first to do a PoC with the community version, trying out the automation in UiPath Cloud for free. Once you realize that this is something good as well as understand the value of it, then you can start with the initial package. If you think that you can start big from the beginning, then go for on-premises and start a large-scale transformation. However, I would advise doing a PoC first with proper guidance from UiPath and selecting a proper implementation consulting partner who has good experience or a solid past track record of doing automation, RPA, the RPA automation journey, and the transformation journey, as a whole. Not just UiPath automations or building robots, but also transforming their project and processes as well as doing Lean Six Sigma, which is a crucial part of the transformation journey. So, you should consider all these factors for a successful automation journey.

Compared to the top three tools, I rate this solution 10 out of 10.

I am currently involved in healthcare-related projects and wholesale/retail-related projects. Previously, I was involved with banking and financial services, healthcare, and retail.

My current company is using a combination of the UiPath tool and SAP automation.

In my previous company, I used the UiPath tool for many projects.

It has a very easy drag and drop process and logic base setup. Previous projects were taking a lot of time. However, when we used UiPath on the same projects, instead of a process/task taking a day, it was now taking anywhere from 10 minutes to five hours.

There is almost no human involvement. For example, in banks, a bank manager will receive so many loan applications. We create some bots to check the requirements after validation and do the follow-up work. The manager is only checking boxes for the final approval request.

In the banking sector, I am using AI Center and creating some workflows. Some machine learning is needed to create these workflows in AI Center. This gives us a 94% accuracy, which is good accuracy.

Document Understanding is a good feature. It is a combination of artificial intelligence and machine learning. We have created some workflows using Document Understanding. We are using its machine learning to do some language analysis, semantic analysis, and invoice processing. UiPath currently provides some language conversions, such as German to Russia and Russian to German. However, it does not offer Russian to German, English to German, German to English, Russian to English, and English to Russian as well as some non-trainable languages.

Document Understanding has been one of the best features for invoice processing. For example, companies require some keywords in invoices. While normal frameworks take much of time, we upload the invoices using Document Understanding, then determine the keywords required for cross referencing. The cross reference is very fast. It will capture the amount and put that in an Excel format. This is a very good feature.

A valuable feature of UiPath has been the REFramework. In banking, we need to log in to the website with a user ID and password. Once, we did that wrong and the workflow stopped. Using REFramework, there is exception handling. Stability depends on the correct configuration of error handling, so this is the best feature. 

It has some Citrix recording options.

The AI Center feature has been very good. It supports many machine learning languages and skills. It speeds execution and provides a good savings on time.

I like the certifications offered by UiPath Academy.

I would like UiPath to give free trial licenses for more features, like AI Center. UiPath currently offers two licenses for the trial version. However, if I need to practice in AI Center, then I need four to six licenses.

I have been using UiPath since 2018.

The stability is very good.

There are no limitations for Windows.

We have over 500 activities in UiPath right now.

I haven't used the technical support so much. My colleagues use it sometimes, depending on their problem. The speed of their response depends on the type of plan, normal or enterprise, that needs support. I would rate them as 10 out of 10.

There is also social media support through Twitter and LinkedIn.

The user community is very good. I am a member. If a developer has any doubts when working on a project, then a lot of people in the community are ready to give immediate answers.

Positive

We have faced challenges when installing market-related data. We need to dig deep when we are installing it with Orchestrator and/or VMware. All the documentation is available, but it needs to be prepared in advance. Whereas, we work in real-time.

I have been involved with many client installations for UiPath and Orchestrator. We do standalone installations for single node and multi-node systems, like Linux. Linux is not fully supported, as compared to Windows. UiPath deploys well on Windows.

My previous company had good ROI using UiPath compared to other tools.

UiPath Academy is free of cost.

The UiPath Community Edition is enough to implement any complex workflows.

The price for attended robots is good.

Some features are very costly, like Document Understanding. That is why in India many customers are not using the Document Understanding license. This is a premium feature and its licensing costs are high compared to other tools.

Compared to other tools, UiPath provides a good, rich environment.

I am using AutomationEdge, which is similar to UiPath, but a small tool. It provides the same features as UiPath, but it is not as popular a tool. The UiPath Academy videos are very good and better than those offered by AutomationEdge. While AutomationEdge also has a free learning course, you must watch their videos from start to finish. UiPath has no restrictions on its learning, which is good and the best option. For example, when you are an advanced learner, you want to go to advanced training courses. However, AutomationEdge makes you start from scratch, even as an advanced user of RPA.

Some processes are faster in AutomationEdge than in UiPath for insurance-related organizations.

I am also using Automation Anywhere, which is a popular tool in comparison to UiPath. However, feature-wise, UiPath is easier to use because Automation Anywhere requires complicated coding knowledge, though some of their features are very good. While UiPath requires some coding knowledge, it is not as high level as Automation Anywhere.

UiPath is the number one tool in my opinion. I would recommend choosing UiPath for someone looking to purchase an automation tool for the first time.

UiPath has very good accuracy. I would overall rate this solution as 10 out of 10.

We provide RPA services and I am currently working on two different projects.

These projects are for two different clients that are each using a different version of the platform. In both cases, it is an on-premises deployment. Our clients only use the end product and don't do any development themselves.

One of my clients is a retail organization and the primary use case is invoice automation. Previously, the process was totally manual. They have different products and different departments and for each and every department for which they bill, like HR, there are printing and supply chain tasks to be completed. As part of their process, they generate invoices monthly.

To generate invoices, they need to gather data from different sources, such as a database or Excel files. What we have done is fully automated the process. They now only need to work with a consolidated Excel sheet and then email it, once complete.

Once they send the email to a particular email address, the robot retrieves it and reads the attached Excel sheet. After doing some cleaning, consolidation, and validation, it generates invoices each month in a particular template, and then it submits them to the EBS portal.

The manual invoicing task used to take between two and two and a half weeks. Now, they start it at 4:30 when they leave and it works overnight. The process is now fully completed within two days. The time saved is now time that can be used to focus on higher-value work. It has also improved employee satisfaction.

With respect to building automations, UiPath is very easy to use. I have trained people to use this product and it is so easy to use that even on the first day, people are able to start working with it.

UiPath enables us to implement end-to-end automation and it starts with features like task mining, process mining, and task capture. Then, we have Orchestrator, where there is a control room that gives you insights, and you can create dashboards using Kibana.

We have done work for a giant logistic firm, and the end-to-end coverage is very important for them. If you are spending and investing money then you should get a return, and the return, in this case, is measured by FTE savings.

Another way that UiPath has improved the way our organization functions is that we have introduced automation to clients that were not even aware of it. For example, we have a client that we have worked with for many years and we were ultimately able to introduce them to RPA. At this point, we have automated many of their processes. Essentially, when you automate a process or task for a company that is not even aware of RPA, they will start using it, which is very helpful for us.

UiPath has definitely helped to minimize the on-premises footprint for our clients. We work with a non-profit organization that we have done some automation for. Since they are non-profit, keeping infrastructure costs down is important. They run events each quarter and in the administration of those events, they have highlighted what they want to have automated and some of the processes include using AI and ML. As a result, the company is growing and creating new products.

I have seen companies that were hesitant about starting with automation because they were worried about the cost. However, in the long run, it saves a great deal in terms of FTEs, effort, and costs. Ultimately, it has helped to reduce the cost of digital transformation for our clients.

This product definitely helps to reduce human error. For example, if there is any human input that is required by the process then UiPath will help to catch these kinds of errors.

UiPath has also helped us to free up employee time. One use case that helped to free employee time was for our client that had to reset lost passwords manually. It was quite common that one of their users lost a password and needed to have it reset, so we created automation for it. The bot interacts with the Unix server to reset the password and the process is now free of manual effort.

Especially for a larger organization, time is money and if you're saving time, it's definitely saving you money. Overall, UiPath has reduced costs for our clients. 

The feature that we use the most is Studio.

Document Understanding is a good feature that is very helpful to us. We have an ongoing project that requires reading PDF files. We need to use different OCR engines and see which ones give us the correct data. Document Understanding allows you to extract the data into different types using different extractors. For example, there is an ML extractor and other types that allow you to pinpoint fields and determine which should be accepted. Based on the confidence level, it gets better every time. In this way, the feature has helped us a lot.

This is the friendliest community and forum that I have ever seen, which is something I see as added value.

I have been using UiPath for close to four years and I have worked with many of the features, but there are still some that I don't know. It is not obvious what all of the features do and it would be helpful to have more information about them.

I have been using UiPath for between three and four years, since 2017.

UiPath is pretty stable. Over time, I have seen them add new features and I have not found anything that wasn't working.

Automations are very easy to scale, regardless of what project you are working on. You don't have to think about the infrastructure, which is helpful. One of the things that make it more scalable is that we can integrate third-party tools and applications.

Our clients are expanding their scope in terms of RPA, so we expect to expand our usage. We will be looking for more use cases and developing more bots.

I have been in contact with technical support and my experience was very good. They responded the same day and resolved the query.

Neither we nor our customers were using a different RPA solution, prior to UiPath.

I have a little bit of experience with Automation Anywhere and Blue Prism, although I have not used either of these to implement a bot for production.

The biggest differences between UiPath and these other products are user experience and ease of use. For example, with UiPath Studio, I can easily find things. Even after training on the other solutions, Uipath is still easier, which is a big plus.

The initial setup is pretty straightforward. It was installed with the MSI installer. I have also installed the Orchestrator, both on-premises and in the cloud, and it is also straightforward.

For Studio, it takes a few minutes to install it, or uninstall and upgrade it. If you have the prerequisites and the AI settings and other configuration options decided, it will take between five and ten minutes to complete.

If you have a reasonable and straightforward process then it can be developed and pushed to production the same day that you install UiPath.

To maintain the Orchestrator and the other components, one or two people would be enough. One person might have the Orchestrator and UiPath knowledge of what settings are required, whereas another person is purely IT and can assist in that regard.  

I have deployed this solution for a client on my own, so a single person is able to do it, without help from a third party.

Based on what my clients have saved in terms of FTEs, they are extending their scope of automation. For example, in one organization, they saved two FTEs and are now automating processes in different departments. I cannot estimate a dollar value but this saving in FTEs is their ROI. Overall, they are finding it very helpful.

The combination of Orchestrator and Studio is a bit on the higher side, price-wise, for some companies.

Overall, I think that the pricing is reasonable and it is similar to competitors. There are no costs in addition to the standard licensing fees.

We have used attended automation for our clients but I have not worked with that functionality. My work has been unattended RPA tasks.

I have tried the Automation Cloud offering but only personally, for learning. The SaaS option is very good and important for some companies because it allows them to save money. Regarding the price, not every organization can afford the Orchestrator, Studio, and everything else that goes with it. These types of companies sometimes want to be service-based, rather than purchasing everything on-premises, and this SaaS offering allows them to save money doing that.

I have implemented the UiPath AI functionality in a PoC, but not in any project as of yet. It is able to handle very complex automations, including those that include third-party integrations, as well as multiple environments on remote machines. We have tried some examples using Excel, Word, and PDF activities and at the same time, interacting with SharePoint, and Microsoft CRM. We are also getting data from the Citrix environment. Applying the AI functionality, it is very much capable of accomplishing complex tasks of these types.

We have not yet used the UiPath Apps feature, although I have explored it. It is a low-code option that you can use to create apps based on where you can see and interact with data, and then use them from Orchestrator. We plan to implement it in one of our projects soon.

There is a myth that when companies develop automations, they will lose jobs. In our experience, there is nothing like that. In fact, we have hired more people since we started working with UiPath.

They have added many features in the time that I have been using UiPath. For example, the AI/ML capabilities have improved to include things like a chatbot. Document Understanding is another new feature that was added, along with an ML Extractor, and AI Center. These packages have a lot of good features that will be helpful for everyone.

The biggest lesson that I have learned from using UiPath is that there are a lot of processes in an organization that can be automated, and it is worth investing in RPA because you can reclaim that time for something more important. After using UiPath for some time, I am much better able to recognize processes that can be automated.

My advice for anybody who is thinking about implementing UiPath is definitely to go ahead with it. I recommend using it without thinking about anything else. 

I would rate this solution a nine out of ten.

I am an RPA developer and I am using UiPath to create both attended and unattended bots.

I develop bots that run doing overnight tasks and we can check the results in the morning.

UiPath allows us to scale without having to worry about the infrastructure. It is simple to scale any of the automations that you develop. 

UiPath makes it easy to build automations. It is very user-friendly and they provide all of the courses in the UiPath Academy. We can learn starting with the basics, and it is really simple. One person needs between two weeks and one month to learn it.

This solution provides us with the ability to do end-to-end automation, starting with the discovery phase and process mining. After that, we move to the building page where we have Studio X, and then we can deploy the automation on the cloud.

UiPath has helped us to scale RPA benefits by automating the backup of all of the projects running in the organization. This bot runs every night and reduces our workload for one employee by eight hours, or one day each week. 

UiPath handles all of the infrastructure updates and maintenance, which is really good.

The cloud offering has helped us to see time to value quicker. It has helped us in many ways, including with the automation of repeated tasks. One example is that I created a bot for myself that is responsible for filtering all of the spam emails from my inbox on a daily basis, and then removing them. The first step is the identification and the second step is removing them. This saves me time.

The automation cloud has helped us to reduce the total cost of ownership because we can manage everything through Orchestrator.

UiPath has definitely reduced the percentage of human errors that we have in our processes. In our system, all of the bots follow our best practices so there is a very small chance of error. The reduction in error rate depends on the process. For example, the OCR is not very accurate so the errors are higher but if the process involves an API or SQL queries then it is very good.

This product has helped to reduce the cost of our automation operations. There is more of an upfront cost but it is one-time, and then we start saving.

The best feature is the good community support that is provided in the UiPath forum.

I like that it is a cloud version and runs on Citrix. I used the cloud offering to deploy my bots and manage my Orchestrators.

It would be very helpful for us if they provided more business use cases and helped us to learn them.

We have been using UiPath for almost two years.

There are times when you need to shut down the automation and restart it. Other than that, it is very stable.

I am the only one developing the bots but I am currently training some other people who are just learning it.

To this point, we have not had to scale any of our projects. Our usage of it depends on the project and where we can use automation.

When other features and updates are released, we normally visit the forum to help understand them. I have never used technical support.

I have also tried using Automation Anywhere.

Each solution has different types of bots that are available. One of the differences is that with UiPath, you have Orchestrator to help you manage them.

Generally speaking, UiPath is easier to understand.

The initial setup is not complex. It is easy to deploy and the actual setup of UiPath is not very difficult. It is a matter of downloading the Studio and creating an account in the Orchestrator. Then, you can start working.

My IT team was responsible for the initial setup. Only one person was needed to complete it.

I take care of all of the maintenance.

I am using the Community Edition and am not familiar with the cost of the paid editions.

We do not yet use the AI functionality but I know that it is there.

I have watched some videos on the UiPath apps feature, which lets us create automations in a low-code/no-code fashion. We have not used it yet but this is something that we'll be exploring in the future.

The biggest lesson that I learned from using this solution is that they have a very good community forum, where you can share ideas and learn from other RPA developers.

My advice for anybody who is implementing this product is to start by taking the fundamental UiPath courses from the UiPath Academy. This will help to understand RPA and UiPath.

In summary, this is a good product and I'm quite satisfied with all of the functionality that it provides.

I would rate this solution a nine out of ten.

In our organization, we are using UiPath as a service model. It is an on-premise model where UiPath is deployed on-premise. We are not using it on cloud services. 

We have a center of excellence that has been set up to communicate with UiPath for all the licenses, for all the tools, et cetera. Individual teams will connect and will communicate with the development team to get those licenses. For the team structure, we have a COE manager, and a COE is again communicating all the relevant information to the teams.

First of all, you would have to go and submit an idea to the COE team. The COE team will review and see this is the correct candidate for our solution and we can leverage it as automation. They provide us with the required licenses and the cycle continues.

The use-cases for the UiPath are limited. For example, if you are coming from a banking background, there would be use-cases it comes from the data solutions. If you are coming from an insurance background, would have use-cases where you would have benefits that are being reconciled. Healthcare might be dealing with patient data, et cetera.

If I talk about the support teams, in general, the use-case for the UiPath is as a ticketing system, where you have a lot of data to add to the queue to remove the need to add items manually.  

UiPath has the ability to implement with multiple systems. You can extract the data from any other application, click the data to enter the specifications, and start the automation cycle. That way, you have a technology that helps you to build a fully automated enterprise.

Our use case depends on the client and their needs. It's specific to their industry. We basically use the product to build automation for them.

We have seen the benefits both in terms of cost-saving, and time-saving. If you are doing automation which a human or an entire team is doing, let's say five hours a day, and there are seven to eight people doing the same amount of stuff, then you can automate that. 

When it comes to automating your process where the company is paying for software if you can use it to make robots that take energy away from repetitive tasks, you end up saving a lot of man-hours - which helps pay for the software.

Savings are measured both in terms of active saving or cost-saving. Then again it entirely depends on the kind of automation you're organizing. 

The most valuable feature of UiPath the process mining. The half capture was a tool that was provided by UiPath in the earliest reviews which simply allowed you to record the operations

It's great for automating tasks specific to business cases. It makes it very easy to do so as well.

The solution offers pretty good analysis capabilities.

The solution ensures there is proper documentation throughout the process.

The product creates a kind of skeleton for developers to help them work faster. 

UiPath is a low-cost platform.

If you are someone who is coming from a business background, and you don't have much coding experience, and you don't want to go through the coding world, UiPath, has UiPath StudioX. With the help of UiPath StudioX you can automate your items to read emails, download specific things, and do other small automation tasks that do not require advanced coding.  

If you are a developer who is more into coding and wants to do more coding, you have Studio and Studio Tool. Based on your level of expertise, UiPath has various levels of product: StudioX, Student, and Studio Pro, for example. It is always good if you have a programming background as sometimes you might need to write a small piece of code, however, it is a comparatively very easy task compared to the other traditional programming languages where you have to write a lot of code to do simple automation.

With the application of AI in recent releases, automation such as document reading can happen faster.

The UiPath app feature has increased the number of automation you can create while reducing the time it takes to create them. Recently, we had a UiPath hackathon which was contacted by UiPath for automation. We went to an NGO, and, for that NGO, we created a solution with the help of UiPath apps. For example, we used to create the invoices that would take seven to eight minutes to manually create. However, with the help of UiPath apps, we were able to do the same path in less than one minute. We have seen a drastic change.

The solution reduces human error significantly. When you are doing a process for more than five hours, you might deal with human error. However, robots don't make mistakes and can run 24/7 without issue.

You do need some coding experience.

AI is not available on older versions. I don't know if it is available in the latest versions of this review. Most enterprises, I'm working with still are at the previous version of the UiPath studio.

UiPath needs to enable more of the features which are available. For example, today, if I have to implement an automation path for the mainframe application, I cannot do the mainframe application without the client. I cannot just do a trial. If UiPath could create dummy applications for the developers who want to try new features, that would be helpful. 

The should be more out-of-the-box models if UiPath keeps adding on. Recently they have added a model in their AI section. However, it would be useful to have out-of-the-box models direct themselves towards plugins. 

You need to continually update the solution as, if you don't, after a few months you won't recognize the product due to all of the new releases. It will be like using a completely new device.

I've been using the solution for five years. It has been a while.

Stability-wise, UiPath can handle the different varieties of stability on the applications you are automating. 

For example, if you choose to automate applications that are expected to change in the next few months, then UiPath cannot help you. That takes an entirely different form of planning. However, the more stable the process, the less likely any part of the process will change, the better UiPath can assist. 

The solution is scalable. If you have to add new functionality to the robots, you will find that is definitely scalable. Let's say you have automated a process and you are getting 1000 tickets only, and then you suddenly get an influx of 10,000 tickets. You don't have to go and run and change your code or anything. Scalability-wise it is just with the click of a mouse that you can handle the change. And, just as easily, you can decrease usage if there are only a small amount of tickets. While developers and coding will be necessary to make it happen, I would say the solution scales extremely well.

I have not contacted UiPath via the contact center. The firm I'm working for has a center of excellence. We do not, as individual developers, directly communicate to UiPath. There is a team that sits in the company that communicates with UiPath, as we're an enterprise. We don't have direct access to the UiPath team.

That said, I do interact with them on the community edition, which I also use, and I find that if I raise a ticket, they listen to my feedback and adjust accordingly. They're excellent.

I have not used any other solution.

The initial setup is straightforward. From an enterprise point of view, from the client's point of view, there are certain restrictions that the company might have in place that could affect the way it's set up. 

The company needs to have a checklist to ensure it's set up optimally.

That said, there are no drivers, no scripts, nothing. Everybody can do it. You just have to click on the approve button, select it, and the job is done, that's it.

We do our own implementation strategy, however, I am not directly involved in what exactly has to be implemented. There are separate teams for that.

While I can't speak to how much users pay for enterprise-level editions, I can say that their community version is quite good and free to use. I've used the community license for the last five years and it's been great.

I do mostly 90% unattended automation. I have created only one attended automation for a client and that was a specifically requested requirement. That was a bit difficult to automate. 

One piece of advice to everybody who is working in UiPath would be to practice and keep UiPath updated as the technology is growing and it is getting updated frequently. If you do not keep yourself updated for three or four months, you'll be dealing with a completely different tool. Keeping it updated allows for the gradual changes to come in in a way that a user can handle, as opposed to having to re-learn or re-discover the product if you have let updates lapse for months.

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

The primary use case is the automation of many reports, dashboards, and tables that were created manually by some of my colleagues. The tasks involve collecting information from SAP Solution Manager, manipulating some of the data based on business rules that have been implemented, and then storing the data in a specific way that can be used in the next part of the workflow. This includes using Excel and the aim is to create a PDF report that is sent to the top business line managers.

UiPath is the perfect tool to implement a solution like this, with continuous operative tasks between Microsoft native applications such as Excel, Outlook, and PowerPoint.

Before our UiPath implementation, the organization spent approximately two junior FTE on these tasks, and another 0.2 senior-level FTE in order to guide junior resources.

This process runs every day and if these tasks are executed manually, it means that two resources need to be staffed forever. At the end of the project, the organization gained a boost of two FTE saved and released, able to move on to other projects. This produced real value for the organization.

The efficiency of the process was the key success factor.

UiPath has the simplest low-code user interface that I've seen in my professional life. You simply drag and drop the activity on the flow, in a clear way, with clear names, and manipulating clear variables/arguments based on parameters. These are the key points in my humble opinion.

The library creation platform is really simple to use. Basically, it works like a normal flowchart application and once you've published packages, you can use and re-use these packages like activities in another workflow.

Last but not least, official Microsoft office integration is really useful, although all of the official integrations are very easy to use.

The UiPath Connect! and UiPath Go! communities come to our support every time we need to implement something challenging.

There are features that could be implemented on the coding side; for example, automatically assigning a unique ID for the "activity" used during the flow. As of now, if you use an activity via simple drag and drop, the activity keeps the original name. If you don't change the name of the activity manually then you will lose some information during logging. It would be useful to put a simple incremental ID on each activity, so even if you don't change the activity name, you will know where the process becomes stuck.

During the last update, the connection between robots and the Orchestrator (cloud) changed a lot. It would be a good idea to provide an easy way to use a single type of robot, regardless if it is a standard robot, floating robot, connected user, etc. Basically, have a simpler way to deploy robots in development, testing, and production environments.

I have been working with UiPath since 2017, and I plan to continue.

This product is really stable, and this is true for the on-premises deployment as well as the cloud version.

This solution is really scalable. It can be used in other organizational departments or on other robots in order to boost your automated tasks.

The vendor provides really good support; fast response time and great quality!

UiPath was my first RPA solution.

During the initial setup, care should be taken when configuring the robot connection. If you choose the "modern folder" setup then you could be struggling.

I am part of the vendor team, implementing RPA for other clients.

We have a 300% return on investment.

The price and setup costs need to be supported by a strong business case.

We evaluated Blue Prism, Automation Anywhere, WorkFusion, and Selenium (for web automation).

Our core business is BPO, which is Business Process Outsourcing. We have massive operations that we have to perform for our customers and we have a digital section of the company that is assisting with that. The digital section is relatively new, being no more than two years old. We are building a number of solutions and tools that our digital section is using, and RPA is one of these tools. The goal is to help our customers innovate and assist them with their digital transformation, ultimately making them more efficient and more profitable. This is possible because some of the processes are very repetitive and performing them with humans is a very bad choice.

We have a hybrid environment, where some of our functionality is on-premises and some is on the cloud. For example, we have some cloud-based automation, and we use UiPath Apps, which is on the cloud.

We had a successful use case at the beginning of the year where we needed to process a large number of invoices that had contained errors when they were originally sent to the customers. There were approximately 200,000 invoices and we had a deadline of four days to complete the task.

It began with us developing the bot, which was completed in less than a day. After that, we sent the bot to our production environment to start processing the invoices. We were successful in the task, through the parallelism of 50 robots, we could process 5 invoices per second.

We have some metrics that describe how long it would take the process to be completed manually. It takes a human an average of between 60 and 90 seconds to process just one invoice. We estimated that it would have taken approximately 125 days to complete this task manually, with between 250 and 300 people working on it together.

We don't use the low-code functionality. Rather, we use the typical development features. When you're talking about developing inside the UiPath, you have something very user-friendly, so you don't even need to use the low-code options. It is very intuitive and you don't need to know technologies such as C# or .NET to develop automations.

The use of UiPath has helped to increase customer satisfaction by a lot. Our main goals are to improve the average handling time that the customer needs to complete transactions, as well as to improve quality. Customer satisfaction improves not only with the financial benefit resulting from a better average handling time but also, from improved quality in transactions. Our human resources department uses tools such as surveys to investigate the quality and they have their own metrics and KPIs for customer satisfaction.

Our first-contact resolution rates have increased because as we develop successful cases and implementations for different customers, future customers benefit from this through faster service, which leads to better customer satisfaction. I estimate that our first-contact resolution has increased by 15% to 20%.

The time it takes us to create automations depends on what we assess the complexity of the bot to be. We have a methodology and metrics that have been developed by our Center of Excellence, categorizing the bots into small, medium and complex. A small bot, which has simple logic, is something that we implement in between one and two weeks. A medium-complexity bot has a timeline of between two and four weeks, and a very complex bot takes four to six weeks to implement.

The most valuable feature that we are using is UiPath Apps because it makes it very easy to implement tasks. It is very easy to scale operations, which is important because we're not talking about just five or ten agents. We're talking about 1,000 to 2,000 agents. The Apps feature helps us to scale very quickly and very easily. We only need to develop one or two bots and then link them to UiPath Apps to process everything. All of the integration between the bots and the human, along with any scheduling that needs to be done, is taken care of by Apps. In our situation, the Apps feature is the best solution to handle this scale.

Utilizing our bots is very easy, and it is done using the licenses that we have with partner UiPath. We can access our licenses, then distribute them to the customers and we can use them dynamically. This is all done in a very easy manner. We just have to navigate to the web-based hub, where we have access to everything that we need.

UiPath is highly customizable and this is helpful for us because we can develop models and frameworks that can be reused for different tasks and different customers. For example, if we have a customer with a process that is very similar to one that we have previously developed for somebody else, we can reuse the models to scale the bots. This makes the new development very easy and very fast.

The Agent Console is able to provide customer insight in conjunction with the task and process mining features that we use. We install the tool into the machine that the customer uses every day, where it will capture the manual tasks and processes into a database. The insights that we receive are related to whether a process is a good candidate for RPA. For example, if it takes the human a lot of time to complete, or they are having trouble with it, then it might be suitable for RPA because putting a bot in place can optimize performance.

Another reason this is important is that human operators work very hard with day-to-day tasks, and they don't have much time to stop and look for processes that can be automated. Using task and process mining, it starts pulling out those insights. For example, it looks for the number of screens that the human is accessing and clicking on. It looks at each click, as well as every navigation and extraction. In the end, it generates a report for us.

The Agent Console has helped to decrease the average agent handling time, which is our main goal when it comes to these massive business operations. Average agent handling time is the metric that we primarily work with and as such, everything we do is related to reducing it. RPA in our use case is not used only to reduce the HC or FTEs; but it is used to boost this particular KPI too. In one of our use cases, we have had an average decrease of 30% in agent handling time, which is very considerable.

There are some enhancements that can be made within Orchestrator, such as the addition of new dashboards that provide us insights into processes that are already running, which would help us a lot.

We have been using the UiPath platform since last year, at the beginning of 2020.

The stability of UiPath is very high, and this is a very important point. In fact, stability was the problem that we had when we were assessing the competition with UiPath. We evaluated several RPA tools and moved on with the UiPath partnership because it was the most robust. It is important to remember that we have a high availability environment, and the entirety of it must be stable. Our team is tool agnostic and extremely skilled in the largest RPA tool providers, enabling us to develop automation on any platform.

UiPath is very easy to scale because, in every part of our solution, we use the Apps feature. This accounts for high availability and automatically provides us with scalability. For example, if we have a process that is handling 100 invoices at a time, but in three months we grow and need to instead process double that number, there is a feature that we can use to instruct the bots to run on additional machines. The scalability is very dynamic in this regard.

UiPath has a function within Orchestrator for dynamic allocation, where it can draw resources from a pool of machines in the infrastructure. For example, if there are 30 machines available then an option can be set to dynamically use the licenses. If there are 10 or 20 bots that need to perform tasks, the licenses will be automatically used to run the processes. You don't need to look at these machines to see what is running because all of the management will be taken care of automatically.

We currently have 25 staff involved in RPA. There are 20 developers and five architects, just to keep the projects and everything with the customers up and running. We expect this to improve and grow, doubling our numbers this year.

In fact, our expectation for growth is very high. Along with each implementation or development that we do, new opportunities arise. I would estimate that for each successful implementation that we have, four to five new opportunities are presented. Naturally, we will need to have more licenses and more contacts to increase the total number of bots in our environment.

From end to end we have about 50 robots already developed and running in a productive environment. We have human operators, back-office analysts, supervisors and coordinators involved in the whole process of execution and monitoring.

After our initial deployment, we have rarely needed to be in contact with support. Our in-house team can do most things autonomously.

We have a premium support package from UiPath and they are very useful and very helpful. They help us with whatever we want and without any doubt support is one of UiPath's strengths. This is not just in a technical sense, but in terms of business and strategy, as well.

As mentioned earlier, our RPA team is agnostic to the tool to be used. We can give our recommendation based on the customer's needs but if he has any premise that a specific platform should be used, we follow his needs.

The initial setup is very straightforward. We have a very good team of architects and we also had some assistance from UiPath. It was not simple, but it was not too hard, either. It was okay and we didn't have any problems with the implementation. In total, it took between three and four weeks to complete the deployment.

In terms of strategy, I think for the best implementation, you need to first have the infrastructure set up. The infrastructure and architecture should be very well defined with UiPath because you have a bunch of functionalities that may or may not be useful, depending on the type of business.

Deciding what functionality is required is the very first step. Then, the second step is to have a methodology and a center of excellence for RPA, including frameworks and best practices. This will help to ensure that everything is implemented correctly and that you don't have problems in the future. Finally, you need to have certified developers and certified architectures because this is the most relevant part. You want bots to go live with the best quality to ensure customer satisfaction.

We now have the ability to provide this type of environment to a customer very quickly. We can configure the environment in between two and four hours, to have it fully up and running, and it is very simple to do. This is because we have an RPA infrastructure already built, so you just need to acquire the hardware that includes the machines and servers. Once they are up and running, we activate this section and we can develop and build the bots.

UiPath was a big help during our initial setup. We have premium support, and they helped us with parts of the architecture, the infrastructure related to servers and the cloud, and getting it all set up properly in our high availability environment. It was like a four-handed job and it was all done well.

We have many different projects and customers and I would estimate that it has saved us and our customers something between $4M to 5M in total.

Just looking for our success case of the invoices processing, we avoid a cost of $10M.

The price of UiPath is higher than competitors, although the cost depends on what functionality and tools you require. For us, we don't need anything extra in terms of functionality but our contract includes an extra charge for premium support.

We evaluated UiPath, Automation Anywhere and Blue Prism, all the best RPA tools providers in the international Market. As we are agnostic with the platform, we can develop using any of those three tools.

One of the cons of UiPath is the price. It's a bit higher than the other RPA tools. In terms of the pros for UiPath, it is more stable, it works in our high availability environment, the support is good, it is very agile and we can develop automations very quickly. Also, implementation was very fast and scalability is important.

We have conducted a proof of concept using UiPath's unattended robot capability to enable a self-service chatbot. Specifically, we used the unattended bot to speak with our S3ND (messaging) solution, which is a chatbot. The scheduling was done via APIs and the communication was done through the chatbot. This is something that we have tested, but not yet deployed. We do think that this is an important next step for us to look at.

We do not use the Document Understanding and AI Fabric features at this time but we are already testing it in some of our customers to implement them as soon as possible.

Another feature that we do not yet use, but we are looking into, is using the AI Center to drag-and-drop machine learning models into RPA workflows. We recently had some discussions with the technical specialists at UiPath about the newer features that are available, and we are looking into arranging for training and webinars that will teach us how to use these new features correctly. Once we have a better understanding of how to implement them, we will begin looking for specific use cases.

The biggest lesson that I have learned from UiPath has to do with our customers and their operations. The most difficult and important challenge that we have is changing the mindset of our customers such that it is in line with digital transformation, and this is something that UiPath helps us with. They provide us with everything we need in terms of security, implementation, and high availability. Really trusting that these bots are doing the right thing is the biggest advantage that UiPath provides for us.

There are three main points that I would make for anybody who is considering UiPath. The first is the cost, in terms of money. The price of investment is high but the benefits are uncountable. Next, it requires that you look into what you really need, and whether it is all of the features that UiPath offers or just some of them. It is also very important that you look at your infrastructure because it has to be able to handle all of the bots. For example, we know that our processes need a lot of computing power and a lot of memory, so the hardware is important. This has to be built in advance of purchasing the software. The final part is the team, including the developers and architects. It is very important that they all be certified by UiPath. There is training and courses available, they make everything clear, and it includes learning the best practices, frameworks, and models to assure that you're doing everything right. If the company is audited and you are doing it properly then you won't have any headaches.

I would rate this solution a nine out of ten.

We have licenses for 15 robots and they are running internal processes. We develop them using UiPath Studio and we only use unattended automation.

Our primary use case, which is 70% of what we have automated, is related to our booking system. Instead of having 10 agents who handle the booking or creating the reservations, the work is done by the robots. Sometimes, bookings are very simple where you have just airfare or the hotel, but in our case, it's quite complex. We call it dynamic packaging, which will have a flight component, you can have a hotel component, different attractions, meal options, a rental car, and more. Instead of entering all of the options manually, which can take up to 10 minutes or 15 minutes just to create a single booking. It is similar when we perform other tasks, such as making a payment. These things are normally done in our target system. I have created robots and workflows in UiPath that are triggered by the database, and they complete these tasks automatically. We have 15 robots conducting the job.

The second use case replaces the agent when once we get all information from the outside system using a .NET application and store it in the database, it creates parameters for the robots to make a booking or reservation at Universal Studios for attractions.

The third use case covers all of Europe and it is a completely automated car booking system. 

Basically, our use cases are all about travel and booking systems for Universal Studios, general dynamic packaging, and car rentals.

UiPath has definitely improved the way our organization functions. It normally takes one agent approximately six hours to create reservations in the booking system manually, and now the job is left to RPA with UiPath workflows. It saves between 40% and 50% of the agent's time, leaving them time to work on something different.

The accuracy of tasks has been improved because everything is data-driven, and there is no problem that comes from human error. The system is almost bulletproof; if you send garbage in then you get garbage out but definitely, there are no human mistakes. For example, instead of entering the name of the customer, it comes straight from the database. The same is true for options like the times of picking up and dropping off your car. The only problem that we have is not related to RPA; it's the case where the target system is not responsive. For example, if you're moving from one screen to another and the system doesn't respond, then we are notified via an alert. 

The improved accuracy and shorter time to complete tasks, freeing up resources for other jobs, translate to money saved. Given that our processes are complex, the automation of them takes a load off of our end-users. In some cases, they have to perform data entry in several different systems. For example, in order to make a booking, they have to use three different systems with three different interfaces.

With RPA, in general, there is also a fear that jobs will be lost but when you're always swamped at work, including overtime, night shifts, and working on weekends, RPA is a big help. 

UiPath has helped to reduce our hardware footprint by between 20% and 30%. We now have only 15 virtual machines running instead of 15 physical desktops. The amount of hardware required to operate the business is directly correlated to the number of human operators and the software that is running.

UiPath has saved us significantly in terms of costs, primarily because of the manpower we used to have for the booking reservation system. It frees up resources for the agents, IT staff, and people from various departments. For example, we have group reservation systems for car booking, flight booking, and others. UiPath has made an impact in all of these places and the cost saving is very beneficial. In the first year, we saved over $100,000 on the booking systems. After the initial project in the first year, two or three more systems were built, for a savings of $300,000 annually before COVID.

In terms of the time we are saving, it is quite low these days because of the COVID-19 travel restrictions. Pre-COVID, we were saving approximately 80 hours per day. The reclaimed time for our employees is now available for them to work on higher-value work. The savings is not only from the data entry but for troubleshooting errors, which no longer needs to be done.

We have offices in Montreal, Vancouver, and Toronto, and the majority of agents are stationed in Montreal. I am working in the Toronto location, so I cannot comment on the majority in terms of how employee satisfaction has improved. What I have heard from the executive management is that more people are happy because they are able to better focus on what they want to do. This is especially true because they do not have to spend many hours troubleshooting trivial issues. Instead, they are concentrating on higher-value work.

We are using approximately 70% of all of the activities that are available in UiPath. These include web scraping and data entry, where the information is stored in a database. We also perform database queries.

The biggest benefit that we have from UiPath comes from using the API.

The features that we use most often are database communication, scraping, and PDF functions. The only features that we don't use are those related to Excel, for spreadsheets.

For smaller projects, we are only passing parameters from .NET applications but in the newer projects, we are using features such as database communication and data scraping.

The ease of building automations is great. When I talk about UiPath, I am usually referring to Studio, which has a very intuitive and easy-to-use interface, yet it is very powerful. This is something that has improved with the help of forums and tutorials. In 2016, it was more difficult because there were really no forums so we had to contact the head office in Bucharest, Romania when we needed help. Getting a demo had to be done in the very early hours and there was lots of communication back and forth. It was a struggle to find solutions, although to be fair, they've been very helpful. These days, it is very easy to use because there are numerous examples, and UiPath Academy is available, along with other resources.

We have been using the UiPath Apps feature and it has helped with the ease and time required for creating automation. Everything has improved over the past several years, as in the past, there were no examples or tutorials available. There was no manual and it was very technical. At the time, you definitely needed programming knowledge in order to handle some of the scenarios. It was at times like this that we relied on support from Bucharest.

Even today, there are only a couple of programmers in the company who develop the bots. Even with the Apps feature, I don't think that the end-users are ready, although this may be because of the way that our organization is structured. Everything is given to the IT department because our scenarios are very complex, and not a simple case of data entry or something like that. With such complex solutions, it is definitely too difficult for our end-users.

There are a few areas that need to be improved, one of which we have already raised with the salesperson and technical team.

The first area that needs improvement is backward compatibility. If you have a newer version of the UiPath Studio or any product, then quite often, if you're a year behind or so, you cannot compile the whole project. This means that you have to rebuild system modules. It's not like a Microsoft product that is always backward compatible. For us, that is a huge obstacle because sometimes, we have to rewrite entire workflows. In our case, this is a massive undertaking that will take three or four months to complete. This is the main issue for us and it doesn't happen with minor release updates, but with major ones, we have to rewrite the entire project because it doesn't compile.

The licensing should be more flexible and more affordable.

We used to be able to integrate with .NET applications, where all of the business rules reside, and then invoke robots or workflows from there. Now, that capability has been removed, so we have to use Orchestrator. Converting our projects requires a lot of work because we have to move all of the business logic to the UiPath workflow. It is not an ideal situation for us because keeping the business logic inside our .NET applications is more flexible and more scalable.

When I was taking some UiPath Academy courses, I noticed that they gave us more complex tasks. There were expert-level examples, but the junior examples are missing. Furthermore, they give you high-end, very technical guides, but there are not really any examples. This means that you really have to dig and use the forums and ask people questions. Essentially, you have to try and find the solutions by yourself.

In general, if you have very large and complex solutions as we do, the overall workflow layout could be improved because navigating through the network components can be very inconvenient. You can still see the high-level of the workflow, but not a detailed one. It may take you several minutes to get to the component you were looking for. In terms of navigation, the mapping solution could definitely be improved. There are always workarounds. What you can do in this case is use the flow charts with the sequencing module to break it down to a more general view. This makes it faster to get to the module that you want to improve or fix.

I am a Senior Lead Developer in my company, and I have been using UiPath since 2016. I was one of the very early UiPath users.

Stability-wise, we haven't really found any issues lately.

In the earlier versions, from 2016 and 2017, there were some issues that were never resolved by the UiPath team. The newer versions, especially while performing web scraping, are much more stable. Once it was deployed, we haven't seen any issues with the .NET applications.

Instability in our use case is the result of the target system; for example, the one that is operated by Universal Studios. If they are unresponsive for perhaps 20 or 30 seconds and the robot is expecting to see a certain screen, especially when it normally only takes two or three seconds to move from one screen to the other after submitting a request, it is going to cause a problem. However, that's not the fault of UiPath or RPA in general, but a fault of the source or target system.

I estimate that with all things considered, UiPath is 99.9% stable.

UiPath is very scalable. We are a mid-sized company with approximately 200 to 250 employees.

There are three or four of us who have hands-on experience with the product, and there are between 100 and 110 end-users. This includes four or five departments spread across three different locations. Our end-users are primarily business users.

Our goal is to increase our usage of UiPath but we are currently downsizing due to the COVID situation. We have some projects in mind, but we have to wait to see what happens with the travel industry. With approximately 50% of our employees laid off, no progress will be made. However, down the road when we get back on track, we plan to use other areas of the system. That will include manipulating spreadsheets, data entry, interoperability with other systems, and interfacing with it.

The technical support is definitely good, although there were some issues that never got resolved. The situation is that we are based in Canada and our salesperson from Toronto organizes the meeting with the technical staff from New York in the US. There were times when they couldn't help us because the majority of them had been with UiPath for two to three years. They didn't understand how things were working back in 2016, '17, or '18, well enough. Ultimately, they never found a person who could help us and to me, that is not really acceptable in terms of finding a workaround or the fastest approach to resolve the backward compatibility and .NET Integration.

What we needed was somebody with five or six years of experience and they could simply not find one.

We had some basic automation running prior to UiPath, but it was native SQL and .NET applications. An example is that we were using scaping options available in Microsoft applications, but it wasn't really RPA. UiPath has definitely helped us to reduce the costs of our automation operations. Everything is now run from one application, and you can use the workflows to collaborate between databases, spreadsheets, and booking reservations. Basically, it's end-to-end in terms of the development lifecycle because originally, our tasks were only partly automated.

If you consider automated testing solutions then we were using Selenium for things such as load-testing, in a previous company. I had no experience with a full RPA solution before UiPath in 2016.

In our early stages of automation, the task would start and then only get to a certain point before a different application had to pick it up. We had a scheduler that was responsible for this. The scheduler would see the partly completed task, then take it and put it somewhere else for a third application to take over. Now, all of this is done using the UiPath API.

Specifically, in terms of overhead operations, UiPath has saved us approximately 80 hours a day, which translates to between $4,000 and $5,000 per day, just in one department. If you multiply this by 30 days then it is a lot of money. Given that it is a ballpark figure for just a single department, it could be even more.

Back when we first installed UiPath, it was complex. But now, it is much easier because they have grown. It is much easier than it was five years ago, although, at the same time, we haven't had many issues in the process of implementing and rolling out our solutions.

Our deployment is on-premises and entirely private.

These days, it takes less than a day to deploy. In 2016, it took us almost a week for much simpler deployments because there was no proper documentation. Fortunately, at the time, we got lots of help from the technical staff in Romania.

When we first started with UiPath, it was not even close to what it's today. It was much difficult to create a strategy because it more or less was a black box. We purchased the product and there was only UiPath Studio, nothing else. There was virtually no documentation and more or less, everything was left to us, our team, to develop this strategy.

Implementing it was more of a trial and error process than it is today. Finally, we did it. We moved our automations from the development environment to the staging environment, and then finally into the production environment. Now, it's pretty stable. At the time, however, it was pretty cumbersome and difficult because there was no proper documentation or guidance from UiPath. Nowadays, it's pretty simple.

There are three of us in the company who are responsible for deployment and maintenance. We also handle the monitoring, implementation, troubleshooting, and updating of the product and robots.

We also have an infrastructure team that is outsourced from a company in Toronto, Canada, called Carbon60. Our experience with them has been a little shaky, but we are handling it okay. They could not really help us as much with the initial setup of UiPath because they did not have experience with RPA. We gave them the specs required for our infrastructure, and they set it up. Overall, approximately 90% of the setup was our responsibility.

Compared to four or five years ago, the licensing in terms of price is less flexible and less affordable. Recently, because of the COVID situation, we need 15 robots. Ideally, we could use five robots and Orchestrator instead, and pay the difference, but the vendor refused to take this offer.

We are currently using the Community Version of Orchestrator for training purposes.

When we started looking at UiPath, they had less than 100 customers in the world. We had been looking at three different options that included UiPath, Blue Prism, and one other one. In our case, we were using a legacy application that was Java applet-based, and the other products were not able to handle that well.

From what I recall, back in 2016, UiPath was the only option that supported Java applet-based automation. We needed the functionality because one of our internal applications was not web-based, but Java applet-based, and depended on it. It did not work immediately and there were some workarounds, but with some help from the UiPath technical staff, we were able to handle it. This is the main reason that we ultimately chose UiPath.

Essentially, UiPath was the only option that was able to handle Java applet automation. With that covering the front end, we automated the whole process.

In the future, because UiPath was not able to handle the legacy projects that we developed in RPA, we might consider another product like Blue Prism. We would assess potential solutions based on backward compatibility.

We have been thinking about using the Orchestrator with the cloud option, but because of the current world situation, especially because we are in the travel industry, our income has been significantly reduced. At this point, we are more or less in survival mode, so we decided to stay as-is.

We were also supposed to get Orchestrator, the latest web developer, and a production license but we gave up because we cannot afford it at the moment. Travel may be idle right now but post-COVID, which hopefully is next year or by end of this year, we're going to get the official Orchestrator license.

Originally, we were using .NET applications, which is the technology that has driven the business. It's huge, and with the newer versions of UiPath, it is no longer possible because we have to use Orchestrator. At this time, we are more or less working on a workaround and it's a massive project that is probably going to take six or seven months to complete.

We are not using the AI functionality yet, although it is something that we're planning to look into, eventually.

The biggest lesson that I have learned from using UiPath is how much time was consumed by our manual processes. Definitely, we have freed up resources for our business team. In terms of accuracy, there are no human errors anymore. Consequently, we can free up between 30% and 40% of our agents' time in terms of analysis and billing. In summary, the biggest thing that I have learned is that using RPA is about improving accuracy and reliability.

My advice for anybody who is implementing UiPath is to start with the training. These days, especially younger developers, people are very keen to jump on developing RPA and they're doing this stuff without using Academy or other training. Rather than do that, I suggest people get familiar with the product and use the training material first. Use the examples that are provided because the UiPath Academy is amazing in terms of that.

In summary, this product has a very intuitive and powerful interface. There are very good examples and scenarios on the UiPath Academy website, and technical support is very helpful. You can also find lots of good examples in the community forums. There used to be only one OCR option, and now there are two different flavors of OCR, which is definitely one of the pros. However, the major cons are backward compatibility and licensing in terms of flexibility and affordability. We also lost some of the functionality for .NET integration, which was a problem for us because the capabilities are simply gone.

I would rate this solution an eight out of ten.

We are using the on-premises UiPath solution for both attended and unattended bots. At this time, we use unattended bots primarily to facilitate integration between applications, and we are not using the attended bot capabilities.

Generally speaking, we develop integrations for our core banking system, which was written in-house and running on a mainframe. It is a highly-developed system that we started using more than 30 years ago. When it was created, we didn't have the integration capabilities that exist in other applications or core systems, today. This means that in order to have external applications communicate with the core system, we need to develop integrations. Examples of this might be web services or other APIs, and that's why it takes time to do.

We have teams to do the integration, but considering that the core banking system is in Turkey and all of our teams are busy, we don't have enough resources to implement all of our integration projects. Now, for the past three years, we have been implementing bots to handle integration by moving data from the applications to the core system, and from the core system to the applications.

The biggest benefit for us is time savings in terms of developing satellite applications for the core banking system. We are developing the robotic API, and we are integrating our internal front-end applications with the core system.

Using this approach, we can easily get and set data from the core system, and we can see the results for each transition. We can learn about what happens in the core system with the help of the bots.

The amount of time that we save depends on the use case. For example, if we implement integration between core banking and the applications instead of native integration through development, it saves a lot of time. I prefer native integration versus using the bots but sometimes, you don't have this opportunity because it will take too long to put into production. Other times, you can't justify undergoing a large development process for just a small integration, so it's enough to solve the problem using the bots.

There is another use case where our operations teams perform repetitive tasks using the bots. For example, when performing the task manually, users have to take the data from one screen and enter it on another screen. We have never tried to calculate how much time we are saving in cases like this, although I'm sure that we are saving a lot of time.

People in the organization have been asking for more projects to be automated because it is easier for them. When their tasks are automated, they are more relaxed and can focus on other more important tasks, as opposed to the repetitive ones. Getting away from repetitive tasks puts you in a position where you can make more decisions and be part of the smart part of the business. This leaves the easier, repetitive tasks for the robots.

There are a lot of really useful features in UiPath including the Orchestrator and the Studio.

The Orchestrator is one of the main tools that I use because I like to help orchestrate the bots. It is the heart of the tool and it gives me a lot of flexibility to automate or manage bots that are in the field. The Orchestration Server is one of the most important features and when you perform a deep dive, you see that it has a lot of functionality. It's great.

The Orchestrator has other features such as computer vision, AI, and machine learning, and it complements the bots and the Studio.

UiPath integrates well with Elasticsearch, which is a great search engine. ElasticSearch is more capable than UiPath for searching logs. I'm filling the gap in log reporting using ElasticSearch, where I'm feeding the logs into it and then creating dashboards, or using the analytics parts of ElasticSearch and Kibana.

The UiPath Academy is a very valuable component of this solution. Many of our employees have used the courses. With it, a person who has a little bit of an analytical mindset can easily learn to do many things. If somebody is willing to develop themselves in RPA, the UiPath academy is more than enough to do so. They will understand the components that make up the ecosystem. The academy is very good, well constructed, and has a lot of labs and exercises to help one learn the system by themself without any help, and very easily.

The logging capability that comes with Orchestrator does not allow you to create smart reports. You have the logs from the bots and what's happening on the machines because you get all of this information from the logs. However, UiPath is more capable when it comes to collecting information about your processes, time saved, or process execution. They have some smart report dashboards.

The installation and initial setup is difficult for non-technical organizations.

We have been using UiPath for more than three years.

Stability is something that we should consider in two parts. The first concerns the bots and how they are running the tasks on the machines. This comes down to what kind of developers we have because if you are developing properly, and implementing all of the exceptional cases that may occur during the execution of the process, it's very good. I haven't had any issues in cases like this.

The second part is the Orchestrator, and I haven't had issues with this either. In the more than three years that we have been using this environment, including the time in production and our test environments, we have never had an issue.

We have had two or three incidents because we didn't have enough space left on the database storage, but that was not related to UiPath. Rather, it is related to the infrastructure. Another time, the SSL certification expired so we had to renew it. Otherwise, stability-wise, we haven't had any problems.

Scalability is very good, although we have not reached a point where we needed to scale the infrastructure. The high availability and scalability are two of the main features in the UiPath environment but we have not needed to go in that direction yet. At this time, we only have five bots in the organization and that is enough.

We are not planning to increase the numbers at this point because the number of bots that we have can be managed on a single node. We don't have clusters or multiple bots because of the criticality of our processes, but these are things that you can add and set up to share the workloads. Although we don't use it, I think that it looks really promising.

In our team, we have a business analyst and developers. Some of the roles for the developers are varied. At most, we have three people on a project who are working with UiPath.

The technical support for UiPath is good. When we first started contacting them between two and three years ago, the support for everybody was the same. However, they're now offering different tiers of support that require a different license and cost. There is one basic technical support, where all customers have the right to open tickets and try to solve the problems. Then, there are different support levels where you can pay extra and you can get more assistance for solving your problems.

Up to this point, all of the problems that I have had are mostly related to upgrades and installations, and they have only been from time to time. So far, I have been able to solve problems with basic technical support. Some of the problems I have solved on my own, whereas with others, I have needed a small bit of help from technical support.

I can say at this point that the support is good, although really, I haven't had any major problems that necessitated a lot of support.

We have used other RPA solutions in the past, but not to the same scale as UiPath.

The initial setup is not very complex, but it depends on the profile and experience of the person who is using it. Considering we had a great deal of deep experience in the project implementation and also the technologies, we are familiar with everything. This includes tasks like installation of the infrastructure, configuring the databases, configuring the virtual machines, and installing the robots' features.

For less technical organizations or people, it will be difficult to implement the UiPath infrastructure. In that case, they will need the help of partners.

It's not so easy, but it's well documented. In fact, one of the good things about UiPath is that everything is very well documented. The deployment takes no more than two or three weeks.

Our implementation strategy started with developing bots using the trial license. We found the bot implementation was very easy. The trial includes everything that you need to develop workflows and the bots that run on the machines. When you get to the point where you need to run multiple bots in production, you need the Orchestration server.

We did not install Orchestrator until between four and six months after we started with the trial. In the beginning, we were testing UiPath and creating some small projects. These were very easy to implement. After that is when we decided to buy the license and move the bots to production.

In terms of maintenance, it is not critical for the bots. It's the Orchestrator that has to be maintained and kept up to date. Every year, you need to upgrade your infrastructure with the latest release, so there is some annual maintenance. If it is on-premises then you also have to maintain the hardware that everything is running on.

Of course, there should be somebody responsible for taking care of the databases and general system maintenance. The operating system, for example, should be maintained by someone. All of these things are layers and sublayers on top of the solution.

If instead, you implement the cloud version of UiPath, then you can get rid of all of the maintenance. In that case, you have only the bots and the Orchestrator, which are hosted on the UiPath cloud, and you don't have to worry about anything. UiPath does the upgrades and performs all of the maintenance, which is nice. In the future, we may go in this direction. However, at this time, maintaining the infrastructure in our organization is easy and not a burden for us.

I can't say that UiPath is expensive but I can't say that it's cheap. The cost that we are allocating for RPA doesn't burden us too heavily, so what we are paying is acceptable compared to the gains that we have in the organization. That said, it is relative because it depends on the size of the organization, the budget, and other factors. From our point of view, considering our budget, it is okay but for another organization, it might be expensive.

There are some features, such as UiPath Insights, that require you to purchase an additional license. The logging capabilities are also a feature that you need to pay extra for.

While we were searching for solutions, we read the documentation for UiPath. We found out that UiPath was originally started as a Romanian company, where we are, so we figured that we would try it since this is where it was first implemented. Our tests showed that UiPath was very promising but we kept investigating other solutions.

We tried Blue Prism and we tried Automation Anywhere, which are both RPA tools. We also did some studying, looked at the Gartner report, and did some further analysis. Ultimately, we decided to buy the licenses from UiPath because it was solving all of our problems.

When you use this system, you are using features from several different modules. It's something like an ecosystem where you have the bots, Studio, and the Orchestrator. If you are not using all of them at the same time then something is missing. They complete each other. If, for example, you don't have the Orchestrator and are only running the bots then it is a different kind of automation.

In the past, as I was using UiPath, I found that there were additional features that I wanted, but regularly and with each product update, they were bringing in new functionalities. At this time, I don't have a project that is waiting and cannot be implemented due to missing features. All of the tools that they deliver, for the time being, together are enough to implement any type of project.

We are not yet using the AI functionality because to this point, although that is because we don't yet have a proper project for it. At the same time, the AI and machine learning functionality are very important to us because we are planning to use them.

We have not used the UiPath Apps feature because it is one of the new features that has come out lately, and we haven't had the time to gain a deep understanding of these technologies. We have some rough ideas about how we can use this feature, but for the time being, we do not have a project that needs to be solved with UiPath Apps.

My advice for anybody who is implementing UiPath is to start with studying the processes and trying to determine whether they are good candidates for RPA. In order to automate a process, you need structured data such that the inputs and outputs are somewhat predictable. Once you know what it is that you want to automate, you have to understand the capacity, and then if you have any candidate processes, you can begin developing.

UiPath is the RPA solution that I recommend. However, it is important to know, before purchasing a solution, which of the processes are good candidates for automation.

I would rate this solution a nine out of ten.

We primarily use UiPath for end-to-end automation. We develop both attended and unattended bots and we use the Orchestrator module, hosted in Azure.

Some of our typical use cases involve automating operations like downloading files online, analyzing and capturing details, saving them in another location, transferring them, and uploading them in other forms.

The app studio feature has increased the number of automations that we create while reducing the time it takes to create them. For example, we have a limitation when it comes to transferring files from one server to another server. However, we were able to resolve it by using a remote desktop on the UiPath server. I don't need to log into another system or another server; instead, I log in and use the remote desktop from my PC. It's really cost-efficient and it saves me a lot of time. It's superb.

UiPath helps us to implement end-to-end process automation starting with process analysis through to monitoring, and this is very important to us. Whether we are automating processes for external customers or internal purposes, there is an automation lifecycle that we follow. The end-users do not have much knowledge about automation, so we have to complete it from end-to-end.

It starts with analyzing the process to see if automation will work. We then develop it by trying to replicate what the user does manually. Once it has been developed and the functionality replicated, we test and tweak it for approximately two weeks. If everything goes well during this time, the process moves to production. In production, processes are continuously monitored.

The testing is a detailed process that involves finding the problems, then implementing error handling using try/catch statements and other methods. It is done in a continuous, agile fashion where we develop, publish, trial, error handling, monitoring, and then it starts again. When a process is pushed to production, when a change is made, it does through this lifecycle again.

How UiPath has improved the way our organization functions is clear when we look at one of our use cases. We need to have notifications about documents that describe the release of products. Our bot will start by filtering documents online using keywords, download the appropriate documents, then check to make sure that each is complete. If there is a problem then emails are automatically sent to the appropriate department.

From this point, we transfer the file into another folder and upload the current version to the release team. They will only receive what they need, rather than having to go through the document themselves. Prior to this, they needed to check it on their own and analyze everything. With this work being done by the robot, it relieves us of two person's workloads. What used to take three people to complete, is now done with one.

In terms of saving time, for our use case that involves the release documents, we save between 80 and 100 hours per week, so monthly, you can multiply that by four.

The time saved by our employees sometimes allows them to focus on higher-value work or in other cases, when we don't need the persons, we can reduce the workforce and then hire people in different roles, such as new developers. Overall, this helps us to improve our workforce. For example, we can branch into more areas, rather than do the same thing for many different customers.

With respect to employee satisfaction, if somebody loses their position then they may not be happy. However, it is important to remember at the same time that we may open a new position because of this opportunity. This allows the person to move, find new opportunities, focus on new things, and develop themselves. To me, this is a win-win because we are more focused on generating new types of business.

UiPath has definitely helped us to reduce human errors. This is a benefit to us because, before this, we used to get customers complaining quite often. However, we have reduced the complaints. We still need to have the customer complaints section but now, we have reduced it from five people to one. The robot is not 100% error-free, but it's between 90% and 99.9% error-free. With so few complaints, we don't need as many people to deal with them.

Overall, UiPath's process analysis and optimization have increased our productivity.

The most valuable feature for me is the UiPath Studio.

It helps a lot. I wouldn't really say it's code-free; however, I would say that it's 90% code-free. It's very easy to use, with most of the actions performed using the drag-and-drop interface. When you do write code, it's a very small amount of the time.

The library activities are really helpful. With the help of the library and with the help of the forums, developers can focus and it is easy to learn. It helps in terms of time-to-value.

I also find Orchestrator to be helpful. The Studio and the Orchestrator together are like your body and your soul. Without both parts, it won't function. You need to have Orchestrator to run the Studio. Right now, today, we have a problem with our Orchestrator and it's not working. I can't use Studio because it's connected and without access to my Orchestrator, I can't do anything.

The academy courses help in the process of getting employees up to speed with the solution by providing them with the fundamental knowledge and the opportunity to practice. When you start doing it, you may face errors and again, with the docs, you may gain more knowledge. When you start to use the forums, you get more knowledge, and it all helps. But, if you only rely on the forums, I would say that it would help only 60% or 70% of what you get compared to taking the academy courses. In the end, you will only get better by doing it, and then going to the forums when you have problems.

The testing and release schedule for Studio should be improved because we find that with two releases per year, one of the versions is stable and the other one is not. It would be better to focus on a single release, but make sure that it is stable. We have had problems in the past with this and we don't need any unstable versions. For example, version 20.4.2 was not stable but version 20.10.2 was very good.

Technical support and customer care are areas in need of improvement. 

We have been using UiPath for between six and seven months.

We are in Switzerland and normally, we use local support. When they cannot resolve an issue then it is transferred to the US team and we get support from them directly. In our experience, the support in Europe is not sufficient and we prefer to speak directly with the UiPath headquarters. We find that here, the people do not have enough knowledge.

We have had a lot of problems and for example, we have an issue right now where our Orchestrator doesn't work. We have had to wait about a week for the ticket to be escalated to headquarters, and because of delays like this, we are not always happy with customer care. The product is good but the technical support can improve.

We had issues where the first person tells us one thing, but a second person says that it's wrong and it needs to be done another way. Then, a third person speaks and presents another idea. This all takes a lot of time before a fourth person explains that everything is wrong and it has to be done another way. A lot of the time when you have these kinds of problems, you just have to start from scratch.

It can be frustrating because we had spent almost three weeks upgrading our system to the 20.10.2 version and now, we face the same problem. We have not been able to properly run our system for between three and four weeks.

I have not personally used another RPA solution but I have colleagues who have experience with Automation Anywhere. We primarily use UiPath but there are some developers in the company who regularly work with Automation Anywhere.

We did not switch from one product to another. Rather, they are used for different reasons. For example, I have heard that when it comes to performing file transfers, Automation Anywhere makes it quite easy and they do not have the limitations that UiPath does.

On the other hand, I feel that the AI in UiPath is doing better. We have lots of workflows and activities in UiPath and I strongly prefer it as a product.

I wouldn't say that the initial setup is complex, although when you are just beginning with a new environment, it is not that easy, either. Because it is a new thing, you will need to learn in the beginning.

We followed the guide and found that the installation was not very tough.

UiPath saves us costs, but there is more to it than that. It saves us in terms of time spent on manual tasks, but on the other hand, we pay UiPath. On yet another hand, with the money we save, we are open to new opportunities and new business.

Overall, I am very happy with the ROI.

The price of UiPath is a little bit high, although there are no costs in addition to the standard licensing fees. Overall, it is not too costly, but slightly high.

We have not yet used the AI functionality but we are trying to. We have not developed any uses cases yet but it is something that we are working on. We will be taking some courses on it first and after that, we may try some internal use cases.

We have advanced our technical knowledge by using this product. For example, we now use JSON config files, rather than using Excel.

One of the biggest lessons that we have learned is that it is nice to have a good solution design before starting development. There were times where we tried to do something one way but a problem occurred, so we had to solve it by trying different features, then testing and running it again. A lot of time is spent during this process. Now, we have learned to focus more during the design, then start to develop it.

My advice for anybody who is implementing UiPath is that it works really well in Windows, so they have to have a Windows machine if they want to start developing.

I would rate this solution an eight out of ten.

We used to maintain a lot of Excel sheets for lead generation and other activities. UiPath helped us to automate those processes and clear our workloads so that we could focus on other main tasks.

It saved a lot of time on tasks that could be quite redundant. Fetching data and maintaining the machines and regularly updating them. That's the only thing that I was using it for. Using UiPath saved me about 10 to 12 hours on a weekly basis.

It allowed me to delegate mundane tasks to personal automations and to focus on more important tasks. By not having to do tasks that don't add value or skills, I could focus on tasks that were more important and that added value to my skills or targets. That brings much more satisfaction.

Also, the ability for employees to delegate mundane tasks to personal automations meant that we did not have to hire a person dedicated to doing those particular tasks. We could use the tool to do those tasks. It helped save those costs. On that front it helped in business operations.

UiPath was quite useful in terms of getting data from thousands of webpages online and arranging it in a predefined format. You can easily create robots and define operations in UiPath.

I come from a non-technical background. You need a little bit of technical knowledge to use it. We had a demonstration of how to use the platform, but it's easy to use. It helps in automating tasks which otherwise you would have to do manually.

The desktop Assistant tool provides a personal automation launchpad so that you can easily access and run automations. That's important because you don't have to go to someone every time you face a problem, or every time you have to run an automation process. It helps make you independent so that you can do your own tasks.

Other things I like about it include:

• Its dashboard is quite easy to use and you don’t need to have a programming background to understand it.
• You can record screens in Excel and download it from the cloud.
• You can also get quite a load of data from the web and use it for your processes without any manual effort.
  

For me, it was quite an effective tool because I hadn't used any automation tool previously. It was quite new for me and it took time to adjust to it and understand it. At times, some processes took longer with the tool, initially. But when you do them on a regular basis, you understand it better and it takes much less time. Setting up the systems could be difficult initially. It would be better if it were more user-friendly for non-technical users.

I used UiPath for less than one year.

It's quite stable and reliable. We had no issues.

I wasn't involved in the initial setup of UiPath in our organization, but I think it took less than a month to deploy it. It's also an ongoing process after deployment. There are a lot of things that need to be done.

About 10 to 15 people were using it in our organization. The users were mainly in IT where they were using it for central management and other automation purposes.

The fact that we didn't have to hire a resource specifically for doing certain tasks is how the ROI could be calculated. It also saved time for the existing employees.

There is a trial version available. You can go for the trial version first and then buy it and scale it per your needs. Try this tool. Go for it. It's definitely worth a try. If yours is a large organization, try the Community Edition first to get the hang of it. After that, move on to its Enterprise version.

What I learned from using UiPath is that there are tools available in the market that can essentially make your life a lot easier. You don't have to worry about doing certain tasks, maintaining them, continuously updating them. Their backups are always available, even if you lose something. They are always easily accessible on any device.

I am an automation consultant and most of the robots that I work on are unattended.

Some of our use cases involve end-to-end automation. One of them is an SAP system where the transaction data, material numbers, and other things are used for T-codes. Based on the value of data in the T-code, it opens other T-codes in the process and updates those registries accordingly. This may include, for example, T-codes one and two. Then, from T-code one, I need to get input with regard to my material numbers. This might be a materials invoice or the invoice numbers of material orders. With those, you have to put it in one T-code and get output.

Based on the output of the T-code one, you need to do the rest of the operations in T-code two and T-code three. Once the job is completed, update all the information about the different T-codes in an Excel sheet and then update it back to the system.

UiPath saves time both from the perspective of a developer and an end-user. I can talk about the two positions because I have been involved in both roles. On the development side, the features make it very easy and tasks that normally take half an hour can be completed in a minute or two.

With respect to the end-user, assume that a process normally takes an hour a day to complete. Once the automation is in place, the whole process will be done in a minute or two. Importantly, the user does not have to monitor the process because it runs in the back end or on a server in a remote location. The entire process will run without monitoring.

At the same time, the user will be informed. Let's say that you have to get some data out of it; most of the time, the data available every few days. Personally, given that I am not normally in the role of the end-user, I have to log in to all of the systems and look for the data. However, if UiPath is configured and developed properly then it will inform you in an email that the data is now available. Similarly, if there is no data available then it can be configured in such a way that the user will be informed of that. This would give the user the opportunity to save and plan to utilize their time for other purposes.

In our company, we have a lot of use cases where we were able to implement unattended automation. This meant that we saved a lot of time and we were able to reutilize the employees for more useful engagements. 

An additional thing that we are able to achieve through using an RPA like UiPath is a reduction in errors. When we are performing any kind of activity, such as a recalculation in Excel, or calculations in a step-by-step process that involves manually copying data between two places, there is a high chance that an error will occur. This is a human error that can be avoided once we implement the automation and move it to production. Ultimately, all of these types of errors will be eliminated.

It is difficult to estimate the total number of errors that we avoid, but I can say that we were able to save time and with each process, the number of errors is reduced.

The most valuable feature is the set of data scraping tools. You can scrape data into your tables, then easily transform it or convert it between formats. If UiPath or another similar automation tool was not there, it would be very difficult to automate something that is a UI- based application. There is no other option to get that back-end data out of it. If we were not able to convert the formatting, or if for whatever reasons we cannot extract the data into a table format, it would be very difficult for us to convert and get the data that we want. The data would be difficult to format and we would spend a lot of time on it.

UiPath provides the data in a table format and in a structured manner, which means that we are able to get the required value from the table and do the necessary calculations on it. It saves us a lot of time in this process.

We have started using the AI functionality but so far, not to any great extent. For example, we were able to identify different types of images while reading an invoice. Prior to using the AI capabilities, we were not able to read them. This is our only use case for AI at the moment, but we plan to explore other activities and possibilities.

We have used the UiPath Academy courses and by doing so, we were able to learn a lot of things. They had examples of use cases that can occur in different scenarios and instead of getting that from a live environment, or during development, we were able to learn it from the Academy and a live example.

With the Studio, we can do basic troubleshooting in the production machine or VM, in case any error occurs. This is helpful because we don't have to move the data back to the development machine.

The integration with APA should be improved with respect to adding data from external sources and being able to bring in data from third-party applications. Also, it should be better the other way around, where UiPath is providing APA data to other applications.

I have been using UiPath for the past four years.

If the application is working fine, without making any updates or changes, then the bot will work as expected about 95% of the time. However, if there are any changes to the end-application made by the developers, or there is a content change, then we definitely have to align to those changes and it will take time.

Generally speaking, we move a process to production once it is stable.

We can easily scale this solution so the scalability is quite good.

We have between 15 and 20 developers in my team who work with UiPath. I am not sure about the number of people on the other teams. In terms of end-users, there are more than 100.

I have developed 30 processes personally, and my team has created more than 200. We plan to continue using UiPath in the future.

We have used technical support and the UiPath technical team is good. Whenever there is help required, and we are not able to find the solution for that from the UiPath documentation, we get a ticket with the support team. Based on the criticality of the process, they help us.

We did not use another RPA solution prior to UiPath.

The initial setup is straightforward and very easy. The main component is called Orchestrator and then there are two more components called Studio and Development Robot. These two are connected to Orchestrator, and once the development is complete, you can do the unit testing on the same machine. After this, you publish the package.

Once the item is published, it will be pushed to the Orchestrator and then connected to the bot. This is where you're going to run the process. Once it is complete the bot will start running. The whole process will take approximately 10 minutes and you can move the data to production.

When the process is running in production, Studio allows you to troubleshoot from there, without having to move it back to the development machine.

I deployed UiPath on my own. They have provided enough documentation.

The pricing and licensing costs seem okay to me, although it is a little bit on the high side.

In the past, you needed to install the Studio license if you wanted to be able to troubleshoot in production. However, that has changed and you no longer need to buy it separately.

My advice for others who are implementing or using UiPath is to ensure that they test the robots and processes thoroughly before moving them to production.

I would rate this solution an eight out of ten.

I started my RPA journey as a developer, and I first heard about UiPath as a low-code, drag-and-drop automation platform. Back then, it was very much in the beginning stages of its development. Ever since then, I've seen it evolve quite fast. I would say even faster than other RPA platforms that I've used, in just a few years.

Thinking back to when I first started using it, there are many new features and updates and it's my preferred platform for RPA.

We primarily used unattended automation, where you deploy the bots to work autonomously. This is unattended, end-to-end automation with no human in the loop, other than providing the inputs or checking the outputs.

We have several use cases, but our main one is reducing manual work. The processes that require a lot of manual input and have a lot of human error are the focus. That could be, for instance, processes that have to do with invoicing, billing, reporting, and coding, which require a lot of man-hours, are very reliant on a human being available, and are time-sensitive. Those are the ones that are on the top list to be automated.

Beyond that, I can't specifically talk about the processes that we've automated.

UiPath helps to implement end-to-end automation, although the discovery of processes, gathering requirements, and creating the design, all happen outside of UiPath. But the development, which is developing the bots, then testing and then deploying them, does happen end-to-end within UiPath.

The end-to-end development capability is important, but this is because every tool offers this and it is expected. That said, there is definitely room for improvement in that end-to-end should include process discovery. It is end-to-end, but those ends can extend further than what it currently is. In that sense, it's no different than other RPA tools.

Another way that UiPath improves the way our organization functions is that the robots can run 24/7. If you think about a human workforce, they work eight hours a day, they take days off, they get sick, they leave, and they take knowledge with them once they leave the company. But, the robots can be run non-stop 24/7, and each process can be scaled up. The same process can be run by one bot, or it can be run by 10 or 100 bots. This means that there's a lot more flexibility that the bots bring, especially for high-volume processes that perhaps even have some peaks, such as an end-of-month rush to produce invoices or meet a deadline or an end-of-financial-year crunch.

These robots have an easier time addressing and variability when it comes to volume. They really create a lot more scalability to where businesses can grow and know that they can meet the demands of the future. So, they're a lot more future-proof, whereas people are harder to rely on.

Speaking from a business perspective, it's the FTE savings. A company obviously needs to spend money on UiPath licenses and development costs, but those costs are oftentimes lower than the cost of that FTE, the full-time employee, whose work is getting automated. If you purely just think about the financial benefits, it's the lower staffing costs.

There is also the ability to free up people. This means that even if people aren't replaced and their salary isn't saved, what they can do is pivot their focus to, for instance, be a lot more customer-facing or do a lot more strategic or creative tasks that perhaps get pushed to the side because there's not a lot of time allocated towards performing them. Now, FTEs have a lot more capacity to contribute and perform tasks that still to this day cannot be automated, like creative thinking, complex decision-making on the spot, strategy, and just human interaction.

In the beginning, employees meet automation with a critical eye. They're thinking, "Well, what's going on? Why are these robots coming in? Are we going to work alongside them? How is this going to work?" But to be honest, in the end, there are winners and losers. What I mean by that is that some jobs are replaced, and that's just simply because of that FTE saving that is usually the driver to justify the cost of development. But on the flip-side, the employees that do stay and do work alongside the bots are usually a lot happier because they have to juggle a lot fewer things.

The robots are there to make people feel like people and not like robots, where they just do the same thing over and over and don't enjoy their job or don't enjoy what they do. A robot takes that away and helps people enjoy their work a lot more because they can do non-repetitive tasks. They can be a lot more customer-facing and perhaps build stronger relationships with their customers, know them better, and have more time available to work on other projects or work on other things that they may never have had the time to do.

In our organization, the robots work on multiple projects. The amount of employee time that is freed up depends on the project and what you are automating, but a pretty good estimate would be a 20% to 40% savings.

With respect to the reduction of problems related to human error, the fact of the matter is that some employees, whether you like it or not, are more error-prone. By automating a process, we were able to standardize it, and therefore, identify the cause of the human error and remove it by replacing the process with a robot that makes a more reliable judgment in terms of action. It is literally just an if-else statement. It's a lot easier to quantify and therefore it's a lot easier to evaluate, and therefore the result is a lot more reliable. Whereas with an employee, let's say the output of their work is a lot more unreliable simply because they could be working on 10 different things on the same day. There could be a deadline approaching, and the quality of work fluctuates with an employee because of it.

With a robot, you will notice that over time, in fact, the quality improves, and that's just the basic truth of RPA. It doesn't happen automatically, and it does require work. It happens because you see the results of the automation and you see areas for improvement, ultimately leading you to make adjustments. You iterate on the RPA solution and make it better over time.

Although it does not improve automatically, through a conscious effort you can be a lot more confident in the output and then be able to see unbiased results at the end of the day. Part of these results is your exception rates, which can be errors. It can be failures, whether technical in nature or decision-making business rule types of errors. Then, you can adjust your process to where it can positively improve that exception rate, and just iterate on that to where it becomes acceptable. Moreover, it's quite stable, which is not the case with the human workforce.

The automation cloud Orchestrator has its benefits and negative sides. The benefit is the fact that it's web-based. A person who has the login credentials can access it without the necessity to have something installed. The development and the monitoring of the bots are separated in UiPath, where the development happens in the Studio and the monitoring happens in the Orchestrator.

In other tools like Blue Prism, it happens in the same place. I've used both, and the Orchestrator is nice. It has a very nice UI, it's user-friendly, it has a lot of features, and I find it quite easy to use. For example, you can see all of the machines, you can see the robots, and you can schedule them. If the business wants to see a lot more across the output of the Work Queue, they can have that visibility from Orchestrator, which is great.

The downside of Orchestrator is the package deployment, which is perhaps another minus of UiPath in general. The deployment of a new package does not take a long time, but there are a lot of steps. It's not an intuitive process. If you have to release a lot of packages, which does occur, especially in the early stage of deployment, when you are releasing hotfixes, or when something goes wrong and you need to redeploy a fix really quickly to minimize business impact, it does slow you down.

I wish it would be just one or two clicks, rather than the whole importing or exporting and connecting to the desktop application and everything that accompanies it. I wish it were a lot easier. Again, it has its upsides but it's not perfect.

The best feature in UiPath is their robotic enterprise framework because that is an inbuilt processing framework for utilizing their work queues. It's plug-and-play, and already pre-built to where you don't have to start from scratch. It's enterprise-grade and ready to be used. All you need to do is populate your dispatcher, create a queue, create a performer, and you're good to go.

The highest benefit of it is that it's just there, ready to use, and you don't need to start from a blank screen. You don't have to figure out, for example, how to create an environment where the robots can check if there's anything in the queue to be worked on. The framework is already there. The other tools that I've used, like Blue Prism, don't have that built-in quite as well.

My perspective and overview are from that of a developer, and I find that the recorder feature is really good. This is because UiPath lets you record your actions on the screen. So, if you want to interact with a web-based interface, for example, then you have UiPath record your actions and then build the activities that you would need in order to replicate those actions through the robot. It makes it a lot better and although it's not perfect and it does need to be reviewed and adjusted, it speeds up development quite a bit. This is especially true when it's basic back development like populating fields and clicking buttons and navigating on a web.

Compared to other RPA tools that I have used, something that stands out to me in UiPath is that it has a very extensive library of activities. Those activities are easy to search for and use.

When you are writing code, there is a feature called IntelliSense, which autocompletes your code. More specifically, when you're typing code, if you're starting to type the name of a variable, it will show you all of the variables available and you can just click them. It's very interactive and it's reminiscent of the Microsoft Visual Studio environment, both from the UI perspective and the coding perspective. This means that developers that are familiar with Visual Studio will probably feel right at home using UiPath. It's very developer-friendly and it's geared towards appealing to existing developers.

The UiPath Academy courses definitely help in the process of bringing employees up to speed. The Academy is the go-to place for UiPath learning and I think that other RPA tools are copying this model of disseminating knowledge, being a lot more open with training, making it freely available, and providing an online classroom. These are things that UiPath has always done, and it certainly helps new developers get upskilled in RPA, and specifically with UiPath.

When it comes to ease of use, UiPath is intuitive insofar as the basic features have a low learning curve. However, if you want to take full advantage of what UiPath can do, and if organizations want to create more sophisticated automation solutions, it is more difficult. For instance, automations involving back-end access, maybe writing directly to databases such as SQL or using API, that's a steep learning curve. In fact, I think the learning curve is exponential.

If you just want to make a robot that sends an email, that's really easy to do. But, if you really want tangible benefits, like if you really want something that solves a business problem, it is a huge learning curve and it takes a while to master. Obviously, it does have that low-code requirement, but I would say that's only for entry automation projects, like proof-of-concept or something along those lines. For something that really solves a business problem, you would need code, because that just makes it a lot more robust and a lot more powerful if you can custom-code certain steps of the process.

Features for process discovery would improve the end-to-end development capabilities.

From a developer's point of view, my biggest struggle with UiPath is debugging. The debug mode in UiPath feels clunky and it is a sore spot. It feels it's hard to control the flow of the process. There are a lot of internal errors and it's not intuitive. In general, debugging is not a good experience and I don't enjoy doing it. In contrast, Blue Prism has better debugging capabilities.

Blue Prism is a little more dynamic; you can adjust variables, you can jump around the flow, and it's easier to control. With UiPath, it's a little bit of a nightmare. It becomes harder to debug the bigger your automation is, because it's quite unpredictable, and it's quite unstable. Definitely, if debugging was improved, I would say UiPath would get 11 out of 10.

Something that I noticed recently is that they have moved to paid certification for developers, whereas it used to have free certification. This is a little bit outside of the platform itself but the pain point here from my perspective is that there is a barrier to entry for new RPA developers, or ones that want to renew their certification. It has become a lot harder and that used to be a differentiator for UiPath. It had a very strong online learning offering and it offered no-charge recertification on top. This is now very similar to what other tools are doing and I see that as a negative.

My first introduction to UiPath was in early 2018 or late 2017.

The robots could be a lot more stable, which is another area for improvement. The stability issue with UiPath is a prominent one, especially in comparison to other tools like Blue Prism. I feel that there are a lot of errors that are caused by the UiPath framework, as opposed to the robot design. Sometimes it's just very unreliable and crashes unexpectedly, which creates serious issues in terms of reliability. In early deployment, it always happens that it's very late nights, and there's a lot of babysitting processes. The robots need it because you never know what's going to crash.

In comparison with other RPA tools, it is average when it comes to reliability. I would rate other tools a little bit easier to manage expectations as to what you can reasonably expect to go wrong, and what you can reasonably expect to break. With UiPath, our developers, even our experienced ones, oftentimes get errors that we've never seen in our lifetime. This is partly due to the flexibility of UiPath, with it being so easy to adapt to all types of applications and all types of environments and it being so malleable. It is one of the most versatile tools; it's industry agnostic, platform-agnostic, and tool-agnostic, but that flexibility creates a lot more room for error in the code. It means that a lot more things can break or interfere with each other, compared to other platforms that are perhaps more niche and more targeted in what they're actually trying to solve.

UiPath is definitely scalable. It is modular, where you build a workflow and that can be reused across multiple robots or multiple processes. Those processes can then be run by one, two, three, five, and 100 bots, provided that they can work concurrently in the same environment, performing the same process. It's wonderful and the scalability is uncapped. If you have licenses, then you can use them, which is great.

The only limits are how many licenses are you willing to buy, and the inherent limits of your own infrastructure and your own process. It comes down to how many robots can realistically work concurrently in the same infrastructure and in the same network without breaking it.

We have approximately 20 developers who use UiPath. We have business users, but it is difficult for me to say how many there are.

I have been in contact with technical support, and I have experienced submitting a support ticket to them. I even got on a call with them and they were very helpful. We had been having issues with automating a platform and we wanted to get their specific insight as to what was going wrong. It had to do with UiPath not being able to extract selectors from that specific interface.

I was really surprised because they spent the time to not only address my ticket and answer my questions, but also to allocate time to schedule a meeting, and really look into the platform via screen share. I was sharing the screen with them and showing them what was happening, and they really looked into it and gave it a lot of attention.

I understand they get a lot of tickets, and I really felt they provided a good answer. They responded really fast, I would say within 24 hours, and we began exchanging details through a back and forth conversation.

They provided me with the outcome that I was happy with. It was a very good experience.

In addition to UiPath, we used Blue Prism and Automation Anywhere. UiPath is king here, and I rarely hear anything about the other two. I would estimate that we use UiPath 95% of the time, perhaps even 99%.

The alternative to UiPath that I am more familiar with is Blue Prism. From my perspective, UiPath is geared towards developers. The audience towards which it's skewed is the developer or the technical person. Blue Prism is geared more towards business people. It's geared towards converting business people, including SMEs and subject matter experts that know the process well, into developers. You will find that the language that each program uses is one that's geared towards the target market. Consequently, UiPath uses a lot of developer language and developer concepts.

For example, UiPath works similarly to the Visual Studio Environment. Blue Prism, on the other hand, uses a lot of flowcharting visuals, as well as the language that it uses for the same concept. It's going to use a definition that's more from a business process flowcharting realm. Recently, both platforms are converging onto each other and I feel like they're becoming more and more similar, but they still have a few things that are different.

One thing that stands out for me is that Blue Prism has wonderful debugging. It's a lot better than UiPath, and it's an all-in-one tool where the monitoring and the building of the robots happen in one application. The deployment is also really easy.

Blue Prism also offers online learning, which is great. They didn't use to have that offering, and I think that they got a lot of inspiration from UiPath. Their online courses have been great because previously when I was learning RPA, I had to use YouTube. Now, they have a whole Blue Prism university, which is amazing.

Blue Prism has inbuilt version control and a lot of other great features. They have a heavy emphasis on security and encryption, which UiPath perhaps needs to improve on. Companies such as banks, insurance agencies, and finance agencies are a lot more interested in Blue Prism because of its very strong security protocols. The encryption offering is a key requirement for companies that work with a lot of sensitive personal data.

I have never been involved in the initial setup, although my understanding is that it's quite a journey.

The areas of the organization with the most ROI from UiPath are operations, finance, HR, and sales. Those are the key departments, although it's across every organization because those departments have a lot of manual work-intensive processes that are the first contenders for automation.

We have a yearly licensing model that gives us access to the development and production environments. The cost of licensing is expensive.

Part of automation is the analysis and optimization of processes because the analysis phase is a by-product of wanting to automate a task. If you want to automate something, you have to break it down into parts and really look at it and think, "How can I reduce this into a series of business rules, a series of decisions, or series of steps?" It's an exercise of process optimization in and of itself because a good practice in automation is to not just take what it is and automate it, but to think, "Does what is currently in place actually work? How can it be improved? How can it be streamlined? How can it be done in fewer steps?" It's a good chance to practice some process review, improvement, and transformation.

The idea is to make it optimal because the current process usually has unquestioned practices that maybe haven't been reviewed for a very long time. A lot of businesses say, "We've always done it this way," and they've never thought to revisit the approach. RPA gives you an opportunity to think about whether what you've always been doing will work when it's being done by a robot. Most often, the processes get streamlined through the requirements gathering phase, understanding the as-is, and then a key part of that is doing the process design, which is the to-be vision.

During that time, processes go through a few design iterations where they are optimized and streamlined because we want the robots to be as efficient as possible. This means performing as few steps as possible without sacrificing value and efficiency. It is important because any inefficiencies in a robot are going to scale with the number of times you're going to run that process. If you run a process a thousand times, and let's say there exists inefficiency that results in an extra minute being used, that could be shed if you were to review and optimize that process.

Ultimately, optimization is an important exercise because the benefits include a further capacity to run more automated processes, and less time is taken up by inefficient steps.

Something to be aware of is that updates to the platform have to be managed because any update could impact the performance of a bot that was built with an earlier version. To avoid having a newer version impact the performance of something that was built previously, all of the updates need to go through a due diligence process.

The biggest lesson that I have learned from UiPath is surprising; not everything needs to be automated. It feels weird to say it because thinking, "Well, I have this platform, I have these bots, why not just automate absolutely everything?", but the truth is that there are things that can be streamlined outside of RPAs. Also, some processes can be automated through other means. Consider the very simple example of sending automated emails, or sorting out your inbox by putting the right email in the right folder, those types of things can be done with email rules rather than RPA.

If a platform already has some sort of inbuilt automation, whether that's a social media platform, email platform, networking platform, or any other type of platform, it's always better to explore that first before looking to solve that problem with RPA. There are times when an Excel Macro or an email rule will be a lot faster and a lot more cost-efficient. RPA should be directed towards big-ticket items, big problems, and large volumes to where no existing solution would provide the same level of value.

My advice for anybody who is considering UiPath is to try it out for themselves. The most beautiful thing is when companies take the leap to have a very small citizen developer team, where they upskill a few technically-minded people with free courses and try to build a small proof of concept to see if RPA is the right path for them. I really encourage that sort of curiosity and experimentation because all of the resources are out there and anybody can learn, as long as they're driven and passionate and curious about automation. I would really encourage people just to give it a try and see what comes out of it.

In our organization, UiPath is the number one RPA tool. Being close to the industry as a developer, and I do feel like it's the preferred tool, at least where I'm based in Australia. It is definitely the preferred RPA solution on the market. Our usage is definitely going to increase in the future. I feel like the future is bright for UiPath. That said, it isn't perfect.

I would rate this solution a nine out of ten.

We use UiPath for cases where we have to do a workflow-related mechanism. Most of these use cases are small, Excel-based solutions and desktop-solution-related workflows, where one or two applications have to be connected, along with the Excel operation, for the end-to-end workflow creation.

We use both attended and unattended automation.

We have created 10-plus solutions using UiPath, and the savings that have been generated from these solutions are around $1 million. They are very cost-effective solutions: finance, order-to-cash, and protocol-to-pay processes. It has created value on the higher end, because the processes were quite cumbersome. We re-engineered the processes and started using UiPath for workflow automation.

We have saved roughly 50 FTEs on a yearly basis. It also enables us to use a lower skillset workforce, which is a cost-effective measure.

Quality, no doubt, is one of the key parameters of automation. UiPath has resulted in quality improvement for the overall processes where it's deployed.

It's on the OCR side and the workflow side where UiPath creates value to us.

The most important and valuable feature of UiPath is the ease of creating automations. It's a workflow-based model. End-to-end coverage is, no doubt, very important, because when you use a fragmented solution, the overall process flow becomes shaky. UiPath has the required capabilities to create an end-to-end solution for a business case. For our scenario, the business cases are quite small. That way, the turnaround time to create a solution is short and it becomes very easy to deploy, which is quite helpful for us.

Another important feature is the OCR capability, which integrates quite easily with other kinds of tools. We have integrated with ABBYY and we have even used the Amazon OCR engine. From an integration perspective, it is scalable enough to integrate with third-party solutions, whereas that kind of thing becomes a bit of challenge when we use Automation Anywhere.

We are able to use Python scripting and Python libraries for data extraction.

We also use the solution in creating attended automations. They are very much division-specific and are currently used by the procurement and the finance teams. These are on-demand, data reconciliation activities that are performed once a week. The bot is clicked by the person who is attending, which is generally a procurement or a finance guy. These are tedious activities so that's why we have the dedicated license for the attended format.

It is quite user-friendly with the drag-and-drop functionality. It has connectors which are quite suitable and industry-standard for basic applications that we use on the desktop, like for the Microsoft suite. From an integration perspective, it has done well.

We have also used its selector technology to automate processes with dynamic interfaces for one of the finance applications, where the UI screen is changing.

The cognitive area is one where there is room for improvement. Automation Anywhere has grown in that area, whereas UiPath still is more dependent on third-party integration. That is something which they should be focusing on more. They should acquire a product and get it integrated.

I have been using UiPath for around two and a half years. I have used both Automation Anywhere and UiPath. We have both tools.

UiPath Robots are quite robust, and from a maintenance perspective it has become easy, if you create logs. It's pretty good.

In terms of scalability, as I mentioned, it has certain challenges, but with the minimal capacity which we are running, it becomes easy to maintain the bots.

We have 10 to 12 automations already in place, and there are around five to six more in the pipeline, which are still being rolled out. The RPA tool we used is determined on a case-by-case basis.

UiPath technical support is pretty good. Most of the answers are provided by the community forum. If you raise a ticket, they are proactive in getting back to you and addressing the point. It's good.

The initial setup was okay. I was involved in the setup of Automation Anywhere four years ago, and with UiPath. Compared to Automation Anywhere, it was much smoother because the community side is quite good with UiPath. In the early days when we were facing issues, we had the UiPath community support to find answers. We did not have to raise a ticket with UiPath because we were able to get our answers in the community forums.

The first case took us around seven to eight months to put in place. The first one is, obviously, always a tricky one. We also picked a use case of medium complexity and it took a bit of time. Later on, we started building more of a workflow solution using our low-cost workforce and, after that, the journey was quite smooth. Initially there were some hiccups, but once the team understood the tool itself it became easy.

We deploy developers who require a lower level of skill sets, developers who do not have that much training. They are normal .NET developers whom we train for one and a half months on UiPath and they start developing UiPath solutions. We have a center of excellence with our developers who work on UiPath. We recently hired two more, so we now have around 11 developers who are working on UiPath.

Taking UiPath courses to get up to speed has been very helpful. I am certified for the tool because of the courses. The curriculum is at least on par with that of Automation Anywhere, although I would say it is much better. The only issue is that the courses are very limited. The AA University has increased to a vast number of courses, and most of them have become free for the end-user. The UiPath course material is good, but there are notably fewer courses and less certification available for people like us, who are more on the business side. AA has a business analyst program and a program manager certification, but I was not able to find anything specific like that in the UiPath Academy.

Our strategy with UiPath is that we generally go for unattended automation because that doesn't lock up our licenses for the bots. We prefer solutions which require unattended automation, because of a lack of budget and other constraints. From the deployment perspective, we have a dedicated server and we're following the minimum guidelines which are required to conform to the deployment standards.

The ROI generated is quite high because of the cost factor.

It is much much cheaper than the Automation Anywhere. That is a key differentiator. It is targeted at mid-level enterprises. It is cost-effective.

There are no additional costs beyond the standard licensing fees. We have taken few of the training-related services from them. Once we move to the cloud version we may require some consulting services to move from on-prem to cloud. That would be the only other cost associated with UiPath.

When it comes to the main differences between UiPath and Automation Anywhere, UiPath is cost-effective. It is quite a lot cheaper than Automation Anywhere. It is also drag-and-drop, a fact which makes basic automation very easy compared to Automation Anywhere. It's quite user-friendly. In addition, the OCR functionality is quite robust in UiPath because it also provides a third-party integration. Python scripting becomes easy and that means our OCR solutions are quite good. These are the pros of UiPath. 

Regarding the cons of UiPath when compared to AA, the first one is the level of scripting details. Custom scripting is quite lacking in UiPath. It's more a drag-and-drop functionality which doesn't allow that higher level of customized scripting when compared to AA. Secondly, the scalability is quite robust in AA as compared to UiPath. Even though we are not pushing the limit, the general opinion out there is that UiPath fails quite visibly when you try to scale solutions that involve operations plus a new product rollout. That's a challenge with UiPath. And, as I mentioned, AA has improved a lot in the cognitive area and UiPath has not reached that level. It relies more on the third parties.

Even if you are a large enterprise and you're trying to start your RPA journey, UiPath is the answer. It sits in the top one or two solutions, along with Automation Anywhere. It's one of the leaders in RPA, and with the low cost model of the license structure, it is very easy to start with UiPath rather than with Automation Anywhere.

If you are looking for a strategic approach, where you have projected that within five to six years you will roll out 250 to 300 bots, scalability is something you have to factor in when starting your journey.

We haven't used the solution's artificial intelligence. We tried to run a PoC using a chat bot, but it didn't do well. I don't think UiPath has its own AI engine. They provide an API-level integration with other AI tools. We had a challenge there because most of the AI functionalities had to work on the cloud. We had to integrate with the Google Cloud and Amazon cloud, but both are in the public domain and transferring data from our office to the cloud was a challenge. We hit a wall. For that scenario, we moved on to Automation Anywhere, which provides us an on-prem solution.

Most of the automations that we work with are internal to our systems. We are also trying to use it with BPM.

We are reducing people's activities in our organization. For example, there are monthly reports that we have to upload and read, and it was taking a day to do this activity. Then, using UiPath, we can reduce that time to two hours. 

It has helped a lot to minimize our on-prem footprint. This is really important because it minimizes tasks that people work on, including myself.

If you automate with UiPath, you don't have to worry about firing someone who is doing the same process. Instead, you are giving that person more time for analysis for the information that UiPath brings in.

The OCR is something that is really cool. You can work with a lot of systems and use the HTML feature to interact with websites. I really like that it interacts with websites. 

UiPath Portal works great for accessing features.

UiPath provides single sign-on, which is very important, because we don't have to manage a lot of passwords.

It is fast. With UiPath Studio, you can get the passwords and work in it quickly. 

The UiPath Academy is great for learning the solution. It helped us a lot.

We would like to know how to implement the artificial intelligence (AI) feature because we are working on some activities in this area.

The bank knows about UiPath, but not all people consider UiPath something they really trust, which is why there are just two of us working on it full-time. We do teach people about UiPath, but they are not 100 percent involved with it.

The stability is usually really great. However, at this point, we are uploading a new version because the stability is not right. They told us that our version, 18.4.5, is not 100 percent compatible with Orchestrator. Therefore, we don't have the stability that we had before.

The scalability works great for us. It is really fast when we ask for something.

It is really fast at scaling automations. At the beginning, it was slow because we couldn't work the way that we wanted. Now, it scales automation quickly.

We haven't had contact with technical support because UiPath has been working great for us.

This is our first RPA solution.

Before Orchestrator, we worked on an application to manage UiPath because we didn't have Orchestrator two years ago. So, we create our own application to manage UiPath.

It was very easy to set up UiPath the first time. We implemented UiPath with virtual machines, and that didn't affect our costs in a significant way.

The timeframe for setting up a new bot for implementation depends on whether it will be big or small. It might take a day, if it is really easy, or a week.

Getting the idea to have a new bot for the first time is kind of complicated. Once you can explain how it will work or be a solution, then you can just go for it.

I have to be involved in the beginning when implementing a new bot. 

Two people from our bank were involved in the deployment. One person develops the solution and another does the QA.

We worked with a third-party (BDG) to set up UiPath. They were really good.

It has helped a little to reduce our work. Before, we had people working at 6:00 AM because they had to inspect, analyze, or look into the systems for prevention. For example, they had to prevent the systems from going down. Now, with UiPath, that person doesn't have to come early because we get everything in reports from UiPath. So, that person doesn't have to come early anymore. That person now just has to look at the report and see, for example, that UiPath did a fix in the morning. 

The solution really works for its price.

The license cost is the only cost to start a new bot. However, if we want UiPath to do an activity and go through another machine, like Remote Desktop, or application, like Bloomberg, then we have a special license that is an extra cost.

We also evaluated Automation Anywhere, but decided on UiPath, which is friendlier. We also considered that UiPath has its Academy and more documentation.

We are glad UiPath has security because not all the RPA solutions have security.

We are getting into AI now, because we haven't worked with that yet.

Right now, we are 100 percent familiar with Orchestrator.

We didn't have to install a lot of features with this infrastructure. We just download some activities to work with everything, and it works fine. We don't have a lot of infrastructure for using data.

Our first step is getting Orchestrator because we really want to have the entire bank involved in UiPath. The solution is great. It can reduce costs, especially with all that stuff that people do. We have big plans for UiPath going forward.

I would rate this solution as 10 (out of 10).

We are using UiPath primarily for unattended automation. We are automating processes for business functions like finance and go-to-market.

We have Orchestrator which is hosted on the cloud and we also have UiPath deployed on-premises. We have three different instances of Orchestrator: one for development, one for staging, and one for production.

There are multiple business processes involving finance users. For example, for intercompany settlements, the end-to-end process was handled manually before. But now, the entire intercompany settlement, which involves many transactions, takes place automatically. Users don't need to intervene. They just need to verify whether all the calculations made by the robot are correct.

Another win for us was in the go-to-market function, where our customers talk to a customer advocate for purchasing different products and offerings. If they want to renew a quote or generate a new quote, they used to contact the CAs and talk to them on the phone, which would take a lot of time. It would take more than a day to process their requests and place their orders. Now, with the help of UiPath, we have developed a fixed form which we hand out for the customer to fill in. The average response time, as a result, has decreased a lot. We are now able to close a deal and generate revenue very quickly, compared to before. The process is around 90 percent faster for us.

We have just started using the AI functionality for unstructured invoices which we receive from different regions. Until now, when we wanted to extract information out of them, there was not any particular rule or way to get that information. A human had to be involved. That is where the AI functionality has come into picture. It makes our robots smarter and gives us the ability to train a robot to extract the relevant information out of different types of invoices.

Of course we have also been able to produce increased accuracy for a lot of our processes. With processes where we are receiving data in bulk, it's very natural for a person to miss out on certain things, but a bot does not miss out on any of the information and create errors in that way, so we have been able to reduce human errors to a great extent.

One of the most valuable features is its ability to allow us to integrate any external scripts—code or any other scripting file.

Also, they have recently come up with new features, like Document Understanding and AI fabric, which we have also started to use. These are helping us a lot with unstructured data extraction from invoices. The AI Fabric has out-of-the-box models, so we are using the invoices model from Document Understanding package. There is also the capability to train the model and that is a great way for us to get information out of the different invoices, as we deal with different invoices from different regions, rather than a single format. This is a great feature which is built-in.

It is also important that all the new services that UiPath is adding to the Portal are managed from the same place. Ease of onboarding for the customer should be a main priority. If the new services can be managed from a single place, it would be very easy for us to onboard them, to understand how to use them, and to enable them in our current workspace.

In addition, things like UiPath's navigation, drag-and-drop options, pre-packaged templates, and low-code features help developers, and people who have some understanding of tech, to build solutions quickly. With these features, we don't have to go down the same path all over again. This helps developers.

Each one of us has used the UiPath Academy courses and that has played a major role in getting people up to speed. I, myself, learned about UiPath by doing the Academy courses and then doing UiPath certification. If anyone wants to start with RPA, and UiPath in particular, it should definitely be their first point to get started with it. The Academy courses are really good.

There are challenges raised by the fact that UiPath is coming up with different versions almost every quarter, and at times almost every month. We plan to upgrade almost every quarter. Recently we were trying to add AI Fabric into our production Orchestrator, but we faced a lot of challenges. We had to involve the UiPath support team in the upgrading process. We were quick movers to upgrade to AI Fabric, as not many companies have done that. There were some bugs that we discovered during our upgrade journey, and that's how UiPath came to know about those bugs. It was little tricky, but UiPath's team is always present and helps along the journey. They have been coming up with a lot of new services and products and there are a lot of announcements on their Portal as well. But it's difficult for customers to keep up with their announcements.

Another area for improvement is version control functionality, particularly for Git. So far, for a lot of files, especially Excel, we are not able to compare the differences between two versions of a project. File conflict resolution could be improved.

I have been using UiPath for two years and three months.

The robots are pretty stable. It just depends on the way they are coded and how robust the developer has made the solution. If they have taken care of all the edge cases and of the possible areas of failure, the robots are predictable.

The solution is scalable. There is functionality to add as many robots as you want by purchasing additional licenses. There is a feature where we can use one machine and add different user profiles which is great. We are able to run the robots by using just one piece of hardware with different user profiles.

But if you are willing to scale up and you want to enable a lot of your team members to use the automation functionality, you can easily do that by purchasing more licenses and you will be able to schedule your processes in a better way.

We have about 15 people who use UiPath in our company. They are mostly developers, solution architects, or business analysts. We have 20-plus end-to-end automations and we use the tool on almost a daily basis.

Not all teams within our company know about UiPath. As of now, we have onboarded the finance and go-to-market departments. We plan to onboard the other teams, to run sessions with them and let them know that something like this exists and that it can help them in their day-to-day work. We are definitely planning to increase our number of automations.

The UiPath support team is there to help us to onboard stuff faster. It helps us achieve our business objectives quicker. We are able to solve stakeholders' problems very quickly. Because we have already planned to go live with certain bots, if our platform is ready earlier, we are able to provide the business value as soon as possible. That has really helped.

I would rate their technical support at nine out of 10. They are pretty helpful. Even if they're not able to come up with a solution right away, they ask for the specific files and all the logs and, usually, things are resolved within a couple of days.

I don't really know about the specifics of pricing, but identifying the type of automation you need will determine whether you can go with attended or unattended licenses. Think about whether you want your robots to run unattended and 24/7 or not, or whether you want a person to validate something in a given process, or if you want to constantly monitor the bot. Those are the types of things that will help determine the types of licenses you need.

With unattended, they now have something called Action Center where you can do a hybrid automation. That type of automation will be unattended, but there will be a human in the loop.

It really depends on what you are looking for and what kind of budget you have. If you already have the Microsoft Office suite, you get Microsoft Power Automate which is also an automation platform. You need to decide how extensively you want to go into the automation journey and whether you are really planning to expand it. If you are planning on going big with Automation, UiPath is the way to go. But if you just want to experiment and try out automation, and you already have Microsoft Office suite, you should try the Power Automate platform.

We develop and deploy use cases in the area of the cloud. We have deployed over 100 use cases. Most of our use cases are related to SAP applications, web applications, and mainframe applications.

One use case example is related to mainframe applications. The bot monitors mainframe applications 24/7. If there are any new jobs, they are identified, then the bot changes the status of the job to differentiate it. 

Previously, we are using the 2016 version of Orchestrator, then we upgraded to the 2018 version of Orchestrator. Some clients are deploying the 2020 version. It depends on the client. We suggest using a version back to clients, i.e., the 2019 version. 

We automate retail, sales, and agricultural services.

There are a bunch of candidates being monitored 24x7. Automation Cloud monitors these jobs, and whenever new docs come into the application, it will then change the status manually based upon certain conditions. Once we deploy the automation into the production, our manpower has been reduced so there are only one or two people needed for the backup. The rest will be taken care of by the automation itself. So, there has been a drastic reduction in our workforce.

We schedule different jobs using Orchestrator only. We have a separate team who takes care of jobs that we apply in Orchestrator. So, if there are any failures, it will automatically send email alerts to us. 

Within Orchestrator, there is a tab where we can restrict roles from the admin level to the user level. Developers give only access to the jobs. Whereas, admins have a roles option to restrict access.

There are still some areas that need improvements. Currently, the tool is not 100 percent accurate with hand written notes and image based automation. It is also tedious using it with Word applications. 

We are doing automation to take care of all our processes, but we still need support people 24/7 to monitor these jobs. So, human intervention is still there. We have two people monitoring these automations 24/7 because there are still some challenges with the automation.

I have been working with it for two and a half years.

When new bots are developed, we definitely see some errors in the first few days, which are usually connector issues. Once the bot is moved to production and has a lot of enhancements and patches to the automations, we make sure that the automation is running smoothly. So, during the initial stages, it won't be very stable, but after a few enhancements to adjust to the automation as time goes, then it will become stable.

Once we deploy and release the automation into production, we will monitor production to see if there are any new challenges, different scenarios, or bugs that we need to fix. We have monitored the automation after deployment for around six to seven months, and the automation went smoothly without any issues. Because the automation is performing pretty well, we have deployed it to more of our workforce and their different jobs.

We have separate, dedicated test data in three different environments. Orchestrator has a database and email server, so everything is in Orchestrator. Apart from the servers, products, and services, everything has a separate operations team, which has eight to 10 members, who take care of everything.

Previously, they used on-premises services for the bots. Then, they asked us to migrate more than 20 bots from on-premises to our AWS environment. So, we have created a dedicated AWS environment for them.

The deployment process goes this way: 

1. Developers develop the use case in a development environment. 
2. Once that is done, then they will move the code to the non-cloud environment.
3. They will test the code if the automation is running fine or not. If automation is running fine, they will show the data which is running fine as a code to the client. 
4. Once they have the desired output, then we will move to the production environment. 
5. The operations team will then deploy that process. 

The first time, it is a bit tricky. Going to production, it will take around 20 to 30 minutes to deploy the first time. If there is already existing automation, we only need a patch to implement it in production, then it will take roughly five to 10 minutes to apply.

The process of testing and deploying code takes roughly one to four nights maximum.

For deploying UiPath, we need at least three to four RPA developers. In general, one person can deploy at any time. The other two to three people are just there on support calls. 

Post-production, we have an operations team of eight to 10 members who take care of the automation.

There are some automations that save us thousands of hours monthly. These are automations that we run 24/7 as well as some automations that we run every five minutes for installing backups. Depending upon the amount of time the automation is standing, we will manage the capabilities of the server. 

To some extent, it has reduced the operations:

1. The automation is sending an email whenever there will be an error. Automatically, it is not going to the user. The user just needs to verify their emails. 
2. Whenever an error is noticed in the code, the automation will fit the address and email the operations team members. 

In these ways, it has helped to reduce operation costs, but not completely.

There are three types of licenses: unattended, attended, and developer.

We also use Automation Anywhere (version 10) and Blue Prism automation tools, but I think most clients prefer UiPath. There are more activities available in UiPath versus the Automation Anywhere version that we use. For example, UiPath has database-related activities, but Automation Anywhere, version 10, does not have this feature. I have tried using mainframe appliances in UiPath and Automation Anywhere, and I found that UiPath is more flexible and has more options available.

The solution is single sign-on, so the authentication is done for us, because it is difficult to remember all our passwords.

We have a ServiceNow ticketing tool for reporting issues related to UiPath.

UiPath is very good for developing web-based applications, especially for SAP and the web. For these two applications, you can go with UiPath without any doubts.

I would rate this solution as an eight (out of 10).

I have multiple use cases as part of this solution, since I work in different domains with different technologies and applications. We use attended and unattended bots.

One use case was for a credit-based client where we worked on the UI automation of the application. We were using UiPath Automation Cloud because our team is spread across different geographical locations, like the U.S, APAC and EMEA regions. We had different RPA developers who are developing the script simultaneously and putting it on the system, and our business case was that we wanted to automate the UI applications. Since there were different developers in different geographical regions, they created the bots on their system. Due to the cloud offering, we were able to move the bots to production using a click of a button. There is also an Orchestrator offering as part of the cloud, which is hosted. Once we had a thorough peer review of the bots being developed, we pushed it to our production-ready cloud-based Orchestrator. From there, we use it to run the script. That is an unattended bot, which is also one of the features. Since it is a credit-based UI automation, there are some instances where manual intervention is required in order to see whatever data is sent out to the client, if it is in the correct order or not. That is why we use the unattended offering of UiPath. Both these technologies help us a lot in creating our production-ready implementation. 

For another use case, we did an implementation in the SAP application. It was a procure-to-payment (P2P) cycle, where a third party sends out the invoices which get fed into the SAP application, then it gets verified and goes out to the payroll team. Once that is verified by the payroll team, the payment is released to the concerned vendors. All these points of entry were being done manually: the third-party invoices entered into the SAP application, SAP verification, and the payroll team verification. Since it involved a lot of financial data, people were very hesitant to get it automated. However, since we had this UiPath offering, that initial hesitation was turned into a very good implementation of whatever we wanted to achieve as part of this UiPath automation. We were using the unattended bot as part of the cloud offering. We ran the processes at night from Orchestrator, so people working from home didn't need to stay up late in order to run the processes. Since we were using the cloud unattended bot service of UiPath, we were able to trigger the whole process in a single click of a button, which is amazing.

As part of the UiPath offering, we have three offerings: Studio, StudioX, and Studio Pro. These three offerings are provided via cloud on a single system and installed on our laptops or desktops.

I am working as a senior analyst. As part of this particular role, I have to cater to the client's needs if they want to get a UiPath implementation. Then, I do the consulting as part of the implementation. I also get involved in the PoC development and how we should use the cloud offering, e.g., what benefits are there.

We were able to move prototypes, which were in PoC stages to production very quickly, which helped us a lot. There has been more collaboration happening because of the cloud implementation. Because we have different geographical locations where in RPA bots are getting developed, at the end of the day, everything is pushed into Orchestrator Cloud. From there, we can execute it. In terms of collaboration, this has been very helpful. 

UiPath Automation Cloud has helped us to minimize our on-prem footprint. We were able to get our prototypes into production very quickly. In turn, this helped us to get stuff minimized quickly because we were able to move the prototype as part of the PoC into production faster. We were also able to scale. For example, if we had new people joining the team, we could easily move them into the cloud offering and add a new tenant. We have added two or three new members who could readily go ahead and use the solution to develop RPA bots.

It is a single point of truth. There is no discrepancy or ambiguity. We can go to the leadership team, and say, "This is what it saves us on costs, man-hours, and effort that we used to do manually versus what we are doing now using the bots."

The most valuable feature (as part of the cloud offering) is Orchestrator. Even if we have the RPA developers spread across different geographical locations, we are able to get the bot ready and pushed into Orchestrator, where any non-technical guy can come in and run the process. When I say non-technical guy, I mean any person from the business or leadership who just wants to see how it works. They can go ahead and log into Orchestrator and execute the process.

The Orchestrator portal is very intuitive, so you don't have to run around and talk to anyone. It is so intuitive because it is like using a web-based application. For example, nobody has to train us to go and do whatever they want us to do. It is so intuitive that we can figure out, "Hey, this is what I need to click in order to add new tenants. This is what I need to click in order to change the geography from India to APAC or any other location. In terms of execution, whatever bots are in execution right now will be shown there. Also, whatever bots are not running, they will be displayed as part of the dashboard as well as the failures.

UiPath provides granular, role-based access control and management, which is very important as part of the monitoring. When we want to drill down on why there is a failure, we need to do a root cause analysis as part of understanding on why this particular bot failed and what could be the reason: 

• Is it because of some kind of data issue? 
• Is it because of an issue from the product? Then, we need to reach out to their support teams. 
• Is it because of an incorrect implementation of the bot or feature that we want to get implemented as part of the solution?

We are moving from single sign-on to no password sign-on. As we are moving ahead with technological advancement, maybe that feature can be added. This totally depends on how that technology is accepted by the people. If people in big enterprises are not willing to switch and don't want to move away from the single sign-on, then it will be very difficult to digest this. However, whenever there is a change, it is very difficult to digest. Eventually, people will like it. I believe if it is implemented as part of UiPath, who is a technological leader in terms of RPA and new stuff when they roll out every release, then this would be a good area that they can look into for enhancement.

They could add more features in order to get that dashboard more intuitive, e.g., how easily can we visualize everything being reported. I believe this should be improved as part of our Orchestrator offering. Now, we have different visualization tools being used, like Power BI. The data gets flooded into those kinds of tools and the dashboard is easy to understand. So, someone with a non-technical background can see the dashboard and understand what has happened. However, to provide detailed analysis, there has to be some improvements so we can provide drill-down data to developers showing, "Hey, this has gone wrong." If they could also incorporate that as part of the reports, then it would be very quick to view on the dashboards.

I have been using it for two years.

UiPath has a number of offerings: on-prem Orchestrator, Automation Cloud, Automation Hub, Cloud Orchestrator, Task Mining, Task Capture, etc. Sometimes, it feels like other new areas are getting more focus compared to areas, like dashboard Insights, which should be more relevant. They should focus on these other areas to make the cloud offering more robust. Though, they are working towards it and releasing updates. Therefore, eventually, they will look into it, work on it, and iron out any kind of discrepancy.

It was very easy to scale up. Since we started getting a lot of data from the client which was getting filled as part of the UI-logged application, we were able to push in data as part of the UI. So, we were able to reduce replies to clients significantly.

We find the solution to be scalable. Since this RPA technology is now widely accepted as part of our enterprise solution, businesses are coming in. Once the business team is onboarded, we can easily onboard the people who have technical expertise to create the bots, analyze them, and provide logic on how we need to design the bots. As part of the initial stages, we only have a business person, a solution architect, and a tool expert. First, we create the credentials for them, then we provide the solution to the business as part of a PoC. After that, if we are using any other traditional system, then it will take a lot of time to get 10 or 15 people onboarded in order to develop the solution in a fully-fledged manner. However, since we have the orchestration capabilities, we can just go in that particular Orchestrator dashboard and create our tenant with a few clicks. We can also move in and out between different geographies. For example, if I want to go and look into what is happening in the Indian service line, I can just go and click on that particular service line, which is already configured as part of Orchestrator.

Initially, when we were going with the idea of creating an RPA bot, the first thing was to get a nod from the business to make sure about how scalable the solution is. At times, what happens is once we get the business sign off, then it takes around a month or two in order to get the team onboarded with all the necessary accesses. Once they get all the accesses, they will start working on the solution. However, in this particular case, as part of this Automation Cloud offering, we didn't have to waste any time after we got the business nod, saying, "Hey, you guys can go ahead and implement this full-fledged solution." Since the orchestration capabilities are there, the moment we received an email from the business, we shot out an email, "Hey, we are getting these pieces and have already created the credentials. Tomorrow, you can get the ball rolling in terms of solution development."

There are multiple channels where we can reach out to them. One of those channels is the Community Forum, which is being constantly monitored for any issues. So, if anybody has already faced it, they go ahead and have it answered. Or, if nobody has seen it before, then the forum moderator comes in, and says, "Hey, why don't you go ahead and reach out to the IT support?" So, this is a channel that gets a response and has faster ways to directly approach the support team managing the servers.

The UiPath Community Forum is worldwide. It is being monitored by community moderators. I have seen feedback being put through to the IT support team, then that is put through to the right channels to get addressed. They really listen to the customer feedback, which is what I appreciate about them. 

The support is responsive at resolving any kind of tickets or issues when we reach out for help. This is one of the primary factors for going with Automation Cloud versus other cloud offerings, like Automation Anywhere and ElectroNeek. UiPath support is very much available and provides a solution. Even if they don't have the solution, they tell the affiliate, "This is how much time it will take," or "It will be released in the next update."

We don't need any IT support in order to maintain this particular solution. Since it is a cloud offering, everything is taken care of by the URL.

In case of any issues for the setup and updates, we reach out to the UiPath support team.

The initial setup is very easy. It is like installing an app on your iPhone. That is how simple it is. Basically, it is not an installation at all. It is just signing into a cloud account. As part of the cloud offering, we are provided with a URL, which gives us access to the Orchestrator instantly. There is no setup whatsoever. You don't have to go and download any EXP or MSA file on your system, then double click it and a number of forms are popping up. It is nothing of that sort. It is a single URL, where you can log in with your credentials, and that is one time activity. After that, it is a single sign-on the moment that you access that particular URL.

The implementation was frictionless with the single sign-on feature.

By using the Automation Cloud version, when there is a new version pushed out, then I do not have to do a reinstallation again in order to get all the newest features. Since I am using the SaaS offering, the new functionalities being pushed out as part of the newest version will be easily accessible to me without doing an uninstall or installation. This is a good part of the offering.

We are seeing a good ROI.

The maintenance work has been reduced because of the bots. Initially, the time that we invested in order to zero in on this particular product was 60 to 70 percent of the job data. This helped us a lot when we were deploying it.

This solution has reduced business costs. For example, products and bots that we designed for UI automation were also deployed for back-end services.

The setup cost is minimized drastically since it is a cloud-based offering. We don't need to have a dedicated person or team to monitor it. We just subscribe to the services, get the URL, login, and the next moment, we are creating tenants and the service line. Then, "Boom!," we are ready for executing the bots from our test check.

Our license cost is reduced since we don't require any IT support. 

I used the free versions of other vendors when we were trying to zero in on the solution that we wanted to use. We used a few other competitors of UiPath as when we were doing the PoC, and the features that we liked the most and made us lean towards UiPath were its intuitiveness and ease of use. We liked how Orchestrator can be used by the business or by anyone with a non-technical background. That is what helped us to make our decision in favor of UiPath. 

With other tools, we had some issues with their support where they were frequently not reachable. They were not able to set up any discovery calls, such as, "Hey, this is how it is going to work." They also don't have very active community forums. 

Instead of talking to the support or sales teams, we investigated on our own. We went to the UiPath Academy, which is readily available, and looked into its documents, which were highly detailed. We also monitored their Community Forum, which is being moderated properly. Then, we read some reviews on IT Central Station, seeing how people are reviewing it and why they are paying for it. For example, if their whole community is coming out with good words, then there has to be something which they are doing well. That is what made us make the decision to zero in on UiPath Automation Cloud.

When comparing UiPath with different vendors offering RPA,like Automation Anywhere or ElectroNeek, we initially thought that Automation Anywhere was ahead of the game and UiPath was playing a catch-up. A few weeks back, UiPath had a good investor round, then they went all guns blazing out in the market. There is a lot of community awareness in terms of UiPath implementation. So, I believe the road ahead for UiPath is very good. 

One of the newest upgrades that we had was in respect to payments getting added. New functionalities are getting added. They also work on the feedback that they get from interviews conducted by sites, like IT Central Station, who take unbiased reviews. They work off this feedback, which is why they are upgrading their products out in the market.

I haven't used the AI Fabric solution as of yet because we don't have a business case for it as of now.

If you are ready with your own business process that you want to get automated, then I would recommend UiPath for its intuitiveness. You should consider the intuitiveness of the UiPath as one of the parameters in your solution decision. For example, if you have the business process ready, then that is half the job done. The other half will be taken care of by your RPA developers or solution architect. So, if you are using UiPath, the learning curve is very small. You don't need to invest a lot of time. 

They have their UiPath Academy learning website, where you can go in as well as ask your team members to learn based on their roles. There are different series of educational videos based on job roles and how that particular role should look at UiPath as a solution. For example, as a manager, if I'm going in and looking into the UiPath, I do not want to be bothered about how I'm going to pull in activities and develop the automation bot. As a manager, I am going into Orchestrator to see how many bots have executed successfully or failed. If I was a solution architect, then I need to know how to design the service lines if they are located in different geographical regions. 

Everybody is really looking for some kind of solution that eases our life since we are working from home. It takes a toll when we are working from home. When we have these RPA bots coming to our rescue, then it makes a difference in our day-to-day life. Then, we can spend more time with our loved ones rather than spending more time in front of our laptop screens.

I would like to rate it as nine (out of 10) because I believe no one is perfect and all the bots are being developed by humans. Going forward, I read on a forum that UiPath is developing an AI feature where the bot will autoheal itself. Once the autohealing feature is implemented, I would rate the solution as 10 (out of 10) because there would be no manual intervention.

We are a small but global company. We are about 1,200 people. We are a logistics company, and most of our employees work in our warehouses. So, our office workers are somewhere between 400 to 500 across the globe. Being a logistics company, we are maybe a little bit old-fashioned. There are a lot of papers going back and forth, and we are trying to automate different scenarios. We cater provisions to ships, so we are basically a grocery store for ships. 

One important thing is when a ship is going into port somewhere, they put in an order for whatever provisions they need for when they leave port again. So, we need to be quick at expediting their orders. When they put in a request for a quote for whatever products they need, we need to respond very quickly, because the tendency is that whoever responds first gets the order. So, we want to do that. We are trying to sort of increase the speed of those types of operations as well as the quality of them. 

It is hard to really pinpoint what it is we are doing, but it's the communication between customers. When we receive a communication from a customer, we want to move the process through our company as quickly as possible and with high quality.

We are fairly new to UiPath still. We do intend to use it company-wide and have started out with purely unattended scenarios so far.

We invoice every month quite a substantial amount of money to our customers. We saw a problem in that about 20 percent of our invoices were sent to the wrong addresses. That meant that, at month's end, when we were expecting money to come in, we would be missing around 20 percent of our cashflow that month. Of course, we wanted to prevent that because 20 percent of the cashflow of $300 to $500 million a year is a lot of money. 

We have automation that runs every night through all our invoices. Because we have some problems with our master data in the company, it does a number of measurements, on whether an address for an invoice seems to be the correct address, and a number of checks, such as, what ship was the goods delivered to? After that, it looks up information through the international registers of ship ownerships, then it will do a number of checks, giving each invoice a score as rating the probability that the address is correct. If it is below a certain threshold, then we will do some manual processing, and we are looking into UiPath Action Center for this. For four or five of our largest branches in the US and Asia, we have seen a significant improvement in the payments at month's end, which has definitely improved our cashflow.

The administration is a SaaS solution, which helps to minimize our on-prem footprint. The only things that we have running on-prem are the machines running the robots. Everything else is handled in the cloud. We don't need to worry about backups, etc.

We are adopting as much as we can some of the things that should reduce the maintenance costs. We are using Robotic Enterprise Framework in our development and Automation Hub to sort of qualify our ideas. So, we are trying to implement a uniform way of doing things throughout the lifecycle of an idea. UiPath supports this fairly well, and I think it will get even better.

Just this week, we are launching our Automation Hub effort because we need to start building a pipeline for our automation candidates. Right now, we have eight or nine ideas in our Automation Hub. That will grow quite quickly because we need the help of Automation Hub to decide on which idea that we will be moving forward with next.

UiPath continues to add services to the Portal. It is fairly important that they are all managed from the same place because it is a single point of access, which was a factor that really played into our choice of vendor, UiPath. We use Automation Hub to sort of collect ideas and discover what ideas are good for information, then we use Orchestrator to manage them once they have been developed. We are hoping to use Insights at a later point, when that is available in the cloud, so we have a complete end-to-end solution in one place. 

Automation Hub is an immature product. We have only been using it seriously for about a week and have already seen some things that will give us a few headaches down the road. We are committed to using it and will continue to use it, but I have some suggestions for improvement. We have been in contact with our local UiPath office about that, and their initial response was positive.

We would like to see more detail and refinement. It is still a young product, and we are confident that the product will improve a lot over the next few months.

We are hoping for some integrations between Automation Hub, Orchestrator, and Insights.

We are missing a way to quantify that money isn't everything with this solution.

Our license was activated sometime in July. So, we have been using it for about six to seven months.

We have seen a few quirks here and there. Overall, we are satisfied with the stability.

We have only a couple of handfuls of automations running, which are very stable. So, we are not doing much maintenance at all. Maintenance needs half an FTE, if even that.

The potential scalability is really good.

I don't know what the scale is for UiPath Portal. There are still signs that it is a young product, but we see it moving and improving at a really good pace. So, we have high expectations.

The technical support has been good. I have only used them a couple of times. The response has been good. They are knowledgeable. 

One of the big reasons why we chose UiPath is that it has a big following in online communities. It has a good forum itself: Forum.UiPath.com, but I really wish that UiPath would have moderators in their forums who are more active. There are a lot of questions that go unanswered, and that is a shame.

We didn't previously have any other automation solutions in this company.

Our initial setup was very straightforward. Our deployment took only a couple of days. We are a small operation with only two unattended licenses. We created the Orchestrator account and installed the robots on two servers. 

As far as development goes, we really just have the base package. Then, we are adding on Automation Hub right now.

We did engage with their local consultancy. They sort of helped us build a strategy for the infrastructure structure setup and strategy, as far as how to identify candidates, operations, and development. However, initially, we just wanted to pull the trigger very quickly. We had an evaluation phase of a couple of months, where we were testing different products and had tried to set up UiPath before, which helped.

We have used Carve Consulting, and our experience with them has been fantastic. We are working with this third-party consultancy to have them come up with a couple of ideas for some solutions that would involve AI Center for the end of this year or next year.

The initial deployment needed just a couple of people from our side, including me. I worked a little with some of our infrastructure guys, getting the accounts set up, the service division, provisions, etc.

We just haven't scaled to a point yet where there has been any kind of return on investment.

There are not very many users because the stuff that we have automated so far has just taken work off people's hands. Where a person used to spend all day uploading pricing data into a database, we have a bot doing that now. So, people are not using UiPath, they have just sort of been relieved of their duties. While that sounds bad, we have made an effort to find areas where FTEs get to spend time doing what they are best at.

The licensing is too expensive. It is not a cheap product. We constantly have to build business cases where we have to justify our existence as an RPA team. 

We have engaged in a long-running licensing agreement because we believe in the product.

We have used a third-party consultancy, and that's definitely not free.

We looked at a local variant of Kofax RPA called SmartRPA, which was built by a Danish company. It is basically Kofax RPA with an Orchestrator service built on top of it. We evaluated that. We also looked at something called OpenRPA, mainly due to price.

UiPath is built on top of Windows Workflow Foundation, which is a platform that I have worked with previously. So, there was a lot of familiarity and extensibility. Then, we looked at how good the product is at automating desktop applications. There was not really a contest there; UiPath was better by far.

The fact that this is a SaaS solution very positively affects how fast we are able to innovate when it comes to automation. When we did the evaluation of what product to choose, UiPath versus something else, the ability to assess deployment of the whole administration was a key factor.

In our decision to go with UiPath, it was very important that we didn’t have to worry about future installations and upgrades of Orchestrator. We just didn't want the trouble of having to do upgrades. With UiPath being a young product that is evolving very quickly, we would be doing on-prem upgrades every few months and we don't have time for that. So, we liked the idea that it is a cloud-based setup.

Security was a factor in our decision to go with the solution. We didn't look into all the technical specs and certifications. We just looked at some of their customers, and said, "If that bank is using it, and it is used in the defense industry, then they know what they are doing." They had good references.

It is the best product.

It is an automation product. At the end of the day, it is software development. If there is anything that is important in software development, it is that you have a defined process from beginning to end, from the birth of the idea until it has been put into production and eventually retired. So, you need to have a defined process for different stages in the lifecycle that you need to be in control of. The product somewhat helps us do this with Automation Hub and the Robotic Enterprise Framework, but we are looking forward to even more tools for stuff like that.

So far, we are still in the meat and potatoes space. We haven't really gone into the AI or Document Understanding stuff yet. 

UiPath Portal is good overall for enabling administrators to work with Orchestrator. I have seen a lot of improvements, even in the last six or 12 months. We are learning as we go. For the first few months, we were working in a classic folder. Now, we are adopting modern folders in order to better be able to scale our efforts.

UiPath provides granular, role-based access control and management. Right now, that is not so important to us because we do everything unattended. So, we have a couple of service accounts that run everything. However, once we move into attended scenarios, then it's really important that we have that granular control.

I know that there are some new features coming out in regards to deploying automatically and elastically, but we haven't looked that much into them. We don't expect them to be a problem.

We are looking forward to doing attended robots, but that will probably be in the second half of this year when we start looking into that.

For the size of our company, we started fairly big. We went all in, buying licenses, consultancy hours, etc. We have spent a lot of money this first year. I would probably advise someone to start small but still be ambitious. Do a lot of PoCs and see how it fits into your organization. There needs to be a lot of disciplines surrounding it, e.g., if you just stay with five or 10 automations, then things are good. However, once you build 100, you start running into maintenance problems and things like that, so there needs to be a discipline. 

You don't need to spend a million dollars to sort of get off the ground, so I would advise people to start small.

I would rate this solution as an eight (out of 10).

We primarily use it to reduce manual effort and to increase accuracy and on-time implementation. We perform end-to-end automation, since we are a company where SAP is used very widely. We use UiPath for SAP automation.

We develop both attended and unattended solutions. We're using the platform as a service and it's hosted on-premises.

So far, we have 15 bots in production. As a result, we are saving a lot of time, although I don't have a figure right now, as well as a lot of effort. We are also able to provide timely delivery to our customers, so the automations have been generating a lot of buzz here.

Attended automation has helped to scale RPA in our organization by automating processes that require human-robot collaboration. An example is our invoices that have data that needs to be scanned. The scans we were receiving did not have the accuracy that we were looking for. We also had a hard time getting the results through OCR. With the help of attended automation, we are able to have users verify data when the bot is running. Once the verification is done, the bot will perform the rest of the actions.

UiPath also definitely helps us with process analysis.

Although I have not used it yet, they have recently introduced a feature which brings more accuracy to the selectors, using the image and the selectors themselves. I feel that will be good. When we are creating selectors, there are elements that it's hard to get at, or there are times when the selectors get changed for some reason. The new feature should make it easier to work with in these situations.

They have also recently added a feature for attended automation, Picture in Picture, which is also nice to have. It's helpful because you don't want to just sit back and let the bot run and not work during that attended automation. Using the PiP feature, you can have it running on your desktop without having to interrupt it to your work.

I would also compliment them on the UiPath Academy, the learning platform that they have built. It contains everything that a developer or architect or tester or, anyone who is looking to benefit from an RPA, would need. It's all there on their platform. It helps speed up onboarding employees to UiPath. When I joined this company, I had prior experience with the RPA and UiPath. But two of my colleagues, who were working on test automation, didn't have that kind of experience. The Academy helped them to get started. We aligned quickly, once their fundamental developer training was done through the Academy. The Academy helped them align with the current practices of UiPath and RPA.

One area that needs improvement is monitoring. I know there are tools that let us see what a bot is actually doing on the virtual machines. If we could get that kind of offering from UiPath that would be great, because when a bot is running on the machine, we don't know what it's doing. Although we have programmed it, there are times when something causes a bot to fail. During such instances, the bot behaves differently when we run it in attended mode than it does in unattended mode. It would be great to have a feature where we could see, on a screen, what the bot is currently doing.

We started this UiPath journey two years back. 

I act as a UiPath lead because I joined early and I have some prior experience with it. There are three other people in India, and one more in the U.S, who use it in our company. The one in the U.S. does the managerial stuff and it's the developers who are in India. Then we have the business users for each of the bots and they also use UiPath. And we have a set of about 20 users who use the attended solution that we have provided to them.

Robots on the SAP system seem stable, but on the web they sometimes lack stability. Still, it's not a very common occurrence and I have overcome any issues with the help of the Trilogic. For example, we had an issue while getting an email from Outlook. A UiPath robot is not able to do that. It will time out. With the help of the Trilogic, we were able to overcome that.

Initially you have to put some effort in to obtain stability and then it is mostly stable. Some maintenance is required, but that's most probably when requirements change, or to add to the stability, but it's not a lot overhead right now for us.

It's highly scalable, in both development terms as well as business terms. We have the capability to add on robots. We can add to the VDI or machine anytime we want. They have put some serious thought into the scalability, when it comes to giving support to developers as well as the business.

We plan to increase our usage of UiPath. We have a lot of things in the pipeline. We have almost finalized on providing RPA as a service, something that we will offer internally. Right now, we are giving this free of cost to our customers who are the business people. We did so to get some attention and to create some interest in the tool. Now that we have almost finalized this as a service, we are going to involve business analysts who will be helping us to find more RPA use cases and finalize more RPA solutions. That means our usage will increase. We're still in an early phase.

I haven't had the chance to interact much with the technical support because the forum has so much information. If I browse through the forum, I will most probably get an answer. So I haven't needed to go to the technical support for any answers.

We have both test automation and UiPath working in parallel. Test automation has been here for the long-term, something like 10 or 15 years. The two guys who work with me, who didn't have prior UIPath experience, are working on that. That part mostly requires maintenance, and they now mostly work on UiPath development. So although we had a test automation solution, we didn't have a business automation solution. That is why we went with UiPath. It gives us an edge in business automation.

The initial setup of UiPath was pretty straightforward. I didn't find anything unusual or complex.

We went through an upgrade recently. We have dedicated cloud architects who helped us do it. We got instructions how to do it from UiPath support and we conveyed those instructions to our cloud architects and they performed it at their end to get UiPath cloud upgraded. Upgrading didn't take much time. It was done within half an hour.

One more feature that is useful is that earlier, we didn't have the option for a concurrent-user license. With the help of the concurrent-user license, we can save on licensing costs while running multiple bots under the same license.

If you are going to implement UiPath, my advice would be to look at how you are going to gather the requirements and how you're going to manage the requests for UiPath. 

Also, get some low-hanging fruit first, before going into the complex automations. That way, if you are new, the low-hanging fruits will generate confidence in the solution. Once that kind of confidence is generated, you can move ahead with the complex automations and complex solutions.

Go through the UiPath Academy extensively. They provide good training materials that I don't believe are available elsewhere. So I really recommend that. I recently attended a dev conference and I learned a lot about this stuff. I work in a closed environment where I don't have much of an idea of what's going on in RPA. This conference helped me keep in touch with the current trends in RPA and UiPath.

I rate UiPath at eight out of 10. For me, that's a very good mark. The two missing points are because there is scope for improvement. Overall, I'm pretty happy with UiPath.

Most of our use cases are related to business, like reconciliation and reporting. Therein, they have some internal applications to automate SAP automation and Salesforce Automation. Our most recent use case is related to documents, like the invoices coming from customers. We have to extract that data from invoices via different formats, e.g., some are digital formats and some are scanned formats. So, we have to extract the data, which we are doing with the help of UiPath.

We are using both attended and unattended automation. For 90 percent of our use cases, we are using UiPath for unattended automation.

I use UiPath almost every day. When I finish developing one process, there is a new process to develop. If a process is complex, it almost takes six to eight weeks to develop it, then you have to deploy it for monitoring. After that, the next process comes up.

UiPath helps based on how it is configured. In our case, there are so many transactions coming in, it is not possible for a human to complete them in nine hours (working hours). So, we went with unattended bots, which we mostly run at night. We start the bots after the working hours of humans, so when the operations team returns in the morning, their work is complete.

From a developer perspective, the process is smooth and easy. You can find a solution on Google easily. You can develop your own code. From a technical perspective, it is 100 percent.

UiPath Studio is great. It has all the activities. You don't have to write anything. Even after that, if you feel that you have to do something for yourself, then you can write your on-premises code in it and develop your own framework. Everything is there. You just have to use UiPath Studio.

if you are a business user, even if you don't have a technical team, you can install the second version of the Community edition, which is StudioX. This is specifically made for business people who don't have a lot of ideas about technicalities. This is a great feature.

If websites are made in a recent programming format, it is very easy to automate them with the help of UiPath. However, if that technology is based on legacy applications, then it is very fragile and hard to do that. So, we have to choose the technology first, and if the technology is new, then you can easily automate it with other applications or the help of an RPA tool.

The process can be complex if an application is a legacy application or the data is unstructured. The analysis of some bots is lacking. If a customer asks for analysis of a particular bot, you cannot just get the data from the UiPath and give it to the customer. It is not that easy. I would rate this process as a seven or eight (out of 10).

The Document Understanding feature should be more developed and advanced. For example, you have to make a template with their ML model. Currently, we can't use our own ML model, and we have to use the UiPath ML model. UiPath has only a few ML models right now. They should come up with more ML models or make it easier for us to use our own ML model. While they are working on this, I have felt much difficulty in extracting data during our last process for Document Understanding. We had to go with the Python language. So, I think they are lacking in this feature.

After deploying the bots in production, processes are very stable, unless something happens with the machine. You don't have to monitor a process every time. So, I am very impressed and satisfied with things.

We are looking to update to version 20.

This solution is very much scalable. If you are working in a small or large organization, it doesn't matter. It is very much scalable, up to anything.

We have a team of around 100 to 120 people in RPA automation, in which 60 or 70 users have the developer license. 

I am very much impressed and satisfied with the UiPath solution. Earlier, I used the Automation Anywhere solution, and it is sort of messy and complex. You have to pull everything from a single workflow. Then, I moved to UiPath, and everything was very sorted. If you really like coding, you can do that. It gives you a real developer type feel.

Developing and deploying robots with UiPath is very straightforward. It hardly takes five minutes to deploy a process on Orchestrator.

The last process that UiPath covered saved the work of two people.

If you have repetitive tasks, you can apply UiPath and have your people trained to do other work.

If you want to start doing RPA, I think you should definitely go with UiPath because it has the Community edition. You can just install it and check whether or not your process works fine with UiPath. It will be an attended bot, but you can form an idea whether your bot can easily be automated.

We have one use case related to Microsoft Word Automation. Word Automation is not compatible with other tools. However, in UiPath, we were able to write our own code to automate and format the Word document, which is why UiPath Studio is the most valuable feature. We are also using the Automation Anywhere. But, in Automation Anywhere, we cannot write our own code. So, we can't automate Word Automation from Automation Anywhere as well.

Automation Anywhere has come out with its own new version of 2019, which is as effective as UiPath. However, when I have tried to run or deploy the bots, it still lacks in features. For example, in UiPath, AML activities are coming up very frequently. Whereas, in Automation Anywhere, these features are lacking, which is why I go with UiPath. Also, Citrix automation is very good with UiPath. You feel like you are able to detect the elements and images.

UiPath gives you REFramework, which is absolutely amazing for business use cases. Automation Anywhere also lacks this feature. With Automation Anywhere, you need to make your own framework, and if you are making your own framework, then the look becomes messy. If someone is trying to understand it, then they have to spend more time on the framework to understand it.

I use the IQ Bot of Automation Anywhere, and even after training a hundred documents, it's not picking up or extracting the data from documents. I feel like I have to train the model again, which is not the case with Document Understanding. If you properly make the templates in Document Understanding of UiPath, it gives you full text values. So, it is more advanced and suitable for me.

We use UiPath Assistant to run processes about 10 percent of the time. Most of the time, we are using Orchestrator. 

UiPath releases new features every 15 days to a month. They have already come up with AI and machine learning.

If scanned documents are coming in for some of the work, we are also using Python language for this.

If you already have a technical team, then you can ask them to look into UiPath Academy. If they have basic knowledge of programming or coding, then even in seven days, they can easily learn UiPath and start applying it in their organization. You don't need to hire outside developers.

Overall, the solution is a nine (out of 10).

We use it for financial use cases: purchase-to-pay processes, reconciliation processes, vendor payment, and merchant payments. This is just in finance. Then, we have retail order processing, order creation, PO generation, delivery note generation, and all those things in retail. We even have banking processes as well, such as a payments portal. We use it in most of the fields.

We don't use cloud licenses. Most of our licenses are on-prem.

We use both attended and unattended automation in UiPath.

We are partnered with UiPath. Sometimes, UiPath refers customers to us, bringing us business. We also give them business.

We have a third-party order processing portal, which keeps on changing its UI very often and has elements that keep on shuffling between the metadata. What we had in this case was the script running was shuffling the elements, and we are disabled that thing. Then, we used the selector technology instead. Selector technology is very important for all our UI-based processes. We rely on it. 

We used the AI Fabric functionality in one of our projects. We had to categorize users' reviews based on the sentiment scores. Everything was already available, including the model. So, we just have to click on all those things from UiPath now.

The new features that they are adding in, these are very different from other RPA tools in the market:

• AI Fabric
• Integration with different data models
• You can do all the data processing, data mining, etc., in the back-end UiPath. 
• You don't need a separate tool for data mining or other cognitive abilities. You can do all the cognitive abilities in UiPath. 
• UiPath Apps, which they're bringing in just now, is a really good thing. It has a good user interface.

Most RPA tools do not directly have these features. Also, we don't have to rely on other tools in order to develop these things. We can directly develop and integrate them with UiPath on one platform. So, we don't have to struggle within multiple platforms.

UiPath Apps is available only on Community. So, this was a best case scenario for us. It was pretty good. The only thing is that it has to be more advanced. Now, it is very basic. I would like more integration with the UI elements. It should be more user-friendly, especially if we go for any other application development. For example, in other UI development platforms, you can easily drag and drop to develop in a UI. However, it is a very initial phase for UiPath Apps, and maybe in the future, they might improve this.

We have used the Picture in Picture functionality for a few attended automations, where the user is monitoring or we are installing a new interface. Sometimes, in my experience, Picture In Picture is a bit buggy. It takes over your control, then the controls get mixed. That is one of few issues that I have found. Other than that, Picture In Picture works pretty well.

I had an instance when UiPath crashed on my computer. Then, the code that I was working on also crashed. This was a very crucial process for us, but we apparently didn't have a backup. UiPath also didn't have any way to recover that code. This was something which I found very strange, because ideally the source company should have a mainframe where they can recover a code. Or, if I give them a corrupted damage file, then they could easily recover that code. 

The stability is pretty good when we follow the best practices, i.e., whatever is in the REFramework. 

Scalability is something that we are still figuring out. RPA is something which we cannot do for everything, because there is a small gap between profit and the cost.

The support has been pretty good so far. The response time could improve, then it would be much better. However, once we get a ticket assigned to a technical person, then it is pretty straightforward. They are very fast, know their job, and know how to resolve the issue.

The on-prem setup is straightforward. There is very detailed documentation. We always get support from UiPath, so it is not difficult. I have never faced any issues, but I have only deployed on a small scale.

The timeline of the project depends on the project's complexity. Usually, the due diligence and everything else takes about two or three weeks. Then, the design takes another one or two weeks before we start with the development, depending on the inputs.

I get involved with small client setups.

There is a client-facing team of around 25 people who do due diligence and design work. There is also our back-end/technical delivery team, which includes mostly developers, a product project manager, project owner, and developer lead, who are there mostly for their technical abilities, not for their design abilities. 

The price of Orchestrator is pretty high in general as well as compared to other solutions, because Automation Anywhere does not charge for its Control Room.

We can develop our own packages and integrate them, which is pretty good. Other tools don't have that.

There are a lot of cons with Automation Anywhere, which we are using. They deployed a new version, 2019, which is very buggy, and they are still working on that. I don't know how or why they released it to the public. They did so much testing, but it is still buggy.

Power Automate (previously Softomotive) needs to improve on its UI. The ease of use is not there with this solution.

Go for it. It is a pretty good tool, which is straightforward and easy to use. They have training in place. Even if you are new to it, you can go ahead and learn to do it. 

They are bringing in new things. You can automate, integrate, and test things. It is even used for mobile testing. It is pretty good in that case. For most of people's use cases, UiPath will suffice for their use cases.

I would rate the solution as an eight (out of 10).