UiPath Reviews

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Positive

I did not previously use a different solution. 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

I am not super privy to pricing information. 

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

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

We have yet to use the AI's functionality.

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

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

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

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

We mostly use it for unattended bots. We are a construction company. Our RPA team does more of the complex processes for users. We take high-end complex items, that are redundant, off of the users' hands, then we host it on our servers.

We have a bunch of unattended processes, about 284 processes.

RPA isn't necessarily taking away tasks from employees, but rather moving them from processing-type employees to analysts. For example, if we had billers doing a very redundant task, then we moved that to RPA. Then, the billers do more customer face-to-face work and analysis, e.g., solutions through Salesforce. So, we have those employees who were previously billers move up to better positions where they can do more analysis and human interaction.

The solution has reduced human error. We don't need to go back and fix stuff. Customer representation is also huge. Quality of work is one of our mission statements. Having that repetitive test always being 100% every single day, month, and quarter, and whenever we send specific invoices from our server support, has been really helpful. It increases that quality formation.

There are a lot of job positions that we never really thought that would get created. Freeing up those experienced employees from sitting down and processing a lot of stuff throughout the whole day and moving them up to customers, we started discovering new talents and skills, especially with the younger employees since you are basically freeing up their time to discover new skills that they weren't even aware of. You are investing in them, showing customers that you have a new generation of fine employees who can do a bunch of new skills out-of-the-box.

The orchestration is the most valuable feature, e.g., how stuff can be organized. This is in addition to the fact that we try to move stuff to an unattended base where there is no user interaction. We are moving more to 100% automation rather than putting a human in the loop.

The UiPath Academy is mostly used only by technology associates and power users in each department who show interest in RPA. The academy has improved on the onboarding system that we have for RPA. So, if we see potential with someone, whether it is interns, power users, or even IT professionals around our department, then the UiPath Academy is definitely a good way to go. It kind of eases up the onboarding when determining who is outstanding or could potentially join our RPA teams.

The biggest value of the UiPath Academy is the ease of use. A lot of different platforms can be too complex. The user-friendly platform definitely helps with the ease of its steps. 

While it is the best tool ever, we decided that the user interaction might not actually be the greatest thing ever. 

I have been using the solution for three years.

I am very happy with the stability of it. 

I wish that there might be a better, easier method of updating our platform, especially for on-prem. I believe most of their customers are cloud-based. So, they don't have to worry about updating their Studio versions or Orchestrator. Being on-prem, it can be difficult because we must reach out to have that version. We can't just plan on our own. We are always at least a six-month step back versus the current version.

We have been scaling it as much as we can, especially with how we are trying to scale how big our team is as well as trying to control that specific workspace and workforce that we have.

There are currently five developers using it.

There were a couple of times with the on-premises version that there were complications, since it is not on UiPath's cloud. We have had a lot of complications where we are dead in water. There were a couple of conditions where we weren't able to get someone up to speed on whatever. The support is not as quick to respond as we had hoped. 

We did talk to our account executives about this. It is definitely a work in progress. I know that they have recommended that we move to the cloud, but it is not attractive enough for us to see if it is actually worth moving to the cloud.

We have been with UiPath from the start. We used to have a lot of in-house C# libraries that we curated. RPA was like overpowered macros similar to what we already had. That is why we knew how to deal with it. 

The initial setup was straightforward. We did it through the on-premises by connecting our SQL database, etc. 

The deployment took around three hours.

The initial setup was with their tech support, and that was definitely great. After that, if we had any hiccups, that was where the complications happened.

The main focus was improving efficiency. Once you focus more on redundant paths, having a bot doing it over and over again, that eliminates human error every now and then. There is definitely a huge ROI in that. Our main focus was low-hanging fruit. By low hanging fruit, I mean the redundant processes that users are just annoyed by when they go in every day and have to do it. There has definitely been a huge ROI because we are trying to free up a lot of the project managers for construction to do more focused stuff there rather than job cost details.

We have probably saved the time of 10 full-time employees. For daily tasks, we are saving an average of four hours per employee.

It is one of those things where you pay for convenience. Pricing-wise, UiPath is definitely way more expensive than other solutions that we have seen, especially since we also have Microsoft Power Automate, which is one of the latest tools. UiPath is on the higher end, but it is one of those decisions, "Is it worth the investment? How much are you getting as an ROI?" That is usually how the conversation goes.

Back then, the main competitor was Automation Anywhere, who wasn't necessarily as user-friendly. The main idea was that UiPath was more user-friendly with more forums. It seems like there was a community for it. Whereas, Automation Anywhere was a bit more complex. 

We are using a bunch of other tools to also see the differences. Everything runs so quickly that technology always needs to be up to speed. Companies, like UiPath, are always running so fast to compete in this area. We are also trying to see who is actually the best. UiPath has definitely shown us that, but it also comes with its price.

They are always trying to look for, as much as possible, in-house creation of back-end processes. This means less clicking and tapping on the keyboard for the robot, which is always better. UiPath definitely blends all that together, which is great. It is literally bridging all our platforms together, which is what I love about it.

With UiPath and RPA, the sky's the limit. There is potential for a bunch of things that you can do. When we started, as a construction company, we were thinking that RPA might not be as useful as we might think and make a bigger difference than our in-house solutions. When RPA came out, we thought it was mostly for companies like EY and PWC, e.g., more for financial auditing since there is so much data. However, we definitely benefit from it as a construction company. There is so much potential, whether it is low-hanging fruit or high complexity. It is definitely a win-win for any company, whatever industry you are working in.

I would rate UiPath as eight out of 10.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

I've been using the solution for four years.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

We are customers and end-users.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

I've used the solution for over a year. 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

We are in healthcare, and the supply chain can be a fragmented process, and now with the Pandemic quite fragile. In recent years, companies have been implementing leaner supply chains to reduce their costs. We found that our best approach to dealing with supply distributions was to create a partnership with a distributor who could provide us with a very large percentage of our day-to day-supplies. We have Central inventories in each of our hospitals; however, we use a stockless operation Monday-Friday. This means we fill supplies for our nursing units on the weekends, but during the week, the distributor is picking, packing, and shipping those supplies in a low unit of measure. Orders are placed electronically by noon daily, and start arriving by late evening. A 'back order' list is sent to us each workday in the late afternoon - too late to do anything with it. 

We did work with our distributor to develop a more customized spreadsheet that detailed each item, by hospital and delivery location. Each following day we would break the file down so that we could e-mail it to each area, to get feedback from them on critical needs.  This took our resources time to prepare and send the next morning. Staff getting the information didn't have much time to review and respond. In addition, we would update each PO line item with the revised 'due date', for back-ordered lines - this was a manual process.  This same resource would then use a tool to send each requestor a 'delayed delivery' e-mail notice.  The overall PO update and communication process took an additional 1-2 hours a day in staff resource time.

With the robot doing this work for us, the vendor sends a file to an address by a certain time. They send it in at about 3:30 PM every day. The robot now takes that file and works that file, which it has ready for us usually by 4:30 PM. Now, it still may be too late for us to work, but the first thing in the morning, we have the file, and the Bot has already sent out notifications to all the users of any backorders. First thing, when they walk in the morning, they know what their backorders are. They didn't know that until halfway through the day before. Now, they get the information first thing in the morning so they can react. Now, we are getting the information first thing and have the time to work with the manufacturers and distributors to come up with other products so that we might backfill or get a branch transfer.

Our end goal was to make sure that we had a daily tool that was 100 percent accurate and could be deployed across a broad spectrum of healthcare workers. Then, they could get information faster and more accurately with as much information to eliminate a lot of extra calls and communication. That is what we embarked on. We dissected our current process and looked at all its different triggers to see how we could turn this into an automated tool. We broke down our process and identified everything that we were doing, then UiPath helped us identify what we needed to modify. We worked that into a tool where a Bot could come along and process it every day, then deliver every afternoon. That was our end result, and it's been extremely successful. We started using the tool last December.

We combined some automation that we already had in this process into this tool to make it a whole automated process, rather than partially bringing it under. We have a vendor who delivers us a report daily of all their backorders because we use the main distributor, so they deliver us a backorder report. Therefore, we made sure that they aligned it in a way that the robot could read it. Then, we wanted to break that down in a way so each of our hospitals could see their section. So, we added some data to this tool which allowed the robot to see that record, and say, "This belongs here, and this belongs here."

Our staff have been reassigned to more value-added tasks. We haven't eliminated anyone because it's been very challenging for us to keep up with the COVID-19 issues. Now, we have resources who have the time to contact vendors, and find out, "When are we getting this? Can we get ourselves pushed to the top of the list?" They can actually be a voice on the other line, a human voice, who communicates. When you're sitting there doing all this other work, you don't have the opportunity to spend it on being a voice for the health system. So, we put people back on working back orders with other vendors and doing other things that needed to be done. We have not eliminated staff because we are using them in more productive ways, getting more work done.

Our staff can now do the things that we need them to do. It has given us the agility to pivot and move to other things, because we are not trapped in trying to work these files every day.

Our customers are getting information about 12 hours earlier, which makes it much faster to resolve back order concerns for their areas. If they have procedures, or certain kinds of cases coming up, and see that they have a back order, then they have much more time to react and try to address their shortage.

It provides information to people by automating that information in a much faster time.

Since we are getting information out to folks faster, they can spend the resource time needed to determine the best approach for what to replace it with, or if we need to work with a sales rep. It ensures that our staff have the best tools to do their job faster.

We have not seen it do OCR, and that would be helpful. Right now, the tool will not read a PDF file, and we can't use PDF files. We want it to able to take an image, then take that image and put the particular field out in the right spot in a table. We have not seen it where you can scan a document in, then it reads fields and places those in a table.

We began our journey last Fall - 2019 

It is very stable. Once we got all the kinks worked out, there hasn't been any maintenance. 

We had a little problem with getting it to run at night. We moved it off of one platform and put it on another one, which fixed that problem. These are things that we encountered early on that went away as we figured out how to resolve them. Most of those changes that we made were internal to our process and caused by some slow responses within our Citrix environment. Once we resolve those, we have not had issues with the tool itself.

I have one person in IT doing deployment and maintenance. We also have a second person under contract if we need support.

The solution is scalable. 

The robot processes the file in an unattended mode, then sends out an email with a link to its output file. From there, all the users, and there are probably about 20, get this file and react to it. They review it from their perspective because there are many hospitals involved. Each one of them has their own tab because the robot creates a tab for each. This makes it easy for them to go right to what they need. There are a lot of folks reviewing the results of what the robot has produced.

I have not used their technical support.

We were passively looking at some tools to automate some of our procurement processes. We are highly automated in our department, but we are always looking at ways to take the things that are not already automated, get into those, and see what parts of those we can streamline.

We met with UiPath last Fall. At that time, we went through a company by the name of Speridian, UiPath is a partner with them. We came to the conclusion that we had a manual process where the right components could be automated. Therefore, we made that our focus and started answering all the questions around the process to ensure that we had everything necessary for a robot to be able to answer the questions and keep moving the process forward.

The initial setup was very straightforward. We outlined what we do and what our end result needed to be. They asked us some questions, then sat down with our resources and walked them through it (or did it through Webex). I don't think there was ever any confusion on what was being discussed.

We didn't spend that much time on the process. Overall, as far as our work, the deployment was 10 to 12 hours, if you look at the meetings and such. Most of the time was spent on their side, because they had to go back and do all the development. So, I thought it was very painless.

We worked with the UiPath team and Speridian to ensure that the bot would know how to handle each aspect of the data and where apply it. As we tested it, we saw that we needed to go back and reconfigure this or this isn't how this is handled. We were kind of working through the things we forgot until we got to the point where, "Yes, this is it. We can do this every day." 

We had the robot tied into an automated tool that we were already using to send notices out. They were able to pull up that tool and have these automated components to all this stuff that we had a manual person sitting there doing every day. She was sitting there taking this data and sending it out, and now the robot was like, "I got the data. I'll send it out." So, we just ran it through the whole process. However, it does take having resources who can ask the right questions. What I found with this team was they were good in actually asking the right questions and helping us with what the robot would need in order to make decisions. Because that's what the robot is doing, it is automatically looking at a value, and saying, "I do this. I have that." 

We learned with it: How we need to respond and how we need to give the robot the feedback. It was quite an interesting process for us. Although you're always thinking you can automate so many things, there are components that you do need a person's brain to figure out. We found those pieces in this tool. We found some areas where, "Here's the exception." So, it even writes off the exceptions for us. While I do still need to have a person looking at exceptions, rather than the 100 lines that they used to have to look at, now they look at two, three, or four lines, then make decisions on those.

They gave us the opportunity to create a tool which would automate as much as possible, then provide us the data that we needed to act on. It has basically filtered out all the things that we didn't need to deal with. It has taken care of those, leaving us with everything that a human being needs to respond to.

I felt very comfortable with the UiPath person who was doing the programming, though I never really met him. I was very impressed. We talked on the phone a time or two, but they just seemed like they got it. They understood. It didn't take a long time for them to figure out what it was we wanted to do. They were able to tell us, "This is what we're going to need. Can you get it?" So, they were easy to work with. They also acted quickly. I thought the whole process of developing everything that we did went very quickly. 

They were able to link into our tools. They made suggestions to us, "Well, these are exceptions. We can put these here. We can do this. We can give you all this." They were providing us with ideas on how we could even expand on this. I found that to be very helpful. I really thought that they did it very quickly. They did not take long to understand what we were trying to do before getting in and really learning the impact. When we needed a change, the changes have come very quickly. 

It has gone so well that we will be doing a few more enhancements. Now that we've worked with the tool for a while, and know that the ability of UiPath and what they can do, we can enhance it even further.

We are doing things at a much earlier time in the day. The robot compressed the time it takes. We are getting our users' information earlier in the day. Now, it may take five to 10 minutes, where processes used to take half an hour or 45 minutes to go through everything. 

With COVID-19, so many supplies have been impacted. Our line items expanded and grew, so it would have been very difficult management manually. Thankfully, we had this process in place last December. It really came to our aid in March, April, and throughout this year, because it has streamlined the process. It has given everybody more time to pivot and make decisions.

The UiPath tool takes redundant processes away, and says, "Let us handle those, then you do all those creative things." It has given us back a lot of staff resources that were being used up by mundane, redundant processes. That's how it worked in our world. In other areas, anytime you fill out a form or answer a question, a robot can post that to a table. There are all kinds of things it can do. However, for us, it took these manual processes that we were doing day in, day out without a lot of thought and gave us that time back to be more thoughtful of what it is we need to be doing to be more thoughtful of what it is we need to be doing, in order to ensure that our health system has the products that it needs to support the community. In my mind, that is what it is about: Giving back your resources to use them in the way they were intended and using a robotic tool to do those things that you can eliminate, like mundane, redundant processes.

Start with processes that happen over and over every day. Something that you have to do, like data entry, whatever it is. Peel back the onion, then look and see how you can automate some of that through a tool. You have to look at what your processes are and understand how those are getting done today. Maybe even share that information with somebody outside your area, because people from the outside might say, "Well, why don't you do it this way?" Because you've lived it so long, you don't even know why you wouldn't nor do you know the questions to ask. Therefore, look at your base processes that you're doing day in, day out and see how you might be able to automate any aspect of those that doesn't require human thinking. I'm sure you will uncover many things.

It is a learning process for everyone, but I thought it was a very fast track learning. Sometimes, you think, "Well, this is going to take six months," and it didn't. In a very short time, we were seeing samples of what we were going to get. Therefore, I was very impressed with the amount of resource time that it took. It was beyond what I expected.

Some tools we are working on will reduce the purchase order build, but we haven't implemented that yet. That's a whole other project that we're working on with them, and that piece goes into procurement.

It is very doable. I was probably fairly skeptical, but once we started thinking about it, it became very clear that this would be just a slam dunk. You have to open up your mind to it, but it was something that when they said, "Well, we want to use some robotics." The fear is you're going to take my staff away. There are some cases of that, but it is not so bad. I don't have to worry about the robot taking days off, getting sick, having a mother in the hospital and needing to be with them. I don't have to pay it scale. I just don't have to do any of those things. Now, the robot can't automatically think outside the box, but sometimes it can depending on the questions I ask it. 

Everybody just needs to take a breath step back, and say, "Yeah, maybe it can replace this." However, that doesn't mean we won't use this resource in another way.

I would rate this solution a 10 out of 10. I'm not the type of person who just gives a rating of 10 all the time, but this solution has just been a phenomenal tool for us.

We are using Studio and the attended robots, but we haven't implemented Orchestrator yet.

Our primary use is to automate tasks within the accounts receivable, accounts payable, and trade settlement realm that we work in. We're also getting into some more internal audit automation.

We run automations in Windows Virtual Machines. It was a long process for us to get started, getting our IS to buy into letting us set up this environment and get started with it.

With respect to how easy it is to automate our company's processes, on a scale of one to five, I would rate this solution a two or three. They offer upfront training, the UiPath Academy, and that makes it easier but you still need to have a technical mindset to understand it, as it is now.

We have all used the Academy. On a scale of one to five, judging how beneficial it is, I would rate the training a five. It's a great experience and very beneficial.

From the point that we purchased our UiPath license until we had our first robot was approximately six months. It took us a while because we had a bunch of other projects in front of getting our first automation. The process was hard, although it was not complicated. The approval process involved going through a security review. 

We have not found that our automations have saved us money, yet. However, it's giving people back the time so that they can do more value-added work.

With respect to saving time, we have just measured the out rate. We're probably saving thirty hours a week with what we have going now, so almost one FTE.

This solution has absolutely helped reduce or eliminate human errors, although I cannot estimate by how much at this time.

Using this solution has definitely increased the confidence and communication that we have between departments because we're saving a lot of department time, and they can focus on their value-added tasks. With this, they're a lot more willing to work with us, and they're happier employees.

The most valuable features of Studio are all of the activities that UiPath and their partners have developed.

The biggest problem that we have when working with this solution is the selectors. If there was a little more flexibility with the selectors, and they were a little bit more adaptive, I think it would be helpful.

With respect to the stability, on a scale from one to five, I would rate this solution four and a half to five. We haven't had any problems.

Currently, we have twelve automations running.

In our organization, we have three people directly doing automation and design work. There are probably six or seven more than are trying to get the larger enterprise into UiPath and get their departments set up with it.

The technical support for this solution is excellent. They got back to me really quickly and provided the solutions that I needed. It was very helpful.

We were not using another RPA solution prior to this one. In deciding to invest in this technology, we recognized that people were doing a lot of tedious processes and that we can make better use of their time.

Huron Consulting assisted us with the implementation and deployment, and they were very helpful. On a scale from one to five, I would rate them a five.

We have been asked to start measuring for tracking ROI but have not yet begun. However, I can say informally that we have seen performance benefits. People are very happy with the things we've automated so far and they're just glad to be relieved of some of that tedious work.

Right now we only have a couple of Studio licenses and a couple of bots, so we're at about $8,000 USD per year. We're hoping to ramp that up pretty soon.

We evaluated Blue Prism and Automation Anywhere before choosing this solution.

One of the major reasons that we chose UiPath was because they gave a free trial at the time when we were looking at it, and none of the other vendors did. Then they also have the UiPath Academy, which allowed us to look at it first and then learn how to use it before we actually had to make an investment.

From a cost perspective, the unattended robots are going to be of more benefit because they can run twenty-four hours a day. At the same time, the attended robots are pretty affordable. I think we're coming up with more use cases where people have it on their desktop and want to be able to run it on demand. We have definitely benefited from both types of robots.

We are looking forward to some of the new features that are going to be released. One of them is in the UI, where you can document what your processes have and figure out if any have the potential for automation. That is going to be very helpful.

My advice for anybody who is implementing this solution is to first speak with a partner. If someone is new and hasn't been in this space before, it's going to be kind of confusing and they're going to need somebody to guide them it setting it up.

This is a really great product and there's a lot of potential for it.

I would rate this solution a nine out of ten.

We are using Orchestrator, attended robots, and unattended robots.

Our primary use case for this solution is in the financial industry.

We do not yet run our automations in a virtual environment.

With respect to how easy it is to automate our company's processes, on a scale of one to five, I would rate this solution a four. The whole interface needs some TLC because it can be a bit tricky.

We have used the UiPath training and it has improved a lot since we first tried it. When I used it a while ago, it had its problems. I think it came due to the fact that it was not developed by native English speakers. For example, they had questions that were simply wrong. It has improved a lot and now it is beneficial. I think that the biggest challenge is for them to stay up to date.

From the point that we purchased our UiPath license until we had our first robot was approximately four and a half months.

This solution has saved us time, but more importantly, it has saved us money by not paying certain fees or certain penalties. With respect to saving money, the last amount that I saw was six figures. Legally, I am not allowed to say more.

Being in the finance business and having certain audits, this solution helps to make sure that we have validations and checks in place to help us to do our processing quicker. Also, with invoices, normally when you pay them by a certain date you get a certain discount. So, we've managed to significantly increase the savings we get just from having invoices processed earlier or on time.

In terms of eliminating human errors, we have one process where we've eliminated errors completely. The average is that we eliminate errors by fifty to sixty percent.

The most valuable feature in Orchestrator is the scalability.

The most valuable feature of unattended robots is that they are always available.

They have added a lot of new features over the past months, and things are a little more complicated. In the interface, sometimes you just have the screen full of windows and figuring out what goes where can be a bit tricky.

We would like to see improvements in Studio such as syntax highlighting and documentation functionality for audit purposes. That would be great.

With respect to the stability, on a scale from one to five, I would rate this solution a four. There are a couple of things that break the robots, and it has to do with the technology itself. The user interface and other components are prone to error, and it's not one hundred percent automation. This is something that you take into consideration when you do RPA. They have also had a couple of updates over the past years where they made significant changes that basically broke the robots.

We have more than a hundred people involved with RPA.

So far, I have only used the ticketing through email support, and it is sometimes frustrating. I've only just learned that there is telephone support. It is hard for me to rate customer service because I was looking for telephone support, thinking that it was not available.

In general, there is room for improvement support-wise.

We are in an industry that is heavily targetted by low-cost countries, so in order for us to stay competitive, we had to do something. When we did our research, the two obvious solutions were RPA and AI.

When we started, it was with Blue Prism, and we learned from the issues we had. When we were looking at what we could do as an AI, UiPath started to emerge and started to become a big player. We then looked at capabilities and the licensing model, and at the time there were two vendors that had pretty similar capabilities.

These two were Automation Anywhere and UiPath. Automation Anywhere had a very high initial investment requirement and UiPath didn't, which is why we stayed with UiPath. I believe that you had to buy at least a hundred licenses for Automation Anywhere, whereas with UiPath you can buy one or two.

It looks like we made the right choice.

The initial setup of UiPath was straightforward. The approvals on our side slowed things down. If it were not for that then we could have been up and running in six weeks.

We implemented the solution ourselves.

We only automate processes where we expect to see ROI within twelve months. As such, most of our processes have an ROI between six and twelve months.

We evaluated Blue Prism and Automation Anywhere before choosing this solution.

We are in the process of moving this solution to the cloud.

From a cost perspective, it is very hard to get ROI with an attended robot. The price is too high.

My advice to anybody who is researching this solution is not to overthink it. RPA is a technology that you learn by doing it.

This is a very strong product. I think that there is a lot of good investment and a lot of good attention out there. This is the best or one of the two best tools out there. They are listening to what the market wants and just need to be careful not to get greedy. That said, there is always a little bit of space for improvement.

I would rate this solution a ten out of ten.

We are using unattended bots, Orchestrator, and Studio.

We use this solution for doing a variety of things. It includes a lot of back-office finance and accounting, tax, and a little bit on our operations side. We're also using it for some test automation within our IT group, so helping to test our points of sale, and some of our data transfers as well.

Orchestrator runs on a dedicated server, but our bots all run on virtual dedicated machines in our data center. There were some challenges in setting everything up to run in a virtual environment. We implemented a couple of years ago, so I think that it has improved by now, although it was challenging.

Part of it was on our end, where our people were not familiar with it. The challenges included picking the right type of VM to run on, having the right kind of setup, and having the environment configured correctly. We needed this to allow the RPA team to have enough control over the day-to-day maintenance, and not have bottlenecks with the technical side. Managing things when we had issues or needed to add something new was also a challenge.

The documentation was kind of broad and didn't go into the detail that we wanted it to, although I have seen that get better, so that is really good. I'm sure if we were trying to implement it today, it would probably be a lot smoother with the tools that they've come up with.

With respect to how easy it is to automate our company's processes, on a scale of one to five, I would rate this solution a four. I think there are still a few things they could do and it looks like they are working towards that. It still requires a good bit of training and ramping up for someone brand new to it, especially without a programming background, to jump in and start building. I think they can continue to refine that and they definitely are moving in the right direction. It's a little bit of a technical hurdle to overcome to be able to build not only just basic automations but enterprise-scale automations and automations that are reliable and can check up on themselves. I think they can work some more of that into the actual tool because we've had to do a lot of figuring out how to build best practices and how to program it directly, and the best way to be able to allow us to support it cleanly through the lifecycle. It is good, but there are some things they can add in to truly make it a five. My standards are pretty high, but I'm sure they'll get there.

On a scale of one to five, judging how beneficial it is, I would rate the training a five. We are big fans of it. I typically don't get the luxury of hiring people with technical backgrounds. We usually have people coming out of school or people transferring from other departments who are interested in RPA. So, the Academy tools have been a lifesaver for us and they've been very good, especially for the RPA developer track. It is very detailed and we can really get someone through that training and feel like they're at least able to perform the basic functions of the tool pretty well. From there it is up to us in terms of getting them familiar with our best practices and how we program things and get some hands-on training with the more senior RPA developer to learn some further tips and tricks. Overall, I'm very pleased with the Academy offerings and they're one of the best I've seen from many of them.

From the point that we purchased our UiPath license until we had our first robot was perhaps a month or two. It did not take long, and that included time for training. When we started off, we bought the software, went through the training as a team, and then started building a few small things. We probably had the first one in production within two months of buying the software.

We have seen a lot of improvements to our organization.

We have one that was a really high-visibility project, where it was kind of a data entry thing that all of our retail managers were spending time on. The data was fed through to a vendor that we franchise through, and they were spending an hour or two a week across hundreds of locations.

We took that into the back office and got data feeds for all the data they were putting in, and then had a bot go through to the current system of reporting, and enter that data for every single store location. We were able to free up those managers with a bunch of time. It was about 5,500 hours a year.

In terms of eliminating human errors, I can say that it has happened but it is difficult to approximate by how much. This is in part because we have a wide variety of software of processes that we've implemented. So, in some, it's definitely higher than others. On the whole, it's been good and it's been helpful, for sure.

A lot of the value from this solution comes from Studio and the activities. They really enable us to make things happen accurately, with the clicks and the types they support. Of all the automation tools I've tried or used, they seem to be the most accurate and most consistent.

The Orchestrator management tools are growing a lot and are constantly improving.

I would like to see more interconnectedness of everything, including making the APIs a little easier to use, and having bots be able to call other bots and get them to start things. Having all of this a little more seamless would be really helpful.

I would like to see more seamless AI functionality built in to allow teams without data scientists or strong data people to be able to build and deploy simple models that will help enhance their bots further and let them do more.

The technical support is a bit of a weak point for this solution, and ideally, they can improve turnaround time so that we don't have to figure things out ourselves as often.

With respect to the stability, on a scale from one to five, I would rate this solution a four.

We've had some issues with stability, and I've talked to a lot of other companies who've had maybe more issues than us. It concerns ongoing support and the issues with bots not performing as expected or doing unexpected things as well. The problem is running into unexpected issues that can result from things that are not very readily apparent on the surface. This can be caused by underlying configuration differences in Windows, or patches that have happened, that sort of thing. It's still a challenge to manage and we often have bots that don't seem to have the issues when we are troubleshooting.

Sometimes it is our fault because we're not programming in enough breaks or logging enough to really track what's going on. It seems very dependent on the underlying operating system and things like update states of office applications. Occasionally, it'll just get stuck or hung up and we can't really figure out why, and that's frustrating. It definitely takes people time to go in and resolve those issues and figure it out.

It just seems like there's a lot of times where we just rerun the bot and then it works fine. I find it odd that it would stop at one point and then you just rerun it again and it works. A lot of those are, I will admit, due to input data issues or the system going down, or a website not being available or loading too slowly when it checks. However, I would like to see them continue to focus on stability as a platform, to avoid those as much as possible any issue.

My team that I work with directly is probably about ten people in total. There are a couple of other teams who are working more on test automation that are kind of separate and that's probably a total of about five other people right now, and we're looking to expand to another couple of teams. That will probably be about five more people within the next year, and then my team is growing. We're looking to add a few more people next year as well.

I am the automation lead, and the users are RPA developers and business analysts.

When it comes to the technical support for this solution, I feel that it may be a little bit of a weak point. When we reached out to customer support, we haven't gotten a ton of help, or it takes them quite a while to dig through the issue. It is understandable because they're going through someone else's code essentially, to try to resolve an issue. So, usually, we end up relying on internal people, more senior developers.

Sometimes it's just a matter of rerunning it or changing some input parameters and then trying it again, which is not the cleanest troubleshooting by any means. The problem is we felt like we had to, given the slow turnaround time on their support desk. We've kind of had to have the internal ability to figure things out.

Overall, I would rate their technical support a three out of five.

I know that they're a growing company and that they have a lot of new people. It seems like we've maybe had some bad luck in terms of the people that we've been in contact with when we've reached out. Perhaps they were new and maybe not fully understanding. There have been times we've reached out to support where we feel like we know the system better than they do, and that's frustrating. Again, that's why we've had to focus on internal knowledge building, which is a strength of theirs, through the training offered.

We do have a CSM assigned to us who I work with and he's somewhat spotty at times. I think he has a lot on his plate. So, at times we have questions that take a while to get answered.

We did a proof of concept that was driven by a consulting company and it was not a success. After that, we decided to implement an in-house solution using UiPath and from there it was successful.

We began with RPA because our management was interested in the potential and in trying it out. Even though the PoC failed, I think there was a promise with the software that we were able to see, so we made the purchase and dove into it. Obviously, it has been successful.

Installing the software itself, the Studio, most of the elements of the licensing and that sort of thing, were all very straightforward, which is great. I would say that the technical side, regarding the virtual machines, took a while in terms of setting up accounts and getting all the VM stuff figured out. All of that took a little bit longer than we expected before we had a stable platform. I think that there could've been some more resources available there, which I think they've partially fixed by now.

We were calculating our savings and our estimate is that in a little under a year, perhaps as little as six months, we probably earned back the amounts that we had paid for the platform for a year. Even into the journey, we felt like we had broken even and were making more money on top of that. ROI was very fast.

I can estimate our licensing costs are approximately $100,000 USD per year.

In addition to UiPath, we evaluated Automation Anywhere and Blue Prism.

My main reason for selecting UiPath, I think, was the strategy of focusing on a very open platform and allowing anyone to try out the trial, and allowing anyone to register for the Academy. I'm really focusing on democratizing RPA and making it available to everyone. It was a big focus for me because the other two had very closed-off systems and while they were able to give us demos, we didn't really get as good of a feel for how the software works as we did with UiPath where we could just download it and try it.

Also, we just had very good experiences with the salespeople and the people who demoed the product. They were very positive and very excited about RPA, and kind of matched what we were looking for. We felt like it was a much better fit for us, focusing on easy to use automation, not as much on code security like Blue Prism, and Automation Anywhere didn't seem to have a clear strategy for what they wanted to do moving forward.

Ultimately, UiPath has been a successful choice, and I feel that they have continued to grow their lead on the competition.

I really liked a lot of the things I see coming in terms of the future improvements for Orchestrator. I think it's going to continue to grow into a true kind of Cloud Platform for end-to-end automation, whereas right now, it's a little more focused just on building things in Studio, and then managing monitoring them in Orchestrator. So, I'm excited about some of the further integration with the dashboards and everything for managing how it works.

Upcoming is better management of projects from end to end. I've built a lot of things myself to keep up with that. But having UiPath support, a lot of that, a little bit better, it's improved. This is including the focus on the process mining and the design phase, and it's often a bottleneck of not having enough time to go through and really thoroughly map out and document the processes.

I am interested in trying the specific Studio for test automation. I think UiPath has a big advantage in that space with their RPA software. It really solves an issue that a lot of other test automation platforms have, which is not being as consistent as they could be, or being too hard or too complicated to program correctly.

From a cost perspective, we have definitely got our money's worth on the unattended bots, which is what we have been focused on. We have bought a few attended bots to try them and this next year, we will be looking for good use cases. It requires a little more integration and using the API. We're looking at leveraging more attended bots, and we may end up buying more, but we're still evaluating how to use them. Unattended bots felt like the clearest advantage for us to implement, and we were successful in starting with those.

We were an early adopter of this solution in our region, so I often speak with people who are researching this solution. I tell them that UiPath is a really great platform and it's growing. It's moving in a really great direction, and I recommend people to take it in-house. Find a small team of people who are really passionate and interested in learning it, and then start small. Start with a few small things to get your feet under you, build an operating model that will support scaling, and then slowly scale it out over time. That's what we have done, and it has been successful for us.

Overall, I am very happy with UiPath, but I do have a few small quibbles. On the whole, it's been very successful and I'm very happy.

I would rate this solution a nine out of ten.