UiPath Reviews

I use UiPath to automate various processes in the energy industry, including invoice processing and contract registration.

Building automation using UiPath is easy.

UiPath enables us to implement end-to-end automation. This is important for the impact of the work and the satisfaction of the client.

The UiPath User Community offers great value because it allows us to find support, ask questions, and collaborate and share with other members.

UiPath has improved our organization by enabling us to automate repetitive tasks.

UiPath has helped minimize our on-premises footprint.

We utilize the Academy courses to prepare for certification. The Academy, a structured learning environment, provides me with the opportunity to acquire knowledge systematically. While it offers a wealth of valuable information, it primarily serves as a foundation for earning the certification. To gain practical experience and proficiency with the tool, additional hands-on work is necessary. Nonetheless, the Academy courses serve as a valuable starting point.

UiPath helps speed up and reduce the cost of digital transformation. The digital transformation does not require expensive or complex application upgrades.

UiPath has helped reduce human error.

UiPath helps save around 80 percent of our client's time.

UiPath has saved us thousands of dollars over the years.

While I haven't explored all of UiPath's features yet, I'm interested in using some of them to discover potential use cases, scenarios, and projects relevant to my work. For instance, the collection center functionality seems promising. It allows clients to create tasks, fill in fields, trigger activities, and log execution process details. Additionally, verifying and managing jobs while switching between different items.

In UiPath, when debugging an issue, we cannot revert to previous steps while retaining variable values. Compared to Blue Prism, UiPath presents greater difficulty in troubleshooting bugs. 

The orchestrator may occasionally disconnect and lose communication with the machine, failing to provide real-time warnings. Additionally, error messages displayed throughout the solution lack clarity and conciseness. Furthermore, workflow names cannot contain spaces or symbols, leading to complications during package download within the project. However, no warning is issued for such naming inconsistencies.

I have been using UiPath for five years.

UiPath is not 100 percent stable but it is within acceptable range.

UiPath is scalable and it allows us to build scalable solutions.

We use both UiPath and Blue Prism, depending on our client's specific needs. However, in most cases, we recommend and utilize UiPath as our preferred solution.

The initial deployment was straightforward, but it does require some fine-tuning. I use the framework for deployments and customize it according to our client's needs.

One person is enough for the deployment.

The implementation was completed in-house.

UiPath provides a good return on investment. It saves on employee costs through automation.

UiPath pricing is average.

I would rate UiPath nine out of ten.

The environments and number of endpoints we deploy UiPath in vary by client.

One to three people are usually required for UiPath maintenance.

We started using AI in Document Understanding by leveraging it against our models for different documents from our customers, primarily in the finance space. We have also used AI to train models for land management documents, helping them learn as we receive new document types. 

Recently, we've used it to analyze documents and articles online to understand sentiment toward our company. We analyze and summarize things people say in articles or posts elsewhere, which allows us to collect industry trend data. We are considering using Clipboard AI for smaller, ad-hoc data processing tasks because it can sometimes be more effective than Document Understanding.

We get a lot of projects that are on relatively short notice for the workload that comes with them. Historically, we would rely on leveraged services or contractors to do that work manually, which is costly. You can save tons of money by automating data entry, transcription, etc. Nowadays, as we get busier and busier, the work seems to bog people down more and more with tasks. UiPath gives them opportunities to free themselves up and focus on themselves.

We initially focused on time savings and how we could free people up more. We achieved that over time, but it took a while to get there in the first few years. We came in with some use cases that we later learned were not great fits for automation. We learned through trial and error and got better at identifying better use cases for automation. We've succeeded, and it's worked out for the better. 

But aside from saving people time, we also wanted to ensure that we brought in new technology to leverage some of those processes. UiPath forces you to look at the process from a high level and take a step back. You might have had the same person doing the same process for 10 years or more without thinking about how you can use new technologies to eliminate the process or make it more efficient. UiPath forces you to look at the process as a whole and the systems it's tied to. When you step back and look at it, especially with new people coming in, they start offering suggestions, like "Wait. You've been sending this email every time? That's something we can automate now. Oh, you've been trying to pull this information from a document and copy and paste it? That's something we can automate, too." 

If it's not automation, it's something else. We can look at other tools and applications our company brought in. There's usually some other solution they can use, automation or not. The natural way to work with it is by lining out a process and laying out all the steps on a workflow diagram. It allows you to rethink your process as you're doing it. 

Instead of just following step-by-step documentation or the way you've done it all the time, it gives you a chance to see it from a new perspective, and that's just part of working with the tool. As you build that out in UiPath using task capture or anything else, you will see that naturally and start thinking about ways to handle it better.  

Automation has freed up employees for other tasks. That's something that they like about it. The other thing it's done is build some excitement about IT and solutions in general. They're always looking at the new function that's coming out. They want to see what else we can do for them. Automation isn't always the answer, but we can get them to engage and talk to us during office hours to attempt to solve their problem with UiPath. We can also learn more about what they do. 

We're getting closer to our customers, talking more about their work, and they're feeling a closer bond with us. They're feeling like they trust us more in IT and are starting to see what other tools we have. Maybe automation wasn't the right fit, but we will always find better opportunities by building a report that sends an automatic email and an application for them in low-code software. UiPath has helped create a much better and fluid engagement process for us and our customers. 

Since it's a low-code tool that's easier for them to approach and understand, they're also more involved in the design process. The learning curve is shorter. When Studio first came out, it wasn't as user-friendly as they had hoped, but StudioX came out in 2020 and was approachable for most of our users. That's what our citizen developers use most of the time now. We have far more citizen developers with StudioX than unattended developers with Studio.

Within UiPath Cloud itself, UiPath Insights has been excellent. Insights is one of the newer features we were excited about because we built custom reports, captured all that data in one place, and leveraged it in different areas. That was a challenge for us and created a support burden. We're automation developers, not report developers. When leadership wanted a new metric or anything, figuring it out was always a pain. 

Insights has built-in mechanisms for tracking time savings, usage reports, and the overall health of your automation program. Having that functionality built in by default is critical. I click it and tell it the report that I want to generate. It'll build it for me automatically, and I can share it with people who need it. It has made a huge difference for people administrating the platform and reporting success to leadership over time. 

UiPath needs work on the governance side. For example, they released Studio Web this year and have started work on its governance, but it initially lacked control from an administration standpoint. You could not lock down third-party libraries or other applications and integrations it had built in.

For example, people could use a Google account, but we might have concerns about that from a security standpoint. Cybersecurity is taking a more significant place in IT, and we're mindful of that. Having explicit governance over what our users can do inside those technologies is essential. We hope to see that more over the next few years. We've given a lot of that feedback as customers to UiPath, and they've been working hard to get that into the pipeline and implement those changes.

I have been using UiPath for about six years now.

UiPath can grow with us, especially since they developed a cloud environment. When we started, we had to make many changes in Orchestrator and other areas as we scaled up. We scaled up fast and automated dozens of automations in the first few years. 

However, we found that the default setup for the UiPath Orchestrator in 2018 didn't have all the features we needed to administer it to our customers. We had to build custom solutions in-house, but they've released many new features in UiPath Cloud that simplify management. 

I rate UiPath 10 out of 10. The executive support team and customer success team have been great. All of them play a role, and they're super knowledgeable. If they can't solve your problem, they know who can and connect you with them quickly. We've leveraged them extensively and will use them more over the next couple of years as we finish our cloud implementation. 

There are still many features we don't use, and we constantly go to them for guidance and help on how to use them best and what they've done with other customers. They provide tons of great insight and have a solid network. 

Positive

We didn't have a low-code automation platform. We developed most of our automations using PowerShell. We didn't have citizen developers, but most business users would use Power Automate. Back then, it was known as Flow on the Power Platform. 

Our corporate leadership decided to bring in UiPath. It wasn't an IT decision.  They wanted something they could start using for their daily tasks. They didn't think we had something that could automate things well, and PowerShell is limited from a scripting and API standpoint. They wanted to automate things in SAP, and the APIs and other things are locked down in a custom shop like ours. We can't integrate with our environment in any way we want, so we need something that can interact through the interface. UiPath does that. It can click and type everything through the interface. 

The leadership started the process. IT got involved and supported it. Since then, we've helped it grow throughout the company. It's not just finance anymore. 

The initial setup was complex because UiPath didn't have many pipelines built in. We had to build custom pipelines for the technology we use. It was TFS at the time, and now we use Azure DevOps. I helped with the VDI setup. For unattended automations, you must have a platform or system they can run on. We had looked at doing HDRs—high-density robots—that UiPath. 

Due to applications such as SAP, it couldn't run on a server-side setup. It had to be on a desktop, so we used a VDI for every bot we created, and I helped create the user policies for our accounts and device policies for each VDI. I also set up all the installations and the presets. I helped set up a framework for that over the first year, from 2018 to 2019. We smoothed out the process from there. That was something we had to do on our side. It will be unique for a customer depending on their environment.

We used a partner during the initial setup.

The leadership is pleased with the outcomes. With Insights, we can show them how much time we're saving with each process.  We document savings in hours rather than monetary terms.

I rate UiPath 10 out of 10.

We managed over 500 global tasks worldwide, leveraging UiPath to automate procurement, financial accounting, customer service processes, and customer relations.

We evaluate resumes through the RPA and ChatGPT four. We also arrange service for customers who need repairs to their devices through automation we developed using UiPath.

UiPath enables end-to-end automation. The end-to-end automation is important because it allows us to reduce our testing and reporting time from 28 hours down to 15.

UiPath has helped us shorten the time for our supply chain and revenue report generation. By using UiPath Document Understanding the OCR can read the PDF documents and automatically drop the file into the ERP system significantly reducing our time.

UiPath has streamlined our operations by digitizing our documentation and converting it to easily accessible PDF files. This has significantly reduced our physical footprint, eliminating the need for paper storage and manual document handling.

As a partner of UiPath in our region we are required to take all the Academy courses so we can better service our clients and share our use cases.

We have 1,000 clients around the world, each with unique invoice formatting preferences. Our AI system efficiently sorts these invoices based on their specific formats. By automating more processes through AI, we've significantly improved efficiency. For example, while standard OCR takes a minute to process a PDF invoice, our AI system does it in just two seconds.

UiPath has helped speed up our digital transformation. We have created a large data lake to help with analytics.

We require human verification for the final invoice numbers. Using UiPath the number of human errors has been reduced to one percent.

UiPath has saved ten percent of our employees' time by automating the invoicing process, translating the invoice language, and emailing it to the original user.

UiPath helps save costs. We can keep the license costs down by using one API license to convert all our PDF files into Word.

UiPath is well-suited for automating tasks within Oracle applications and can be deployed on-premises or in the cloud. This flexibility is particularly advantageous when dealing with sensitive data that cannot be migrated to the cloud for security reasons.

UiPath needs to improve its integration with Microsoft products such as Office, SharePoint, and PowerPoint.

I have been using UiPath for two years.

UiPath is stable.

UiPath can scale to our needs.

The technical support is good. We rarely have to use them.

Positive

For general automation needs, we choose Microsoft Power Automate due to its cost-effectiveness compared to UiPath. However, for Oracle-centric automation, where stability is paramount, we rely on UiPath.

The initial deployment was complex. Many settings within the orchestrator need to be set before running a job. Once we implemented UiPath we had our user team keep an eye on it for one month to ensure it was stable, scheduling only attendee jobs before moving onto more complex automation.

In our region, we have a team of 15 to 25 people for the deployments and a smaller team of five in North America.

We implement UiPath in-house.

UiPath is expensive compared to the competition. We pay a license fee that is over 20,000 USD.

We evaluated Automation Anywhere, Power Automate, and UiPath. Automation Anywhere and UiPath are more expensive than Power Automate.

I would rate UiPath a nine out of ten.

We do require the assistance of IT to help increase our digital transformation.

Maintenance is required when updates are made to a process or component. Our team of 25 is responsible for the maintenance as well.

We needed a solution for users that had too many manual tasks. We're in a large bank, and there are tasks like account opening or other items that can be automated using the UiPath system. It can handle auditing as well. 

We've been able to increase productivity time by using UiPath. It saves time and costs. 

Previously we used the classic activity. UiPath modified the activity and it made it easier to do the development and create accurate products for the customers.

It's easy to build automation using UiPath. There are a lot of ways to make an automation, compared to other tools, like Automation Anywhere and Power Automate. It's very flexible. We can use different codes and use Excel modifications. It's very comfortable to use. 

In UiPath, we've developed a developer foundation and developer processes. If there are modifications to what has been done or ideas for new ways to do something, we embrace that. 

We can implement end-to-end automation. It's important for us. We do need to study the process and then create a process that is a better solution. Our users can study the whole process and come up with solutions and best practices for building automation. The best way to do it is to have one person handle the end-to-end automation so that there is no confusion in the process.

The UiPath Community is helpful for users. It's an advantage. It helps share knowledge. We're able to find the best solutions for issues with it. 

We've used the UiPath Academy courses. It helps users to study UiPath: what it is, how to use it, and how to build solutions effectively. It's great for users who want to study and be more confident in the development process. 

It has helped us reduce the cost of digital transformation. When we have more people, we need to pay more salary, and it takes more time. Using UiPath, we can save valuable time and reduce costs. What a man can do in one hour, UiPath can usually do the same task in half the time. 

It reduces human error. Sometimes people aren't in the right mindset. If they are tired, for example, they can make mistakes. However, a bot always does everything the same way. 

I'd like to see the accuracy improved. Sometimes the development works fine. Other times, it requires some small changes in the development. 

They could add enhancements in AI technology that could be helpful for everyday developers. 

I've used the solution for three years. 

The solution is stable for the most part. I'd rate it eight out of ten. Most of the time, it's working fine. However, sometimes we have small problems with the data connection or pushing data. It can be difficult to identify the orchestrated things. 

We have about ten people on our team servicing clients with UiPath bots. There are three senior developers. We have bots across multiple locations. 

I'm unsure if the solution scales well. 

We sometimes have to ask a lot of questions as the accuracy can be missing. When they provide us with a solution, there are options between classic and modern. It might take a while to fix things or if there are issues again and again the customers can sometimes be disappointed. 

Neutral

I've used Microsoft, Automation Anywhere, and Blue Prism. I'm most comfortable with UiPath and Power Automate.

Power Automate is developing a lot of its own solutions right now for Microsoft. I find UiPath more advanced than Power Automate and Automation Anywhere, which don't have as many features. Power Automate is the most comparable to UiPath. 

The main disadvantage to UiPath is the cost, which is really high. 

When we do the deployment, we have to take into account security, et cetera. It concerns us when we're talking about using the cloud. There may be particular processes we cannot do on the cloud. 

One good developer is all you need for maintenance. If you have to update the system or do a modification, we need to update UiPath. So there is maintenance required and a person does need to watch the process. We provide the maintenance.

Currently, our vendors are doing the installation. After it's installed, we provide all of the bots and processes. 

I don't have any metrics in relation to ROI. 

The licensing is very expensive for UiPath. Many clients are going with Power Automate or Automation Anywhere based on the high cost of UiPath. 

We're an end-user of UiPath. 

Currently, we aren't using AI technology in our solution. However, I like the idea of it. We'd maybe be able to resolve redundancies with it in the future. It may be on our roadmap in the future. 

I'd recommend UiPath. It's very accessible. I use a lot of products and this is the best product to give to customers overall. 

I would rate the solution nine out of ten. 

We use UiPath to automate business processes.

We use UiPath Orchestrator and other products in the cloud, but we deploy the robots to our own internal network. The robots are managed by the cloud, but they run within our applications on-premises. The UiPath administration system and configuration are also done in the cloud.

The ease of building autonomous automation depends on the design. In our organization, we have developed a good design that recognizes the business process and the design features. We want to develop it in a way that is easy to follow. If we do this well, it will be easy for the developer to understand what needs to be built. The studio product, which is UiPath's development product, is also a very easy product to use to build the automation.

UiPath enables us to implement end-to-end automation.

They have a large and active user community. If we are a large enough customer, UiPath assigns dedicated account managers, pre-sales staff, and developers to work with us. They also organize community events, such as the one where one of our senior managers was invited to give a keynote speech from a customer perspective on their experience with UiPath. These events are positive and beneficial. UiPath is a large company and is probably one of the top three RPA vendors. As a result, they have a large and active user community.

UiPath has helped us reduce our on-premises infrastructure. We used to have an on-premises administration or orchestration system that consisted of databases and application services. We no longer need that system, as everything is now in the cloud. This is beneficial for managing upgrades, capacity, and costs. UiPath costs us less overall, even though their cloud licenses are slightly more expensive than on-premises licenses.

We use certain UiPath Academy courses to train our developers before they start working on projects. The Academy offers consistent and quick training in all the core elements of UiPath. This saves us time and resources, as we don't have to tie up valuable staff in maintaining training materials or delivering training. The courses are self-paced, so new employees can complete them at their own pace. They are also up-to-date with the latest features of UiPath, ensuring that our developers are always learning the latest skills.

UiPath does not speed up our digital transformation as much as it reduces the cost to a level where we can afford to do our digital transformation. I always consider the RPA solution to be feasible until such time as we can properly transform the business behind the scenes. I refer to it as system automation rather than RPA automation which is a true digital transformation.

It reduces human error by automating repetitive tasks. This means that we no longer have to train people on how to do these tasks, and they can be performed consistently and accurately every time. This is especially important for tasks that require data entry into fields or applications that do not have validation. By automating these tasks, we can avoid the cost of hiring and training people, and we can also reduce the variation in the process. This leads to a more efficient and error-free operation.

UiPath has helped free up our employees' time by automating repetitive tasks that were previously done manually. For example, employees were previously responsible for entering information into multiple systems, which was a time-consuming and error-prone process. UiPath robots can now perform these tasks much more efficiently, freeing up employees to focus on more high-value work. In addition, UiPath has helped us to eliminate the need for some contractors who were previously hired to perform manual data entry tasks. This has saved us money by eliminating those contractor positions. In the last four years, we have used robotic process automation in 90 percent of our processes and fully automated ten percent. This has saved us the equivalent of 200 full-time employees.

We have saved approximately $18 million over the four years we have been using UiPath. These are real savings, as people are no longer doing those tasks. In particular, we have been able to eliminate 100 full-time equivalent contractors. These are hard savings that we can actually measure. UiPath has a tool that allows businesses to identify a process, enter the key steps, and calculate the amount of time spent on those steps. UiPath then magically calculates the potential savings. These savings are real because they are based on the amount of time that people would have spent on those tasks if they were not automated. The results of this analysis are then stored in the Automation Hub tool. This tool allows us to see which high-value processes should be automated first. UiPath is smart enough to tell organizations they don't need to analyze all of the processes themselves. They can let UiPath do it for them. The Automation Hub tool does not go into the details of the design or the automation of the processes. It simply captures the processes that the business has identified as being manual and in need of automation. This gives us a pipeline of work that UiPath can then sell us licenses to automate.

The ability to recognize screen elements and their robot technology are both very valuable features. The ability to recognize the screen element that we want to input or extract data from is very good. It is also very extensive. We also like the way that the unattended mode allows us to run it as a background process on a desktop. We can run these things quite well. UiPath's robot technology is very reliable. 

I see UiPath as a practical product that is trying to achieve end-to-end automation or end-to-end processing. They are playing in this space and bringing their AI connectivity or components into their product. However, I think the only downside is that, as we have seen recently, for some of the processes we have automated, we have documentation on the technical elements that we have automated, but people have forgotten the business rules. UiPath has a task capture product or a process mining product but it could be improved by capturing the business process and then how the automation that we have developed feeds into that overall business process, and making that available to the business so that they know what the business processes are. UiPath does not have a delivery product. For example, when we go into Microsoft DevOps, UiPath does not do that. Once we have identified the process and have coded it in UiPath, there is nothing to tell us about how we deliver that process, and who is assigned to a task to build the components. There is no project management or DevOps delivery pipeline model inside UiPath, so we cannot manage the development.

I have been using UiPath for four years.

UiPath is stable.

UiPath is extremely scalable.

The technical support is excellent.

Positive

The on-premises deployment of UiPath is complex. We had a lot of network issues because we have a secure network architecture. We had to split up our database elements, application server elements, and virtual machines that run the robots. This was complex. High availability was also complex to achieve, as we had to set up load balancing and failover. Finally, upgrading the system was a nightmare. It took forever, and UiPath releases a major release every year. Deploying in the cloud is much more straightforward.

The license cost for UiPath is about $500,000 per year.

I always say that the price of UiPath is too expensive. But if we identify a high-value business process to automate, UiPath becomes a very cost-effective product. A robot license costs $6,000 USD per year, or $10,000 NZD. This is about one month's salary for one person. If we can automate a process that would otherwise require ten people, the investment in UiPath will pay for itself quickly.

We evaluated Automation Anywhere and Blue Prism before deciding on UiPath. We are a large organization and can afford the cost of UiPath, but it was more about the functionality of the product at the time. UiPath consistently ranked ahead of the others in terms of functionality, according to Gartner and Everest. I believe we made a wise choice. It is also easier to get developers for UiPath because of their Academy.

I would rate UiPath nine out of ten.

UiPath's AI functionality can be used to help developers build automation processes, but it can be expensive. We use the open-source TensorFlow technology from Google, which is the same technology that UiPath uses. Our developers are willing to build and manage this technology themselves, which is a cost-effective solution. However, if we use UiPath's AI functionality, it will be managed by them.

I am an architect. I have worked as an integration architect, infrastructure architect, and network architect. When I first saw UiPath, I thought it was just for scripting the front end, but it is much more powerful than that. I really like it because it allows me to find slow, expensive, and inefficient business processes and automate them. This can lead to real savings for the business. With traditional applications, there is often a business case that needs to be made before the application is built. But with RPA, we can see the savings every day. For example, if we automate a process that used to take ten full-time employees, we can see that we are saving ten FTEs every day. I enjoy using UiPath because it is a real solution within IT that can drive out real costs from the business.

I recommend that those who want to use UiPath do not treat it like any other IT system. Do not simply implement it and expect it to be of high value. The most important thing is to understand the business well enough to use the tool to its full potential. In other words, automate high-value or high-benefit processes.

I've worked in two organizations where I have used UiPath. The first organization was in banking and we used UiPath to help automate banking and financial forms. The second organization, the one I am currently working for, is a technology company with several sub-companies that include banking/financial, the hotel sector, and some overseas organizations. In this organization, we automate tasks that are repetitive, as well as reconciliations.

The main advantage is that we've synchronized our process across 70 sub-branches covering the entire island of Sri Lanka. Previously, we had three or four employees manually inputting the user entries for the various branches. We eliminated those positions so that data entry is now done by robots and performed in the head office.

We have multiple robots directing all of the data to the robot platform in the head office. We saw value within six months. That's how long it took to eliminate the positions. We stopped recruiting people who had previously done that task. More tasks remain, but the main use case was realized within six months.

The APIs are helpful in our workflow. We have a separate application for the government sector, and the Sri Lankan government provides that API. It's a matter of due diligence because we get the customer information, like the national identity card number. We use the API to exchange that information.

We get quick information about existing loans, including how they perform and whether the borrower is paying on time. If they are red, it means that the payments aren't being made in that period of time. That is the kind of information that is exchanged with the API. We can process 20 or 30 users every minute through the API on average.

Previously, our staff onboarding involved a large number of hard-copy documents—around 50. We have automated what was a long manual process, using automation to go through the documents to create a customized onboarding process, one that includes the government regulatory platforms that we are required to use. We used to have to store those documents in an archive, taking up our storage capacity. With UiPath's OCR platform, we get the information we need to do the task. That has resulted in huge savings for the organization, including environmental savings in terms of trees used for paper. It has also saved a lot of the human effort involved in verifying data in those documents.

In our previous process, the documentation was written entirely by humans, including data entry. That data entry was a critical point but there was a lot of human error. That has been reduced by 85 to 90 percent. In my current organization, we have automated about 70 processes and the amount of employee time saved depends on the process. For example, one of our automated processes has saved eight hours for one FTE, while another has saved 10 FTEs two hours each.

And we have done an end-to-end automation for an insurance platform, for renewals. There is no human touch at all.

UiPath has also helped us to reduce our on-prem footprint, compared to our previous platform. In our previous model, we worried a lot about our data. But with UiPath in the cloud, could our entire database be somewhere else, meaning not in our custody? A few years back, UiPath introduced governance and audit platforms, and that's when we felt that it was okay and that we didn't need on-prem platforms anymore. It was okay, at that point, to go for a cloud platform. We are migrating our on-prem platform to the cloud now.

UiPath Orchestrator is incredibly useful. It's the main dashboard platform we use. Orchestrator provides a single platform where we can connect with legacy systems and manage all the bots. 

Orchestrator lets us see the entire process across various department units so that they can see the separate tenants and units. The application can multi-task to handle processes even when we have a long queue. If the queue is piling up, we can assign multiple robots to clear the queue quickly. We can find the ETA for the queues and everything inside Orchestrator.

The Studio and development boards are also helpful.

The UiPath community staff is the best I have ever seen. I have worked in several communities, not only in RPA platforms but for other tools, but the UiPath community is the best. I am an active member of the community. If someone has a question, we always look after it there and are very happy to help them.

The UiPath Academy is very useful as well. My colleagues and I are always going through the new features that are available for our automation and new developments. We always keep in touch with the Academy.

Previous Orchestrator versions were very user-friendly for the admins and the users, but the new Orchestrator is a bit advanced. If they could reduce its complexity, to something more like what it used to be like, it would be better.

Also, if they can improve the performance of robots, that would be good. 

I have been using UiPath for more than five years.

There are no issues with the stability.

It is scalable and very easy to scale but, again, that comes back to the pricing.

UiPath scales easily, but scaling for the cloud and on-premises versions is different. For the on-premises solution, we need to add new licenses to scale up. But it's easy in terms of scalability on our end.

Support can be divided into two tiers: enterprise users and community users. Enterprise users like us get high priority because we are dealing with live operations and customers. When we raise a ticket, we have options like critical and onsite support. They reply in one or two hours, or in less than 30 minutes if it's critical. Their technical support is very helpful and the ticketing platform is very good.

We also get a fast response for non-technical customer service issues.

I hope their support can be developed because when there is a difficult case, sometimes it seems that it's a new issue for them as well. I have experienced that. That should be improved a bit. Overall, support is very good, but there is room for a bit of improvement.

Positive

We didn't have an automation solution previously. As a developer, there are lots of costs in our country associated with switching to automation. There weren't other solutions that could integrate our entire operation like UiPath. I don't think it was possible to select another one.

As a user and an administrator, I can manage the entire server from the main controller. I know everything that UiPath is doing. I also can't think of another solution that has the same broad user community.

UiPath runs Orchestrator and the application in the cloud, but our robots work on-prem in our data center.

In my previous organization, I deployed UiPath, but when I got there I didn't even know what UiPath was. Fortunately, they have nice documentation on the UiPath website, step-by-step. I followed that and was able to deploy things. Since then, I have helped several organizations, via the UiPath community, to deploy Orchestrator within two or three hours. If they have completed the relevant prerequisites, it can be done in that amount of time for a standard installation.

We had a detailed plan in place that progressed in phases. In phase one, we eliminated the data entry function in the main office and the branches. In phase two we would optimize our existing processes. Once all the automation is finished in the head office, we optimize those head office processes.

We have seen significant cost savings throughout the company. Before we started to use UiPath in 2019, we had three or four people doing data entry in every branch. It has eliminated human data entry and also frees up our cashiers because the cashier cannot go anywhere when the queue is long.

We calculated what we have spent for our entire RPA platform and what our ROI is. Our calculations showed that after one and a half years, we had recouped our entire spend on the RPA platform. That included the entire robot cost, servers, the software license, et cetera. That means we had ROI after 18 months.

When it comes to unattended robots, the cost for us in Sri Lanka is huge. It's tricky for us to convince management when they think about the price. We have to prove the value with evidence. We explain that we will save this or that amount, so please help us with this tool. 

Maybe for Middle Eastern or other countries, the price of that robot is not a big deal, but roughly $10,000 for an unattended robot is a very big deal for us. 

They are switching their licensing from a legacy mode to flex licensing. With that kind of license, they have given up a certain fee, which is okay, but the robot cost is high. Orchestrator is now free on the cloud platform, but we need UiPath Studio, the developer platform, as well as attended and unattended robots, and those are the things we pay for. The unattended robots are the highest priced. On a scale where one represents the most expensive and 10 is cheapest, I would rate UiPath at about two.

We have looked at several automation platforms. We have done several demos and looked at the price of Automation Anywhere and Blue Prism. But they are more complex than UiPath.

If you consider other applications, like Blue Prism and Automation Anywhere, the UiPath platform is better because it's user-friendly, making it easy to get tasks done. Even for a beginning developer, it's easy to catch up with all the stuff in UiPath.

UiPath has noticed that I'm an active contributor, so they contacted me to get feedback and invite me to build the community. If I check my LinkedIn profile, I can see all the things I've done in the UiPath community. I don't see that with the Automation Anywhere platform.

If I don't know how to do something, I can watch one video and learn everything I need to know. If we post a question on the forum, we get an answer in one or two minutes from another user.

We have several use cases. We're a telecommunications company. We use it for anything from order entry, design, activation, and interactions with technicians within our field. We really have an end-to-end solution.

We are using Studio, Orchestrator, and unattended bots.

It is deployed on-premise but on our own cloud.

We had a long-time situation where we were sending technicians to the fields unnecessarily, because they couldn't install the service. So, we worked through a process to wake up devices. We used RPA to implement it. 

With downsizing, we have been able to automate a lot of this space, so we can downsize and still function as a company.

Capitalize on the unattended automation, as there are a lot of different methods to evoke and schedule it. You can email it, trigger it via API bots or Orchestrator. There are a lot of different methods you can use. We don't really do a whole lot of attended. Not that we wouldn't at some point, but unattended is nice because it's out of sight and out of mind. Set it up and let it go.

We are the first company to bring UiPath Academy in-house on the 30th of September. When we signed our licensing agreement, we added it in our own LMS. So, we have that connection and everything else. We love it. We've implemented all of their modules: RPA Starter, all three of the development courses, Solution Architect, Business Analyst, and Build a Bot. It's super exciting. It's one of the best things that we've done. I would rate it a five out of five.

We now have a functionality that is being released for web forms. It's more for attended. I would like to have these web forms exposed in Orchestrator to be able to trigger a bot externally. I know we have partners that provide similar functionality. I would like to have that same functionality where you could deploy a form, but instead of having it pop up on somebody's desktop, they could go through a URL through Orchestrator and trigger the bots via a web interface. This is instead of having to be tied down to an attended bot.

For some of the Insights stuff, we have found that you have to be flexible on measuring your ROI. You have to be able to customize some of that because it's not as cut and dry as you think it is. 

I would look for the audits on the back-end. Performance-wise, make sure that it is still performing. 

I would rate the stability as a four (out of five), but some of it could have been us too. 

An overabundance of logging that we created crashed the SQL Server. We had to adjust and restructure the way we were doing all of our logging to prevent that from happening again. Ever since then, it has pretty much been fine. 

We have had issues with upgrades. However, from a normal day-to-day functionality perspective, it is pretty stable.

Right now, we have about 150 developers. Then, we have engineers and process analysts.

We have 400 automations on average and 1000 in the pipeline.

It's been fantastic. It doesn't matter what time of day or anything else. We get top-notch service.

It has been about our contacts and support team. They look at us, and say, "You guys want to do what?" Then, they stand behind us and help us get it done.

We had merging companies coming together with a lot of integration going on. With integration, there are multiple teams, processes, and systems. To keep up for our reduced expenses, we had to do it. This was another tool in the toolbox for us: automation.

It took us eight weeks from initial purchase to the first bot to be put into production. It took about two weeks for assessment and documentation, then another six weeks to develop and deploy it. The bot that we developed was complex. It wasn't super simple. We've done simpler, but that time frame was about average for us.

We did the deployment ourselves, but we had the premium support. So, we did have some support from UiPath. However, everything that we did, we did on our own.

ROI was almost instant. We measured everything from deployment. We measured our successes. We do audits once a month. ROI was pretty much from deployment. We don't audit anything in the first 30 days because there is a lot of settling in, some bumps, and, "Oh, we missed this step." For the most part, within 30 days, we were realizing and managing expectations on benefits.

We're really only measuring handling time right now, which is defined by our business clients. They define what handling time we are trying to define, then the measure of success. That's what we measure ourselves on.

We're probably in the tens of thousands of hours that we have saved, easily.

Because we have so many agents, that's why we went unattended. Attended was very expensive for us because it's a per person license. Where we can take entire workflows, do the triggering and scheduling, etc. We never have to have any human interaction with unattended.

We have a cost model for operating expense savings. It is usually about $100,000 to $125,000 and takes us six weeks to develop and implement. That's development, testing, and implementation. We do code reviews on everything. That does not include all the documentation, assessment, etc.

We just signed a very large perpetual agreement. So, we had 125 Studios and 1200 unattended licenses. We paid $3.7 million. Then, we paid maintenance costs for the next three years, which was 15 percent of that.

We evaluated Automation Anywhere, Blue Prism, Pega, and UiPath.

Scalability was probably the number one that we went with UiPath. Scalability, the ease of use of the software, and the existing functionality that was there were the main reasons. There is a lot more out-of-the-box in terms of embedded functions that were there at the time when we did our analysis. It seemed like UiPath was really on the cutting edge. They were more proactively implementing good features, where others that we were talking with seemed like they were behind in that perspective. 

We'd rather stay on the cutting edge with technology instead of having to wait for our partner to get caught up.

Obviously, there are cheaper options than UiPath.

I'm really excited about the new stuff. There is great new stuff. We wish we would've had this stuff a year ago because we had to build some of it in-house. We are really excited about the Explorer and process mining.

I would rate the ease of use of the platform for automating our company’s processes as a three and a half to four out of five (where five is the easiest). It depends on the skill set of the developer. If you are a developer with a .NET background, then it will be a lot easier for more of the customization. For the technology overall, it is easy to automate our processes.

We run our automations in the virtual environments, like Citrix. We struggled a bit with Citrix at first, because our infrastructure and systems are somewhat antiquated.

Nobody is perfect. I would rate UiPath as a nine (out of 10).

Initially, we used task-based swivel-chair automation to fix our broken technological footprint. It was common for us to use three applications for one process. Now, we're moving toward larger digital transformation use cases. We use UiPath for Document Understanding, and we're still waiting for our insurance company to approve generative AI. 

Our executives define our AI and automation strategy, which is devolved to our department leaders and employees to determine tasks they don't like doing that we can digitize. Our initial goal was to improve operational efficiency, which we've achieved. 

Action Center is used extensively for digital transformation purposes. The shift from using Excel to bots, providing precise human work, is highly valuable.

We realized significant time savings across three business areas, totaling several thousand hours. Our benchmark process was automating the manual processing of credit card chargebacks. Fully automating this process not only saved us time but also millions of dollars.

The impact on stakeholders has varied. Some segments have leaned into using UiPath. For example, there's a high level of RPA penetration in wholesale. Employees in wholesale have incorporated automation into their applications as critical functions. In other business areas, they're bringing us small, task-based automations that don't impact clients much. They're usually secondary automations that help teammates who work directly with clients.

UiPath has freed staff to work on other projects consistently across multiple lines of business. The amount saved depends on the department. Some areas of the business save hundreds of hours, but the impact is smaller in others.

Some of the biggest areas of improvement are already being addressed. We're looking forward to the healing agent because we see a lot of UI migration because of our broken technological footprint. 

I have used UiPath since 2020.

UiPath is incredibly stable. Any issues we've had were on our side. We needed to add enough VDIs to support the digital infrastructure. Those have been resolved by adding more blade servers.

I have been able to scale up, showing no issues during the installation of new blade servers.

I rate UiPath support nine out of 10. 

Positive

We used Blue Prism. 

Our licensing is generally pretty good for our contract.

We evaluated Automation Anywhere. The decision came down to costs and capabilities. UiPath could do some things that AA couldn't.

I rate UiPath eight out of 10.