UiPath Reviews

We're a blockchain company that provides finance and analytics solutions, so we have multiple use cases, including organizational process automation. We do some end-to-end automation and automate some repetitive tasks. In the future, we plan to target some advanced processes like blockchain and machine learning. 

One example of a specific use case is market auditing. We are auditing our sales team and plan to audit our customers. This entails inspecting data produced by two third-party platforms, Salesforce and SAE, and combining that data into one Excel workbook to perform some calculations. We perform some analytics and then export the data from Excel to our CRM. Transferring the customer data to our CRM is incredibly time-consuming because we deal with more than a thousand lines of data. It takes a minimum of two hours to upload all the data to the portal.

UiPath helps us extract the numbers from the CRM side and share them with our marketing and financial team. This involves four processes that we combine into one automated endpoint process. The reduced workload across the three involved departments translates to cost savings equalling about 2.6 FTE monthly.

Another use case is to promote our components, services, and products. We are building a promotions portal that is attached to Excel. The promotion will involve maybe 500 line items and multiple roles. While you can do this manually, there is a significant potential for human error that could mean a loss of revenue. For instance, if we accidentally offer the same customer two discounts, we have to honor that. We haven't had any errors using UiPath in the last six months. 

We have three offices in our country, but the solution is deployed on a virtual machine in the head office. If a branch location requires process automation, we automate that solution at headquarters, and all the infrastructure is centrally managed. The primary users are six people from my team, including me, a business analyst, a developer, and three consultants. There are also two people from another group managing the UiPath infrastructure. 

We use UiPath Action Center, a capability that allows us to engage businesspeople and incorporate them into our automation. In total, we have about 12 to 15 people using UiPath, but some of them have limited privileges. 

Management prepared a presentation last week detailing how we've benefited from the start of 2021 to June 2022. We uploaded 149 processes into our unattended environment, and the robot runtime is 15,028 minutes, so we saved 75,114 hours. In the last year and a half, we saved the equivalent of 43 full-time employees.

 We have automated many tasks that would've been done manually, and we are reassigning our employees to other valuable tasks. This translates into a cost savings of about $98,000 for the last two years. Performing repetitive tasks is also demoralizing. If you're constantly performing representative tasks, your motivation level very goes down, so keeping our employees motivated is an added benefit. 

I am not an experienced developer, and working with UiPath has taught me a lot. We use UiPath Orchestrator with a combination of unattended and attended bots. That functionality allows you to manage your platform virtually. You can monitor everything and assign new roles to users. 

I would like to see more native AI and machine learning functionality. UiPath doesn't cover all the options for a few tasks that we require, so it's hard to do advanced automation. For example, UiPath chatbots are one area where machine learning capabilities could help. Users ask the robot questions, triggering those kinds of processes. 

We started using UiPath in September 2020.

UiPath is a highly stable solution. We haven't encountered any bugs, downtime, or other issues since we started to use the solution. We also don't experience any instability when working with components in other projects. 

UiPath is a highly scalable solution because some of its capabilities can be used in other projects. This means we don't have to rebuild the solutions we have already developed. With the help of these solutions and features, we can reduce the development time. 

I rate UiPath support eight out of 10. Technical support is generally good, but there's one thing I don't like. UiPath support's technical expertise is impressive, but the response time isn't ideal. When you raise a ticket on the UiPath portal,  customer support can sometimes take up to 24 hours to respond. 

Positive

Setting up UiPath was highly straightforward because we had help from the vendor team. Our deployment team had eight people total, including me, a business analyst, a developer, and two IT people plus two people from the UiPath side. It took approximately one month because we implemented the UiPath solution on-premises. We had one or two technical meetings with the UiPath team and we needed to build some architecture. They suggested that we leverage our existing servers on Microsoft Azure and Google Cloud.  

Then, we integrated all those solutions on the UiPath side. We installed a UiPath solution in the dev environment where we were developing the processes and one in the live environment. We have more than 32 licenses, so we created 32 virtual machines on Google Cloud and Azure. 

Every organization needs to cut costs, and all customers try to negotiate a discount on licensing. When we initially tried UiPath, they offered a discount of nearly seven percent, but they haven't since. UiPath's price is a little high compared to other solutions, but it's easier to use and maintain. We purchased a three-year license.

We tried Blue Prism, Automation Anywhere, and another tool by IBM, but I didn't care for those solutions because they were too complex. UiPath is easy to use, monitor, and manage. Automation Anywhere and Blue Prism lacked some of UiPath's features. For example, UiPath allows us to maintain our environments remotely through UiPath Orchestrator. 

I rate UiPath nine out of ten. It's a great solution. I highly recommended UiPath over other automation tools I've used.

At my company, we automate everything, including the ERP. It's for logistics as well as the production. 90% of our use case is automating SAP and the bonus software.

The user interface is amazing. If we want to look at the conditions, we can do so easily. We can just search and we can find it. It's very simple.

They provide architecture that is really amazing. 

It is quite stable. It is really good and very reliable, which is what I really want. 

You can scale the solution very well.

I have used automation. The report was helpful. It trains employees - even those that didn’t have any experience. In UiPath, it’s not as clear how you go about things or where to click. It's very difficult to change items. The best part of UiPath is the automation.

I have a downloaded code. When you ship the plan from one country to another country, there will be a lot of historical data in the item. Typically, we have to delete this manually. It is a lot of data. We have exclusively recruited people for this job in the past. Then, we came up with some designs for the automation and it has saved them plenty of time. We are able to finish all the deletion of unnecessary data in record time. That was a really easy way to help save time and human resources. Automation Anywhere is really helpful financially.

Manually, a task like this would have taken around 30 days to deal with 10,000 lines of deletion. Now, with automation, the same task can be done in two days.

In the past, our recruits have come from Ireland. I’m not sure how much labor time we’ve saved with UiPath, however, it’s significant.

I have tried UiPath’s Academy. I got certified from UiPath. The best part is that the lectures are really good. They also provide the trial motions, which is really helpful when learning.

I have watched UiPath Academy’s orchestrated videos and done the pre-development. I completed the entire video and then did the test. They have certified me for Orchestrator and the developer parts.

One really good thing about UiPath is the user community. We can just search for a term and get help with questions. Most questions will be answered by the community. That is really amazing and helpful. Participating in the community makes UiPath really easy. It's very easy to find solutions to questions you have.

The UiPath community compares well against other RPA communities out there. On a scale of one to ten, I would say that the automation ranks at a nine. It’s a helpful tool.

We use attended bots as well as unattended bots.

Attended automation has helped to scale RPA benefits in our company by automating departments or all specific processes that require human-robot collaboration. We know how to use automation with merchants so that they help you with authorization for the end-users. The robots have really helped us in specific use cases, especially around logistics, for example.

We have just started using UiPath’s AI functionality. We are exploring it now after we got some orientation from UiPath. Within one year, we'll start using it for the plans that we have created for this year.

UiPath automation has reduced human mistakes. That is the best part. If somebody, a human, does the same continuous actions, mistakes will happen. With automation, we’ve had zero errors at this point.

UiPath updates its software every year. The problem is the support for the old code. For example, right now I'm using the 2021 10.3 version. If I have developed a code three years back and I want to update the packages, it won't work as expected. They do not follow up with support for the old version. Therefore, a person has to exclusively work again with the old robot to make it compatible with the new version.

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

Stability-wise, I would say, for an ERP, UiPath is good. If you are going to automate some websites, the stability is very bad, however, for ERP it is really good. 

The scalability is good. Based on the demand, we can actually scale up things. Again, it depends on how we implement UiPath in the organization.

We pay extra for UiPath support. For us, it's really good.

Since we are paying extra money for support, whenever we have a problem they exclusively send two people to our organization. They elaborate and explain the solution to the problem. That's only due to the fact that we pay extra money. We have experienced only positive scenarios with support.

While I'd rate paid support eight out of ten, when you don't pay for support the service may be only a five out of ten.

Positive

I also have Automation Anywhere and Microsoft.

Microsoft's solution is better than UiPath. However, UiPath compared to Automation Anywhere is better.

With UiPath, they should have at least some basic knowledge of .NET. It's very different from Microsoft. Somebody without any background can develop robots.

Compared to Automation Anywhere, UiPath is really good. Especially the user interface. Some of the Orchestrator functionality is also really good compared to Automation Anywhere. 

We had used an earlier version (8). We had to use that and log into the Orchestrator, et cetera. At that time, all versions were difficult. Now, they have the availability to make the setup easier and we have the entities to deploy the package. It's now very easy and very convenient.

The deployment takes about two minutes maximum.

For the deployment strategy for UiPath, we did a QA first. We had a tech that would create the instance, we'd deploy the Orchestrator and then just do the QA. We'd create another code request for the master branch. 

I have seen some ROI, however, I have only high-level ideas about what it is. Our team is in Denmark and in India. From what I heard, we are getting considerable value for money at this time.

The solution is a bit pricey.

More and more companies are coming out with similar solutions, and therefore the space is likely to become very competitive.

I have used the cloud deployment at well. Now I use the on-premises version. 

If anybody is going to evaluate UiPath, first, I would say, you need to look into what kind of automation you are going to do. If it's ERP, I would definitely recommend UiPath. If it's something, like a PDF or insurance kind of use case, then I wouldn't recommend UiPath. From my experience, what I understand is that UiPath is good for SAP. However, you can use it for any other kind of ERP as well.

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

I mainly use UiPath for all automation tasks. We focus on the security automation side. We are doing some research on security automation regarding incorporated SIEM. We mainly are focusing on the security automation side using UiPath.

The process design work, the workflow management, and the custom templates are the most valuable aspects to us right now.

In terms of the ease of building automation using UiPath, it's easy to use. Previously, we had to do everything manually. When it came to automation, we had to design it manually and we had to have the documentation and everything in a separate place. By using UiPath, we can collaborate with everyone in one single system and we can maintain everything in one repo. Everything in one single system makes it easy to use and reduces our time spent creating automation while also improving effectiveness and efficiency. In terms of time saved, while previously it might have taken us two to three days to do perform a task, we now have it down to one.

The automation cloud offering helps to decrease UiPath's total cost of ownership by taking care of things such as infrastructure maintenance and updates. We don't have to host in our environments. They are responsible for maintaining everything. We can also connect from anywhere, which is very useful. The automation cloud offering helps to decrease UiPath's total cost of ownership as it reduces maintenance costs.

I use the UiPath Academy to learn more information, get new features, and learn about them as I go. UiPath Academy courses have been extremely helpful in getting up to speed and getting updates on the new features.

These days, once they release the new features, we can immediately learn about them from the Academy. We have everything, including guides, in one place. We don't need to search here and there and go and search features and ask for help from someone else. Once we first log in to the Academy, we can see everything that's saved there. We have one single place from which to learn.

The UiPath user community, in terms of the value that we gain by being a part of it, is good. The forum is also there. If someone needs help they can put the question on the forum as well. While there's no extreme support, for mid-level questions, we have some sort of support there right from the community.

We use attended automation. Attended automation has helped to scale RPA and has benefited the company by automating department or role-specific processes that require human-robot collaboration. UiPath helps to improve the effectiveness of the processes. Time is saved and human errors are reduced when we leverage this aspect. We've likely seen a drop of 50% in human error. It's also freed up 50% of employee time.

We do use some of UiPath's AI functionality in our automation program. I use some subject features. While using complex processes, we can segregate them into different parts and we have more visibility of the processes. When it comes to automation, we can make decisions such as how these processes are aligned and how to rearrange them. The AI functionality enabled us to automate more processes overall.

UiPath has reduced the cost of digital transformation so far. Some upgrades were required, however, they weren't massive. Most of the stuff can be managed.

They could work to improve the user community. For example, having a common place to discuss items. They could improve user forums. That way, we can share knowledge and experiences across different industries. 

I've been using the solution for around six months. 

In terms of stability, it's really good. I haven't come across any problems.

Scalability is really good. We can change anything we want with minimum time.

The cloud offering allows us to scale up operations. When the number of users increases and the number of tasks goes up as the business expands, we can easily, with the cloud subscription, share it with more users. It's really easy.

I currently use the solution daily, which will likely continue. Many people use the solution in our organization, including all developers and project managers as well as IT admin. Around, altogether 80 to 90 people are using UiPath. I've automated two processes so far, however other departments also use it and they are doing their own automation projects. 

Technical support has been very helpful. 

Positive

The initial setup was straightforward. For implementing and getting support and we could directly work with the company. UiPath was very helpful.

Deployment was done by a separate IT team, however, we are used to testing the product and giving feedback. We provide the feedback, what we use, and everything, and it can get tweaked. It's quite straightforward and easy.

It took about three months to deploy UiPath.

The implementation strategy was to communicate with IT. They know the whole solution, however, we were participating in the process to witness how to use the software and how it's helpful. We give feedback on how it feels to do our work. Therefore, I don't directly install it; I only advise on my findings from a usage standpoint. 

UiPath helped to deploy the UiPath solution in our organization.

UiPath has helped save 60% of costs for us in our organization.

We have seen an ROI. Considering the overall cost we spent before vs after and considering our increased accuracy and the time savings when you see the bigger picture, it's worth more than what we spent.

The pricing and licensing of UiPath seem to be affordable. 

The IT team may have looked at other options, including Blue Prism. I didn't directly participate in the evaluation process. 

We are UiPath customers. 

It's a good process automation tool. I'd invite anyone to consider this tool if they are planning to go into automation tasks. However, they definitely need to have a trial period. After that, if it suits their goals, then they should acquire it for their organization.

I would rate the solution a ten out of ten. 

I started my RPA journey as a developer, and I first heard about UiPath as a low-code, drag-and-drop automation platform. Back then, it was very much in the beginning stages of its development. Ever since then, I've seen it evolve quite fast. I would say even faster than other RPA platforms that I've used, in just a few years.

Thinking back to when I first started using it, there are many new features and updates and it's my preferred platform for RPA.

We primarily used unattended automation, where you deploy the bots to work autonomously. This is unattended, end-to-end automation with no human in the loop, other than providing the inputs or checking the outputs.

We have several use cases, but our main one is reducing manual work. The processes that require a lot of manual input and have a lot of human error are the focus. That could be, for instance, processes that have to do with invoicing, billing, reporting, and coding, which require a lot of man-hours, are very reliant on a human being available, and are time-sensitive. Those are the ones that are on the top list to be automated.

Beyond that, I can't specifically talk about the processes that we've automated.

UiPath helps to implement end-to-end automation, although the discovery of processes, gathering requirements, and creating the design, all happen outside of UiPath. But the development, which is developing the bots, then testing and then deploying them, does happen end-to-end within UiPath.

The end-to-end development capability is important, but this is because every tool offers this and it is expected. That said, there is definitely room for improvement in that end-to-end should include process discovery. It is end-to-end, but those ends can extend further than what it currently is. In that sense, it's no different than other RPA tools.

Another way that UiPath improves the way our organization functions is that the robots can run 24/7. If you think about a human workforce, they work eight hours a day, they take days off, they get sick, they leave, and they take knowledge with them once they leave the company. But, the robots can be run non-stop 24/7, and each process can be scaled up. The same process can be run by one bot, or it can be run by 10 or 100 bots. This means that there's a lot more flexibility that the bots bring, especially for high-volume processes that perhaps even have some peaks, such as an end-of-month rush to produce invoices or meet a deadline or an end-of-financial-year crunch.

These robots have an easier time addressing and variability when it comes to volume. They really create a lot more scalability to where businesses can grow and know that they can meet the demands of the future. So, they're a lot more future-proof, whereas people are harder to rely on.

Speaking from a business perspective, it's the FTE savings. A company obviously needs to spend money on UiPath licenses and development costs, but those costs are oftentimes lower than the cost of that FTE, the full-time employee, whose work is getting automated. If you purely just think about the financial benefits, it's the lower staffing costs.

There is also the ability to free up people. This means that even if people aren't replaced and their salary isn't saved, what they can do is pivot their focus to, for instance, be a lot more customer-facing or do a lot more strategic or creative tasks that perhaps get pushed to the side because there's not a lot of time allocated towards performing them. Now, FTEs have a lot more capacity to contribute and perform tasks that still to this day cannot be automated, like creative thinking, complex decision-making on the spot, strategy, and just human interaction.

In the beginning, employees meet automation with a critical eye. They're thinking, "Well, what's going on? Why are these robots coming in? Are we going to work alongside them? How is this going to work?" But to be honest, in the end, there are winners and losers. What I mean by that is that some jobs are replaced, and that's just simply because of that FTE saving that is usually the driver to justify the cost of development. But on the flip-side, the employees that do stay and do work alongside the bots are usually a lot happier because they have to juggle a lot fewer things.

The robots are there to make people feel like people and not like robots, where they just do the same thing over and over and don't enjoy their job or don't enjoy what they do. A robot takes that away and helps people enjoy their work a lot more because they can do non-repetitive tasks. They can be a lot more customer-facing and perhaps build stronger relationships with their customers, know them better, and have more time available to work on other projects or work on other things that they may never have had the time to do.

In our organization, the robots work on multiple projects. The amount of employee time that is freed up depends on the project and what you are automating, but a pretty good estimate would be a 20% to 40% savings.

With respect to the reduction of problems related to human error, the fact of the matter is that some employees, whether you like it or not, are more error-prone. By automating a process, we were able to standardize it, and therefore, identify the cause of the human error and remove it by replacing the process with a robot that makes a more reliable judgment in terms of action. It is literally just an if-else statement. It's a lot easier to quantify and therefore it's a lot easier to evaluate, and therefore the result is a lot more reliable. Whereas with an employee, let's say the output of their work is a lot more unreliable simply because they could be working on 10 different things on the same day. There could be a deadline approaching, and the quality of work fluctuates with an employee because of it.

With a robot, you will notice that over time, in fact, the quality improves, and that's just the basic truth of RPA. It doesn't happen automatically, and it does require work. It happens because you see the results of the automation and you see areas for improvement, ultimately leading you to make adjustments. You iterate on the RPA solution and make it better over time.

Although it does not improve automatically, through a conscious effort you can be a lot more confident in the output and then be able to see unbiased results at the end of the day. Part of these results is your exception rates, which can be errors. It can be failures, whether technical in nature or decision-making business rule types of errors. Then, you can adjust your process to where it can positively improve that exception rate, and just iterate on that to where it becomes acceptable. Moreover, it's quite stable, which is not the case with the human workforce.

The automation cloud Orchestrator has its benefits and negative sides. The benefit is the fact that it's web-based. A person who has the login credentials can access it without the necessity to have something installed. The development and the monitoring of the bots are separated in UiPath, where the development happens in the Studio and the monitoring happens in the Orchestrator.

In other tools like Blue Prism, it happens in the same place. I've used both, and the Orchestrator is nice. It has a very nice UI, it's user-friendly, it has a lot of features, and I find it quite easy to use. For example, you can see all of the machines, you can see the robots, and you can schedule them. If the business wants to see a lot more across the output of the Work Queue, they can have that visibility from Orchestrator, which is great.

The downside of Orchestrator is the package deployment, which is perhaps another minus of UiPath in general. The deployment of a new package does not take a long time, but there are a lot of steps. It's not an intuitive process. If you have to release a lot of packages, which does occur, especially in the early stage of deployment, when you are releasing hotfixes, or when something goes wrong and you need to redeploy a fix really quickly to minimize business impact, it does slow you down.

I wish it would be just one or two clicks, rather than the whole importing or exporting and connecting to the desktop application and everything that accompanies it. I wish it were a lot easier. Again, it has its upsides but it's not perfect.

The best feature in UiPath is their robotic enterprise framework because that is an inbuilt processing framework for utilizing their work queues. It's plug-and-play, and already pre-built to where you don't have to start from scratch. It's enterprise-grade and ready to be used. All you need to do is populate your dispatcher, create a queue, create a performer, and you're good to go.

The highest benefit of it is that it's just there, ready to use, and you don't need to start from a blank screen. You don't have to figure out, for example, how to create an environment where the robots can check if there's anything in the queue to be worked on. The framework is already there. The other tools that I've used, like Blue Prism, don't have that built-in quite as well.

My perspective and overview are from that of a developer, and I find that the recorder feature is really good. This is because UiPath lets you record your actions on the screen. So, if you want to interact with a web-based interface, for example, then you have UiPath record your actions and then build the activities that you would need in order to replicate those actions through the robot. It makes it a lot better and although it's not perfect and it does need to be reviewed and adjusted, it speeds up development quite a bit. This is especially true when it's basic back development like populating fields and clicking buttons and navigating on a web.

Compared to other RPA tools that I have used, something that stands out to me in UiPath is that it has a very extensive library of activities. Those activities are easy to search for and use.

When you are writing code, there is a feature called IntelliSense, which autocompletes your code. More specifically, when you're typing code, if you're starting to type the name of a variable, it will show you all of the variables available and you can just click them. It's very interactive and it's reminiscent of the Microsoft Visual Studio environment, both from the UI perspective and the coding perspective. This means that developers that are familiar with Visual Studio will probably feel right at home using UiPath. It's very developer-friendly and it's geared towards appealing to existing developers.

The UiPath Academy courses definitely help in the process of bringing employees up to speed. The Academy is the go-to place for UiPath learning and I think that other RPA tools are copying this model of disseminating knowledge, being a lot more open with training, making it freely available, and providing an online classroom. These are things that UiPath has always done, and it certainly helps new developers get upskilled in RPA, and specifically with UiPath.

When it comes to ease of use, UiPath is intuitive insofar as the basic features have a low learning curve. However, if you want to take full advantage of what UiPath can do, and if organizations want to create more sophisticated automation solutions, it is more difficult. For instance, automations involving back-end access, maybe writing directly to databases such as SQL or using API, that's a steep learning curve. In fact, I think the learning curve is exponential.

If you just want to make a robot that sends an email, that's really easy to do. But, if you really want tangible benefits, like if you really want something that solves a business problem, it is a huge learning curve and it takes a while to master. Obviously, it does have that low-code requirement, but I would say that's only for entry automation projects, like proof-of-concept or something along those lines. For something that really solves a business problem, you would need code, because that just makes it a lot more robust and a lot more powerful if you can custom-code certain steps of the process.

Features for process discovery would improve the end-to-end development capabilities.

From a developer's point of view, my biggest struggle with UiPath is debugging. The debug mode in UiPath feels clunky and it is a sore spot. It feels it's hard to control the flow of the process. There are a lot of internal errors and it's not intuitive. In general, debugging is not a good experience and I don't enjoy doing it. In contrast, Blue Prism has better debugging capabilities.

Blue Prism is a little more dynamic; you can adjust variables, you can jump around the flow, and it's easier to control. With UiPath, it's a little bit of a nightmare. It becomes harder to debug the bigger your automation is, because it's quite unpredictable, and it's quite unstable. Definitely, if debugging was improved, I would say UiPath would get 11 out of 10.

Something that I noticed recently is that they have moved to paid certification for developers, whereas it used to have free certification. This is a little bit outside of the platform itself but the pain point here from my perspective is that there is a barrier to entry for new RPA developers, or ones that want to renew their certification. It has become a lot harder and that used to be a differentiator for UiPath. It had a very strong online learning offering and it offered no-charge recertification on top. This is now very similar to what other tools are doing and I see that as a negative.

My first introduction to UiPath was in early 2018 or late 2017.

The robots could be a lot more stable, which is another area for improvement. The stability issue with UiPath is a prominent one, especially in comparison to other tools like Blue Prism. I feel that there are a lot of errors that are caused by the UiPath framework, as opposed to the robot design. Sometimes it's just very unreliable and crashes unexpectedly, which creates serious issues in terms of reliability. In early deployment, it always happens that it's very late nights, and there's a lot of babysitting processes. The robots need it because you never know what's going to crash.

In comparison with other RPA tools, it is average when it comes to reliability. I would rate other tools a little bit easier to manage expectations as to what you can reasonably expect to go wrong, and what you can reasonably expect to break. With UiPath, our developers, even our experienced ones, oftentimes get errors that we've never seen in our lifetime. This is partly due to the flexibility of UiPath, with it being so easy to adapt to all types of applications and all types of environments and it being so malleable. It is one of the most versatile tools; it's industry agnostic, platform-agnostic, and tool-agnostic, but that flexibility creates a lot more room for error in the code. It means that a lot more things can break or interfere with each other, compared to other platforms that are perhaps more niche and more targeted in what they're actually trying to solve.

UiPath is definitely scalable. It is modular, where you build a workflow and that can be reused across multiple robots or multiple processes. Those processes can then be run by one, two, three, five, and 100 bots, provided that they can work concurrently in the same environment, performing the same process. It's wonderful and the scalability is uncapped. If you have licenses, then you can use them, which is great.

The only limits are how many licenses are you willing to buy, and the inherent limits of your own infrastructure and your own process. It comes down to how many robots can realistically work concurrently in the same infrastructure and in the same network without breaking it.

We have approximately 20 developers who use UiPath. We have business users, but it is difficult for me to say how many there are.

I have been in contact with technical support, and I have experienced submitting a support ticket to them. I even got on a call with them and they were very helpful. We had been having issues with automating a platform and we wanted to get their specific insight as to what was going wrong. It had to do with UiPath not being able to extract selectors from that specific interface.

I was really surprised because they spent the time to not only address my ticket and answer my questions, but also to allocate time to schedule a meeting, and really look into the platform via screen share. I was sharing the screen with them and showing them what was happening, and they really looked into it and gave it a lot of attention.

I understand they get a lot of tickets, and I really felt they provided a good answer. They responded really fast, I would say within 24 hours, and we began exchanging details through a back and forth conversation.

They provided me with the outcome that I was happy with. It was a very good experience.

In addition to UiPath, we used Blue Prism and Automation Anywhere. UiPath is king here, and I rarely hear anything about the other two. I would estimate that we use UiPath 95% of the time, perhaps even 99%.

The alternative to UiPath that I am more familiar with is Blue Prism. From my perspective, UiPath is geared towards developers. The audience towards which it's skewed is the developer or the technical person. Blue Prism is geared more towards business people. It's geared towards converting business people, including SMEs and subject matter experts that know the process well, into developers. You will find that the language that each program uses is one that's geared towards the target market. Consequently, UiPath uses a lot of developer language and developer concepts.

For example, UiPath works similarly to the Visual Studio Environment. Blue Prism, on the other hand, uses a lot of flowcharting visuals, as well as the language that it uses for the same concept. It's going to use a definition that's more from a business process flowcharting realm. Recently, both platforms are converging onto each other and I feel like they're becoming more and more similar, but they still have a few things that are different.

One thing that stands out for me is that Blue Prism has wonderful debugging. It's a lot better than UiPath, and it's an all-in-one tool where the monitoring and the building of the robots happen in one application. The deployment is also really easy.

Blue Prism also offers online learning, which is great. They didn't use to have that offering, and I think that they got a lot of inspiration from UiPath. Their online courses have been great because previously when I was learning RPA, I had to use YouTube. Now, they have a whole Blue Prism university, which is amazing.

Blue Prism has inbuilt version control and a lot of other great features. They have a heavy emphasis on security and encryption, which UiPath perhaps needs to improve on. Companies such as banks, insurance agencies, and finance agencies are a lot more interested in Blue Prism because of its very strong security protocols. The encryption offering is a key requirement for companies that work with a lot of sensitive personal data.

I have never been involved in the initial setup, although my understanding is that it's quite a journey.

The areas of the organization with the most ROI from UiPath are operations, finance, HR, and sales. Those are the key departments, although it's across every organization because those departments have a lot of manual work-intensive processes that are the first contenders for automation.

We have a yearly licensing model that gives us access to the development and production environments. The cost of licensing is expensive.

Part of automation is the analysis and optimization of processes because the analysis phase is a by-product of wanting to automate a task. If you want to automate something, you have to break it down into parts and really look at it and think, "How can I reduce this into a series of business rules, a series of decisions, or series of steps?" It's an exercise of process optimization in and of itself because a good practice in automation is to not just take what it is and automate it, but to think, "Does what is currently in place actually work? How can it be improved? How can it be streamlined? How can it be done in fewer steps?" It's a good chance to practice some process review, improvement, and transformation.

The idea is to make it optimal because the current process usually has unquestioned practices that maybe haven't been reviewed for a very long time. A lot of businesses say, "We've always done it this way," and they've never thought to revisit the approach. RPA gives you an opportunity to think about whether what you've always been doing will work when it's being done by a robot. Most often, the processes get streamlined through the requirements gathering phase, understanding the as-is, and then a key part of that is doing the process design, which is the to-be vision.

During that time, processes go through a few design iterations where they are optimized and streamlined because we want the robots to be as efficient as possible. This means performing as few steps as possible without sacrificing value and efficiency. It is important because any inefficiencies in a robot are going to scale with the number of times you're going to run that process. If you run a process a thousand times, and let's say there exists inefficiency that results in an extra minute being used, that could be shed if you were to review and optimize that process.

Ultimately, optimization is an important exercise because the benefits include a further capacity to run more automated processes, and less time is taken up by inefficient steps.

Something to be aware of is that updates to the platform have to be managed because any update could impact the performance of a bot that was built with an earlier version. To avoid having a newer version impact the performance of something that was built previously, all of the updates need to go through a due diligence process.

The biggest lesson that I have learned from UiPath is surprising; not everything needs to be automated. It feels weird to say it because thinking, "Well, I have this platform, I have these bots, why not just automate absolutely everything?", but the truth is that there are things that can be streamlined outside of RPAs. Also, some processes can be automated through other means. Consider the very simple example of sending automated emails, or sorting out your inbox by putting the right email in the right folder, those types of things can be done with email rules rather than RPA.

If a platform already has some sort of inbuilt automation, whether that's a social media platform, email platform, networking platform, or any other type of platform, it's always better to explore that first before looking to solve that problem with RPA. There are times when an Excel Macro or an email rule will be a lot faster and a lot more cost-efficient. RPA should be directed towards big-ticket items, big problems, and large volumes to where no existing solution would provide the same level of value.

My advice for anybody who is considering UiPath is to try it out for themselves. The most beautiful thing is when companies take the leap to have a very small citizen developer team, where they upskill a few technically-minded people with free courses and try to build a small proof of concept to see if RPA is the right path for them. I really encourage that sort of curiosity and experimentation because all of the resources are out there and anybody can learn, as long as they're driven and passionate and curious about automation. I would really encourage people just to give it a try and see what comes out of it.

In our organization, UiPath is the number one RPA tool. Being close to the industry as a developer, and I do feel like it's the preferred tool, at least where I'm based in Australia. It is definitely the preferred RPA solution on the market. Our usage is definitely going to increase in the future. I feel like the future is bright for UiPath. That said, it isn't perfect.

I would rate this solution a nine out of ten.

We 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 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.

The primary use case of UiPath, with every organization that I've worked with as a consultant, has been to make business processes more efficient and the work of their employees more enjoyable. 

By utilizing this technology, you're able to get value through your value streams quicker. When you realize value, that means you can work with your customers more quickly, as well as build customer loyalty and employer loyalty. These have definitely been some of the byproducts of using the software.

When I was working as an RPA manager, managing a program for an insurance company which supported insurance lifecycle processing, one of the components was that they had to review insurance policies annually. It was very cumbersome. We were talking anywhere from 10,000 to 40,000 daily. It was almost a 20-FTE process. We were able to automate that completely.

However, the real value came when the organization understood how to apply RPA and it actually began creating brand-new business processes specifically for RPA. So instead of hiring new people, they said, "Hey, we've always wanted to do this, we don't have the budget to bring on and train people, so let's build bots to do it from day zero." Once they were able to understand that I could do more than just automate processes, that I could build new business lines with bots, that was an incredibly valuable result of using this software.

The benefits are very high when you automate business processes. Before using RPA, I was working in technology, building macros and things of that nature. But the way we're able to build sustainable, functional bots that really work well in the long-term makes the benefit a ten out of ten.

This is going to be an interesting answer, but the most valuable feature of the software is not the software itself, but the community that supports it. When I first started learning the software to support a program, I had to self-teach; there wasn't a budget for training. But going through their learning platform and then connecting with the community when I didn't understand how to utilize some of the functionality, that was far more powerful than the product itself. The network around the product is amazing.

The great thing about the UiPath RPA Academy is that it's not stagnant. Even though my first go at getting certified as a developer was three years ago, I literally have to go back the Academy and learn it every year because there are new features and new functionality. An example is the RE Framework they've incorporated. The living nature of the Academy gives a lot of value. But hands-down, the way that they give practical exercises, the fact that they give you applications you can download to learn how to interact with bots by simulating an actual operational environment, makes it a very impactful learning experience.

In addition, I find the solution easy to use. I have personal experience using all three of the major software vendors that are in this space right now, including Automation Anywhere and Blue Prism, and I would put UiPath as number-one, specifically from a learning perspective. I've been able to take people with absolutely zero technical background and quickly scale them up in a matter of weeks so they're building bots. I haven't been able to accomplish that same feat with the other platforms.

Being a person who has held every RPA role from developer to analyst, architect, and executive, one feature I think it needs - from a documentation perspective - is the ability to easily extract variable details and data. They do have a Variables panel that you frequently interact with, but I constantly have situations where those need to be adjusted or I want to be able to present those to a business. Sometimes it's difficult to extract those, and if you're not tracking them while you build, you can quickly get into 200 to 300 variables in use, especially using the RE Framework where you're passing workflow arguments in and out. I would like to see something like that.

In addition - and obviously UiPath is aware of this - we have to continue to improve the OCR capability. Computer Vision is excellent. I've used it on Azure. I've created PeopleSoft environments and worked through the Computer Vision feature. It works amazingly in a Citrix environment. But I speak with multiple organizations and a lot of them have the same problem of processing documentation from the mail room or from vendors, etc. That's a huge component. If we can get that embedded in UiPath, so we don't have to rely solely on OCR vendors like Captiva or ABBYY, that would be a huge step forward in being able to service all organizations.

There could be improved logging and functionality. But if you truly understand the software, adding logging to what the bot is already doing is as simple as typing on the right line. It's incredibly easy and you can embed it. Even though what it currently logs is limited, it's easy enough to create logs or reporting without a lot of effort.

Outside of that, it's really hard to come up with other recommendations. The software is solid.

I was recently reading about the document processing framework that they just implemented. I gave a demo two weeks ago on the Computer Vision functionality that was in beta. So the sustainability is there. They're focused not on just how good RPA is and on making it better, but they're also integrating it with future-tech. That is where the stability comes in.

UiPath's scalability and stability are exceptional. They are constantly releasing new versions.

Scalability is all in the delivery. I've definitely run into multiple organizational roadblocks with my clients because they get six months down their delivery timeline and they're not meeting their OI, they're not scaling. That generally comes down to how it's being delivered. If you have experience, you're working with a partner, you're working with people who have used this solution at scale, you can generally bypass a lot of those roadblocks. It's definitely scalable if you have the right expertise.

I have used both technical and customer support. When I was going through training, trying to learn some of the software, I had issues when I finally purchased licenses. The issues were related to putting them in Orchestrator and installing them. Support was definitely very supportive, very responsive when trying to get feedback.

Even when it comes to the community, as well, if you're just trying to learn the software, to learn the features and functionality, the community network is there to quickly respond and support you so you can get back to getting value, instead of getting hung up on one piece of functionality.

I have seen cases where an organization moves from a different automation solution to UiPath. At one point, we were transitioning from Automation Anywhere. There were very basic bots, these weren't complex processes, but we built a bot in UiPath that read the XAML of the Automation Anywhere script, converted it into activities in UiPath, and built a bot. We had a bot that builds a bot.

An example of why people move to UiPath is that when I was the director of RPA for a finance company, when I set up the program I had to go to EVP and pitch the prices and the costs. When I gave him the cost for all the software, to bring a vendor on, he told me "no." It was way too expensive. But UiPath has this amazing option called the Community Edition. What I was able to do was download the software, teach myself how to use it in about 45 days and, within two months, I had automated a pilot process, completely on my own. I was able to walk it into the EVP and say, "Look what I was able to complete. You told me no money, no funding, but now can I get funding?" Then I got funding and was able to bring on a team. That's one perfect example. They said "no," so I got a free version that cost me nothing.

In terms of how companies know that they need to invest in automation, in this day and age, with the speed at which information and technology move, it's at the point where this is not a new topic. A lot of organizations, through word-of-mouth, internet searches, or conferences, or events such UiPath 2019 here in DC, realize it as soon as they hear the success stories. It's impossible to ignore. Most organizations are like that. They hear about it, they realize that it's something they should consider, it's something they have to do, and they take the next step.

The initial setup is absolutely straightforward; it provides a quick and easy installation. Given that you may have to go through some technical hurdles to get permission to download it, I'm not talking about that. But if you have all the permissions and you're allowed to download and install it, it's absolutely simple. It shouldn't take more than ten minutes.

Technical prerequisites are not needed to use the software, but technical resources can speed up the ease with which you deploy. Given that you're generally not interacting with UiPath in isolation but with other business applications as well, you want to make sure that there's technical support in case you have some issues. Or, if there's something that you didn't experience in UAT but that comes up once you get into production, it's good to have some additional support. It's not a requirement but I would recommend it.

ROI is one of the most frequent questions I get from organizations. You should be seeing ROI in less than six months. If you're not returning your cost and more, from a licensing and personnel standpoint, in the first six months, then it is not a software issue and it is not a delivery issue. In that case, it is a scoping issue. You're probably looking at processes that shouldn't have been automated in the first place.

Every organization that is successful with the software is reaching their ROI in six months or under.

The amount of time saved with bots is an interesting question but it's hard to answer with a pinpoint response because it depends on an organization's strategy. I've seen multiple organizations that use attended bots, so they're just saving a fraction of the time. But then I've been in organizations where they've automated a process end-to-end. A process that previously required 20 FTEs went from having 40,000 hours of manual work to zero.

For pricing there is a variable at play, and that's scale. Depending on how you want to scale - whether working with a partner or directly with UiPath - there's a specific cost per license. But then it's all about optimizing a process, and what we call "license utilization." We try to maximize each license, and we'll have it running three or four processes.

The cost is nothing, it's peanuts, when you see the capabilities. When you're talking about one license supporting what was previously done by 14 people, what is $1,500, or whatever the licensing cost is for unattended bots?

Even more importantly, as a technology expert, I know that I could do some additional coding and automate the running of the bots. But why would I spend that extra time when they have Orchestrator. I could have a person running them as well, but the Orchestrator license is far cheaper than a resource; just click "run." When you compare the results that you get, the price is a moot point.

If I was going to give any advice to someone who was just about to utilize the software, I would say that the most successful organizations that apply this technology make it an entire team effort. It's not started in one business unit. And if it is, it's socialized across the enterprise. That's the quickest way to scale: getting everybody onboard. The second-biggest thing is that the most impactful projects you will get will come from your people, your internal workers. And until you get them to understand what the software can do and its capabilities, it's going to take you longer to scale your program. So make sure everybody's socialized, and make sure everybody truly understands what the software can truly do. They're going to give you the best opportunities to benefit from it.

Deployment should definitely be done using the support of experts. Even when I owned my own RPA program, and I wasn't in a consulting capacity, I still reached out to a third-party to get support. While setting it up is something that you can do internally, given that most objectives include speed-to-market and quick scaling - wanting to see results in 60 days instead of six months - it's going to be very difficult to do alone, especially if your goal is to have 100 bots in a year. If your goal is ten, you can probably manage it. It's important to use experts if you are looking to rapidly scale.

I have implemented UiPath in virtual environments, including on-prem, Azure VMs and servers, SQL-based data storage, as well as AWS. I've never had any issues with the responsiveness or the application having any problems operating. The biggest consideration that you have when trying to deploy robots in a virtual environment is making sure that your architecture is sound. You have to integrate through severs and you have to take into consideration firewall updates. And then there's interacting from the cloud if your applications are on-prem. You have to make sure that the bot doesn't have any issues. But if your architecture is solid and your infrastructure is set to support the applications in a cloud environment, there shouldn't be any issues. You wouldn't notice any difference compared to having them on a desktop on-premise.

I would agree that UiPath eliminates human error, but I would add the caveat that good code eliminates human error. I've been doing this for a while and I've seen bots that mess up. It's in your delivery methodology. If you have a sound delivery methodology - you're going through a rigorous UAT cycle and are having outputs audited by the subject matter experts - you should literally get to zero errors. Maybe you will have five percent exception cases, but your error percentage should be zero.

Having worked with all the tools, they all have little niche components. As long as UiPath continues to focus on knowing what the next wave of technology is that businesses really need to use to be efficient, and they start embedding that skillset in their software, that's all you could ask for. They need to stay in front of the power curve of technology, which is impossible, but they're trying.

I've never had a bad issue with UiPath. My experience with them has always been pleasant and engaging. They're never stuck at just giving you software, showing you how to use it, and then walking out. They're always focused on improving your business. If you focus on that, and focus on generating value, you can't lose.

Automation technology is the number-one driver across an organization now. Trying to find ways to do more with less has been the going mantra for organizations for years now. It's no longer feasible to simply run operational efficiency or Six Sigma projects to try to get gains. The only way that you're going to get significant gains is going with an automation-first approach. That's where I see a lot of organizations headed, even spending more on RPA software than on cloud implementation. It's a very big focus, and I don't see that slowing down any time soon.

On a scale from one to ten, I would you rate UiPath as an eleven. It's excellent software.

I use this solution for automating customer processes. I have been working with this for almost seven years and am responsible for automating various business processes across different industries such as finance, telecommunications, and airlines. I have experience working with numerous sectors and do not use it for personal reasons.

Document Understanding allows me to track information not only from structured documents but also from unstructured documents through artificial intelligence and machine learning techniques. These are excellent tools. Additionally, the process understanding enables me to track and manage document processing effectively. Ease of building automation includes utilizing tools to record the process and generate the initial process design document.

I have just generated the default pilot. I believe another option for the tool could be voice interaction. For example, similar to using assistants like Alexa, it would be beneficial to integrate voice commands with the UI to create an Excel spreadsheet and populate a data table.

I have been using the solution for seven years.

I have experienced stability issues.

I have experienced scalability issues.

I would rate customer service a ten out of ten.

Positive

The number of solutions we select depends on client needs. My company uses various software platforms without preference, and it depends on client requirements and objectives.

The initial setup is efficient if all infrastructure requirements are met, faster than Azure's requirement. It could take about an hour.

We have our checklist that describes every document. We ensure everything is checked. We are a consulting company, and we have expertise in this field.

If you lose higher Wi-Fi parameters, it saves additional time. The license cost is slightly higher compared to other providers, yet the benefits are justifiable.

The developers are very client-focused, always looking for feedback and adding additional value in every version. I was one of the first UiPath MDPs, and it enables a lot of learning opportunities. If you're keen on learning, you can benefit greatly.

UiPath is accessible with various language options, breaking down communication barriers. Many developers benefit from this, especially since it's free. Fatigue can lead to errors, but automation helps reduce such issues, particularly in financial processes. In terms of digital transformation, UiPath accelerates the process and reduces costs. 

Overall, I believe UiPath is the best tool available. I rate the overall solution ten out of ten.