What is our primary use case?
I gained some experience with UiPath Orchestrator when I used to work with an insurance company in Dubai, where the tool was used to automate some of the manual processes.
How has it helped my organization?
My company used UiPath Orchestrator within the organization. UiPath Orchestrator helps reduce a lot of human and manual effort in our company's departments, where a lot of time has to be spent on manual entries, matching the figures, reconciliations, and other related areas.
What is most valuable?
The most valuable feature of the solution stems from the fact that it was a user-friendly product with an intuitive design. The product was easy to learn and implement. In the past, I have used other products that were competitors of UiPath, like Blue Prism and Automation Anywhere. Automation Anywhere was a little more complicated than the tools offered by its competitors because, from a programming point of view, you had to write the codes. UiPath Orchestrator was a little easier and more user-friendly than Automation Anywhere.
What needs improvement?
Feature-wise, I would say some maturity is needed in UiPath Orchestrator, considering the use cases of my company where I used it. UiPath Orchestrator helps you scan documents and get the data out of them, but certain problems can be dealt with over time if the product matures. Right now, the default features that UiPath Orchestrator provides are a little messy. Sometimes, the tool reads zero as nine and nine as zero, and the pattern it provides is cumbersome for a user to interpret, especially considering that there are certain third-party tools that you have to use instead of using the default set of tools offered by UiPath.
The vision libraries that the tool provides, along with the visualization part, are areas with shortcomings in the solution where improvements are required.
UiPath needs to mature the products and services offered since all the automation processes are good to deal with when the processes are very rudimentary, straightforward, and static. If a human angle is involved in any of the processes, where someone has to make a small decision, then implementing the product to meet such requirements can be a little tough. All the automation tools provide you with a specific module wherein you take a picture, and you can get the data from the scanned document. Data extraction from the scanned document was something where I found that UiPath Orchestrator's features could not provide the expected level of accuracy. My company had to do a lot of hunting and hard work to get that level of accuracy with the data extracted from the scanned documents.
For how long have I used the solution?
I have experience with UiPath Orchestrator for two years. I used the tool till March 2023.
What do I think about the stability of the solution?
What do I think about the scalability of the solution?
It is a scalable solution, but for our company's use cases, we have only used it for a couple of jobs and scheduled processes because we had no reason to scale up. I can't certainly say that we have used the tool's scalability feature. UiPath claims that Orchestrator is scalable.
How are customer service and support?
Initially, during the product's setup phase, the vendor from whom my company procured the tool's licenses in Dubai provided us with all the needed help. There was no reason for my company to contact UiPath's support team.
Which solution did I use previously and why did I switch?
Compared with Blue Prism and Anywhere Automation, UiPath Orchestrator is easy to use and offers a very intuitive design. UiPath and Blue Prism are efficient, but grasping the concepts and understanding modeling and implementation is tough. Automation Anywhere would always need you to do some programming, and the team needs to undergo a huge learning cycle phase, so we decided to go ahead with UiPath Orchestrator.
How was the initial setup?
The process for which my company used UiPath Orchestrator was very complex. In the company, we couldn't actually implement it completely, so we had to use it in a partial manner, but it still helped us with the reconciliation part and the new customer onboarding process.
The first setup process of the product was easy.
The product's implementation strategy was used for only a couple of scheduled jobs, so it was not a very big implementation phase. In my company, we used it for the core insurance and finance departments. The data from the core insurance department will be pushed by all the departments to the ERP's finance module, and then, the sum of the total insurance premium collected should be equivalent to the premium collected from different departments. For the aforementioned process, our company uses the tool to handle the reconciliation part, where the figure of the premium meant to be collected and the actual premium amount collected should match, and if there is a gap, then the tool should notify the team or department where the specific differences were found so that they can look into it and correct it.
The solution is deployed on an on-premises model.
The rollout phase after the production process took around six months to eight months, but that was not because the tool was cumbersome. The tool was easy to understand. The process that my team and our company did not have a clear-cut picture of how to deal with the implementation phase logically. There were certain things about the other teams in my company who were not disclosing how they do the implementation manually. Identifying the logic needed to take care of the implementation phase takes more time than implementing the tool.
What's my experience with pricing, setup cost, and licensing?
UiPath Orchestrator is an expensive tool to implement.
What other advice do I have?
There were no human errors when using the tool, especially for areas like reconciliation, where various processes exist. Reconciliation needs somebody to check the figures at a particular point manually and the figures at another point, and if there are any differences in the figures, then it becomes important to figure out the reason for the difference. There is a process of reconciliation, and there were no errors in the tool's functioning earlier. The tool functions in a more timely manner, and it is more accurate now. Manual intervention is not required when using the tool, saving much time. The tool's time-saving capability is more useful for the company's use cases. The tool was generally used to save the manual effort more than to deal with the errors. The density of errors wasn't much even before the tool was implemented for its automation capabilities.
Regular maintenance of the servers is needed, and sometimes some restarts are needed, so not many issues are there with the product's maintenance phase.
I would suggest that those who plan to use the product need to understand their use cases in a better manner before they try to use the technology that the solution offers. For somebody who implements the tool, there is a need to initially understand the technology because tools have limitations, including Automation Anywhere, Blue Prism, and UiPath. If there are certain straightforward processes where you know that you need to do four processes, you don't need to implement an automation tool. To be described as an automation tool, the product must offer a certain intelligence level. The intelligence of the product is in terms of when there is a need to make sense out of a scanned document, and the tool has to put in efforts to make sense out of the data that is pulled from a scanned document while ensuring that there are no mistakes made by the product between zero and nine, or three and nine. The aforementioned areas are common problems users face when trying to get the right data they want from a scanned document through an automation tool. Using AI with UiPath Orchestrator can help users fetch some value out of the tool.
I am pretty satisfied with the features that the tool provides. The only thing is that there are certain aspects that the product has to enhance so that it can provide value to a customer from the tool.
I rate the overall tool an eight out of ten.
Which deployment model are you using for this solution?
On-premises
Disclosure: I am a real user, and this review is based on my own experience and opinions.