What is our primary use case?
Our primary use case for UiPath is the automation of some of our processes. The main departments that have been affected are accounts payable and accounts receivable.
We are developing expertise internally. At least for the first year, we worked with an outside consultancy to provide us UiPath development. They were working with the business team here closely, but also helping to train our people.
The main parts that we've got are in the area of invoice automation, but we also have some bots that deal with the automation of some of our engineering applications within Oracle.
We run six bots, primarily dealing with invoice automation from our suppliers. That is working in conjunction with Abbyy. So, part of the process is UiPath and part of it is Abbyy FlexiCapture. We also have some engineering applications in Oracle that we also use it for. Examples of this are updating bills of materials, or printing out invoices.
The key savings and kind of the real business case of the project were to do with invoice automation.
How has it helped my organization?
UiPath allows us to implement end-to-end automation. We utilize the Task Capture functionality for some of the initial parts. Then, building the bots is done with Studio, and Orchestrator is used for monitoring. It's complete, end-to-end automation.
The invoice reconciliation has been very useful. We now process 80% of our invoices automatically, of which 80% of those get no human contact. The remaining 20% of the ones that are automatically processed are either exceptions or they are certain expense items or the price doesn't match up. In this case, there's some human intervention, but we are getting a high percentage of things going through automatically.
This automation has enabled us to move some headcounts into different, higher value-adding activities instead. We have freed up approximately 10 full-time employees by using UiPath. We didn't let anybody go. Rather, they've been moved into other more creative roles.
What is most valuable?
The most valuable feature of UiPath is its usability. It's very easy to understand. I think in general, some parts of the process were difficult to grasp, and there were challenges along the way. But now at this more mature part, it's definitely increased employee satisfaction. People have been able to move into higher value-added, more enjoyable tasks.
We've got a group of citizen developers that work on UiPath. These are people that weren't developers but given a bit of training and its ease of use, they have been able to utilize it.
Both members of my team and I have used the UiPath Academy, and the training has been really good. It has enabled us to utilize the citizen developer approach. It is because of the conciseness and quality of the teaching that we have been able to employ citizen developers. We didn't really envision that as something that was possible, but given the ease and usability of the tool and the quality of the training, that's been possible for us.
UiPath has definitely helped to reduce human error. The main process that has gone through automation is the accounts payable process. Now, some of our suppliers may offer discounts and stuff like that. So, it's reduced the time for us to get things into the system. We've got increased visibility, and we've reduced the number of people working on this process, ultimately meaning cost savings as well.
What needs improvement?
The one negative that this solution has is its reporting. I found it a bit confusing because it was suggested to us that we use Elastic and Kibana for reporting. To me, this seems a little bit fragmented. I understand that UiPath has the Insights feature, but it wasn't what they recommended for us and I think the reason is that it isn't powerful enough for what we want to do. Ideally, we should not have to utilize other tools for reporting.
When it comes to speeding up our process, it has not made any impact. This is because the licensing and agreement part is quite time-consuming. Where we may have wanted to scale up quicker, we've been limited by signing contracts or getting things moving in that regard. As such, it's not really sped up our procurement process or enabled us to scale as quickly as we'd like when we wanted to.
We scale up some parts of the system quicker and we were seeing large delays in processing some of the documents that we wanted. This problem was that we didn't have the hardware or software ready for us to scale. So, in that regard, we've not found the ability to scale beneficial.
The error handling is in need of improvement. We'd had a problem tracking when errors occur, and troubleshooting how things are captured in production.
For how long have I used the solution?
I have been working with UiPath for between 18 months and two years.
What do I think about the stability of the solution?
My impressions of the stability are largely positive. However, I'd like to see more emphasis placed on error handling for production.
What do I think about the scalability of the solution?
With respect to scalability, I'd like to see it be made more fluid. It was a bit slow for us to be able to scale. If it was more elastic or there was a different way of billing it instead of having to sign up we had to sign up for a year-long license, it would have been useful. It wasn't that we minded the length of the contract or the cost. Rather, it meant that there were contracts that had to be signed, etc.
With the processes that have already been implemented now finished, we're actively looking at where else it can be deployed. There is even interest from the executive team. They would like to see it used further.
How are customer service and support?
UiPath has an active community but we've not really engaged with them very much. When we were in need of help, we contacted support and our account executives, but not the community.
The technical support has been really useful. I would rate them a ten out of ten.
In general, they've been very responsive, and easy to get them on a call if required. I've been really happy with the SLAs they've provided to us.
How would you rate customer service and support?
Which solution did I use previously and why did I switch?
This was our first RPA implementation.
How was the initial setup?
The initial setup was fairly straightforward. As we are using the on-premises solution, we've had to invest in additional hardware.
What about the implementation team?
We used a consultant to assist us with our deployment. We definitely found it beneficial because it gave us experience. We didn't have any experience with RPA, and they helped us to get off the ground and provided some best practices.
There are three members of our team that are responsible for bot deployment and maintenance. One is a UiPath developer, another is a support developer, and the third is a business analyst.
What was our ROI?
We have definitely seen a return on investment.
UiPath has helped to both speed up and reduce the cost of our digital transformation. Compared to traditional automation approaches, it's been a lot quicker and less costly to implement. It very minorly affected us in terms of needing IT support. For example, we've had to work with our Oracle applications team, as well as our infrastructure team, in getting some of those parts set up. Overall, I've not found it to be burdensome.
UiPath has definitely saved on costs for the organization. I think that initially, there was some skepticism. Obviously, there were significant implementation costs but now, we're definitely seeing the fruits of that.
Our total savings at the moment is between 50,000 and 100,000 per year.
What's my experience with pricing, setup cost, and licensing?
The licensing fees are billed annually.
Which other solutions did I evaluate?
The company evaluated Automation Anywhere and Microsoft Power Automate before choosing UiPath. I can't speak to the pros and cons of the different options because the decision was made just before I became involved.
What other advice do I have?
Overall, in terms of ease of building automation, our experience has been positive.
UiPath has features available for attended automation, although all of our automations are unattended. Similarly, we don't yet use the solution's AI functionality but it's something that we're really interested in starting to use.
My advice for anybody who is looking into implementing this product is to ensure that the processes they want to automate are standard and standardized. That was a key barrier that we realized, and it delayed things for us by quite a bit.
I would rate this solution an eight out of ten.
Which deployment model are you using for this solution?
On-premises
Disclosure: PeerSpot contacted the reviewer to collect the review and to validate authenticity. The reviewer was referred by the vendor, but the review is not subject to editing or approval by the vendor.