UiPath Reviews

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.

We're a food ingredient distribution company that receives documents on ingredients' nutrition, allergens, microbial testing, etc.  We primarily use UiPath to process these documents. It was our proof of concept for using the system initially, and we'll expand it to process invoices and other related use cases.

We operate using an enterprise operating system. It's not a technological thing. It's how you determine project priorities. Soon, we'll set up process mining. Then, the IT team and technology group will decide what we do. Right now, the business units effectively vote on the next quarter's priorities. 

We're a high-tenure organization. The average tenure is 15 years, so we want to avoid growing our headcount. We're continuously growing by 10 to 15 percent annually, so we've had to add enough staff to process the documents. Our primary concern was to stop the increase in staff. Even after we added staff, we were falling behind because they were much slower at processing those documents. 

We get documents from our suppliers and, as a distributor, send them to our customers. If the supplier hasn't sent them, we need to hound them. We were falling behind on our backlog of 250,000 documents. UiPath enabled us to avoid adding more employees. Automation was the way to go. We haven't added any more headcount, and the backlog is going down, but it isn't as much as we had hoped.

The automation has allowed us to provide customers with better-quality documents faster. It has also given employees more time to locate the documents we don't have, freeing them from mundane tasks. It's freed them from the work of typing data on a form into an ERP system. 

We are talking about using it for our environmental and social governance initiatives. We're considering bringing together some of those pieces through automation to track our energy usage or what we've spent on some of the other bits and pieces and have a better ESG profile.

I find the intelligent document processing features extremely interesting. They're fun and represent an actual practical use of AI. There are so many impractical ways to use AI, but this offers a tangible ROI, and you can see its benefits directly. 

There are small issues, such as the Action Center not auto-refreshing. The user has to keep clicking "refresh." It's minor, but if you're waiting for something in your queue, you don't want to sit there and keep clicking. Logging could be improved, and there are a few connectors where I would like to see enhancements, but nothing major.

We started using UiPath in January of this year, so we've used it for less than a year.

The solution is solid, and I've had no issues with stability. The one issue encountered was due to a version change, where the changes in that version were unexpected.

The solution is great for scalability, and we can always add more bots as needed. We haven’t found it limiting at all.

Our experience with UiPath support has been mixed. The responses take a little long, which isn't bad when we only need a question answered. However, our system went down twice, and it took four to eight hours to get our first response from support. If I submit a ticket at 2 pm, I might not get a response until 10 pm. That's still relatively soon, but I might not be paying attention that late at night or be available to respond. 

Positive

We did not use a different solution for document processing before this.

The initial setup was pretty easy and straightforward. It didn’t take much time to get UiPath running.

We implemented the solution in-house ourselves. We do have a partner, Empower dot AI, which we plan to work with on future projects.

We are probably just starting to see a positive dollar ROI versus what we spent implementing UiPath. We only started this in January, and it was fully implemented by late June or early July. Hence, we are still in the infancy phase of experiencing ROI.

UiPath's pricing is reasonable. The model of charging per AI unit makes sense, and the licensing for Action Center and other parts is good. The cost does not seem excessive.

We have been using the RPA functionality in UiPath mostly for cash management. Our biggest use case is submitting wires and payments.

We aim to reduce routine tasks and allow people more time to do more important things. We were mainly looking at time savings for employees, and we may not have gotten all of the time savings that we wanted, but we definitely have found some. In addition to saving time, we also hope to mitigate risks for some of the tasks we've implemented and reduce human error in some of these processes, 

In bot development, we have had a lot of conversations about what we want bots to do, how to process exceptions, who exceptions go to, and who needs to be aware. Once the bot goes live, we have to keep the chats and lines of communication open to ensure everything's working.

The most valuable features are UI, web, and Excel automation, as well as the ability to package all of these in one software suite.

Setting up the infrastructure with different virtual desktops and making the connections stable in our environment present challenges. More direction on cleaning up these issues would be useful.

I have been using UiPath for about two years.

We've had some stability issues, but we're unsure whether UiPath caused them or if it was our company's older internal infrastructure. We haven't had any downtime caused by UiPath.

UiPath has been able to scale as our environment grows and keeps up with demand.

I rate UiPath support eight out of 10. We receive good support from UiPath when we need it.

Positive

Personally, I did not use a different solution before UiPath, but some departments at the corporation have used other RPA tools, and some still do. We chose UiPath because we worked with some consulting firms that were familiar with the development capabilities of the solution. They could help with the initial development of the bots. We like the direction of the tool.

We worked with consulting firms familiar with the development capabilities of UiPath to assist with the development of bots.

We have seen a return on investment due to time savings with high-value employees. However, as we continue to make new things, it's hard to determine the exact return at this point.

I am not involved in the purchasing, but people have been generally happy with the pricing so far. Some pieces we use now may not provide expected value, and we might remove those in the future.

I rate UiPath nine out of 10.

One of our simpler UiPath use cases involves running an SQL query, copying the results into a spreadsheet, and then emailing them to the appropriate people. 

We also have a third-party system for parking at the hospital. Visitors need to fill out a web form, and the automation process kicks in once the web form is filled out. The data is input into a database and then automatically processed in bundles. The form is filled out automatically for them, and it batches every thirty minutes. 

UiPath helps us automate many tasks people do daily that they don't want to do. They can spend that time on tasks that humans are better at, such as being creative and thoughtful instead of copying down information, filling up databases, making spreadsheets, sending emails, etc. I have one automation that normally takes me about four hours to do. 

Automating certain tasks can potentially save employees approximately 60 hours per week. This was particularly true in our parking pass processing. People used to get overwhelmed with that task, so automating it saves significant time.

Computer Vision helps us read and process handwritten documentation. That will be incredibly important. The unique aspect about UiPath is the robustness of the Academy that's built into it.

UiPath could be more intuitive in how it formats strings, variables, or databases. This can sometimes be difficult, even for someone with a computer science background. Additionally, some tasks require a team effort as one person can get overwhelmed or discouraged.

We are only about a month or a month and a half into using the solution.

The stability is generally good, but it can't really be driven without support for prolonged use.

Scaling UiPath is easy. You just purchase more bots.

Previously, we used Power Automate and a proof of concept for Automation Viewer, but we decided to switch to UiPath because it has a better deployment model. We use the Orchestrator. It's a server that we can add our robots to and configure them. 

UiPath is good at handling the sequential flow of processes. The way it breaks down sequencing is commendable. It was shocking how disorganized some of the other solutions we reviewed were.

We are seeing a good return on investment potential, but we haven't fully realized it yet since we are only a month and a half in.

I rate UiPath eight out of 10. 

I'm using UiPath on an automation project for my company in the banking domain. The use cases are for things like insurance claims and debit card transactions. We use it for our clients' requirements and also internally to address any of our company's needs for UI automation. 

When we started the client's project, they had a simple process, but they were dealing with a large volume of data. Most organizations primarily rely on Excel as their main solution, and they're doing processes through that. They wanted to automate Excel processes that they had been doing manually. UiPath improves productivity and saves time. For example, I developed a bot for processing insurance claims in UiPath. It involved checking documents and comparing them to the information in the databases. The process would take around 40 minutes to perform manually. We reduced that to eight or nine minutes per process through automation. It greatly increased the volume we could handle, producing a lot of value for the organization.

As we developed more automations for Excel, their manual work decreased, so they gave us more requirements. I've developed about 15 separate processes for the banking project I'm working on. Each process has its own way of doing it. We have developed network solutions. UiPath has contributed so much to the development of automation in our company. Our clients are pleased because they can boost their revenue by introducing bots.

UiPath has helped us reduce our on-premise footprint. The development cycle depends on whether it's a major or minor process. We start development, test, and deploy. After that, a support team will maintain the process, and we will not be involved again. We have multiple people working on a particular project, and it changes with every sprint of a cycle.  

UiPath Academy has lots of videos and other resources. While we can go to YouTube or some other source to learn about UiPath, we don't get a comprehensive understanding of the solution or the latest features. We can only get this through UiPath, and everything we need is in the courses. You can take a foundational course to learn the basics and get a certification that is valid everywhere from the advanced developer courses. Every company expects its UiPath developers to have this certification. 

UiPath's AI functionality is useful if we're working with unstructured data. For example, if we have a PDF where the data we want to extract is not separated, we can use AI to define the data for automation. I have done some practice use cases for learning purposes, but I haven't used AI in a project.

The solution helps to speed up digital transformation. I'm not sure about other countries, but many banks in India are still doing things manually and not using UI automation. This is a revolution in banking technology because bots are doing everything, and they don't need a lot of people to do the tasks.

UiPath can reduce human error, but a developer needs to understand the process completely that the bot will perform and provide all the conditions for how to perform things. After the client approves a project, we create a bot, and it will function based on the solution documentation. The UiPath bot will perform whatever conditions I give it. About 80 percent of the solutions we develop will complete the process without human intervention, and the remaining 20 percent of automations require some manual effort.

The solution frees up employee time because UiPath doesn't require much coding knowledge. If we can find a working solution for many purposes, we can download it. We don't need to spend time developing as many processes. 

I like UiPath's coding engine. We don't need to know much code. Most of the activities in UiPath are drag and drop. It's easy to build automations in UiPath. If we need support also, that doesn't require much effort. The UiPath tool gives us a structured framework. That is used in almost every project I work on. It made our development process effortless. We've completed a lot of projects with the help of the framework. 

The UiPath community enables users to share knowledge and bots that they've developed. If I have a bot installed in our machines, it doesn't require much effort for other users to run it. The user experience is seamless and user-friendly. Everything is ported on the back end, and it works as expected everywhere. If we have any doubt about a topic, we can post a question on the user community forum, and people from around the world will offer solutions in minutes. It takes very little time to get the solution. 

We only use the UiPath Community for support. It would be nice if a team of developers or a support person were available to help us work internally on our project. That would be helpful.

I have used UiPath since 2020.

UiPath is stable. All of my colleagues in other companies feel that this is highly stable compared to other tools.

UiPath is scalable.

I rate UiPath eight out of 10. We primarily get support from the UiPath Community, but sometimes their solutions work differently when we take it to our machine sometimes we have this capability. 

Positive

I also learned Automation Anywhere at the same time, but I found that the UiPath interface was easier for beginners to learn. 

We use UiPath as a cloud service. You create packages that are deployed through Orchestrator. Any machine with access to Orchestrator can just download the package and run it. The deployment is straightforward if we have the necessary access. We need to add a package to Orchestrator and download it. It doesn't require much time. 

We have a team of people. Every deployment includes developers, a support team, and an engineering team that will deploy the code to the production machine. The support team will ensure the bot is running properly after deployment, while the developer is the one who creates the package. UiPath doesn't require much maintenance aside from upgrading the bots with packages from UiPath. 

The pricing model is based on the number of processes. My colleagues tell me that UiPath's pricing is pretty normal compared to other solutions. 

I rate UiPath nine out of 10. I would recommend it to anyone who is interested in RPA. It's easy to learn and implement. You will not be disappointed. I still have a lot to learn. There are so many capabilities.