UiPath Reviews

My primary use case with UiPath is to automate workflows for processes in web-based applications, such as email and Excel automation. We also use it as a task or workflow management tool, capable of assigning tasks, checking on the status of tasks, and more.

Another thing that I have been doing with UiPath is replacing repetitive tasks performed within the organization. Automating such tasks makes the related process smoother and faster. 

We are using the UiPath automation cloud offering, which is a SaaS solution. One advantage to this type of environment is that we can get updates instantly. If it were an on-premises or hybrid model then the setup and maintenance take time, but this isn't the case with a SaaS model. This instant setup is what we needed because it made for a smooth transition from manual processes to automation. 

With respect to building automations, UiPath is a pretty straightforward platform. The major reason that we choose to implement UiPath is the interface that it provides, which boosts the usefulness of the entire platform. If we need assistance then there are many knowledge base documents available. There is also in-app help, which makes it very easy to understand and start using it.

I was able to learn how to use it within a week, which shows how easy it is. For example, it does not require a lot of coding. It's more of a drag-and-drop interface, making it easier to develop programs and automate processes.

UiPath enables us to implement end-to-end automation, and it has completely replaced the manual processes that we were using. This includes analyzing the process and implementing automation to collect the data. Data fetching is done using the robots that we create.

Since implementing UiPath, we have experienced better retention of our users. This is because we have been able to make our process much smoother, as well as quicker. Consequently, we have been able to deliver at a much faster pace. This has enhanced the customer experience and in turn, has improved customer satisfaction. Overall, we have seen an increase of about 30% in terms of user retention. This has translated to increasing revenue.

With respect to automating our processes, automation has reduced our manual efforts by more than 70%. This means that we are able to concentrate more on other aspects of our business. The business is growing because we are able to do things like work on our website, customer engagement, and customer relations.

UiPath has taken care of most of the backend work for us, which is a good bonus. It has reduced our investment in manpower by about 50% and decreased our overall output time by more than 70%.

Automation has definitely reduced the rate of human error when compared to our previous, manual processes. At this point, there is minimal to zero human error. I estimate that approximately one hundred percent of human error has been eliminated.

Implementing this product definitely helps speed the process of digital transformation, and reduces its cost as well. One of the goals of our organization is to completely digitize. We want to optimize everything so that employees can focus more on the customer relationship aspect, building more value for our brand. UiPath has definitely helped in improving the overall process.

Our digital transformation did not require any external support for third-party application software. It's an in-built process and we did not need anything extra.

The specific feature I like is folder organization, and it is in the Orchestrator tenant. This is very useful because it keeps all of my folders and data in a centralized tenant.

The menu options are easily accessible in the Orchestrator tenant, which is something that I like very much.

The UiPath Academy was pretty helpful for us in the initial stages. We were able to learn more about the software and what is there. They also provide courses and certifications, which assist with learning and getting employees up to speed.

It took only a week for me to completely get a handle on the software. Taking the initial training and certification courses is a hassle-free process. It is not difficult to induct somebody and have them start using the product.

The courses that they offer provide hands-on experience, and I think that it's a good initiative that they are taking on by doing so. It helps to ease the learning curve and allowed us to learn more about the world of automation.

UiPath has a user community that is very knowledgeable and friendly. Our peers in the UiPath community are able to dumb down responses to a beginner's level of experience, regardless of what queries we have put forth. Whatever we have wanted to do with RPA, they have been able to help. We now have a good level of comfort in terms of interacting with our peers in the community.

We have experience with other communities and have found that the discussions are generally at a higher level, which may be too difficult for a new person that is just starting out with the product.

Generally speaking, I like the features that I am using and I could not really say where improvement is needed in that respect.

The product could be made a little less glitchy. Specifically, when too many users are working at the same time, it hangs a little bit here and there.

In a future release, I would like to see drag-and-drop functionality in the robot creation process within Orchestrator. As of now, it is not available there. It would be helpful because from there, it is easy to create a process flow. Instead of switching between multiple menus and multiple tabs, we can do it from the Orchestrator or the main menu.

I have been using UiPath for approximately a year and a half.

I would rate the stability an eight out of ten. Sometimes, when the load is high or there are many users working at the same time, or when I'm working on different parts at the same time, it lags a little bit. There is a slight drop in performance.

Otherwise, it's very stable and secure software.

Using the automation cloud offering has meant that scaling up automations has been very smooth for us. We started out with between 40 and 50 users working on this particular tool, and now it's between 150 and 170 users.

There are two levels of roles; admin roles and user roles. The admin role is able to assign and approve tasks, using the task management module. Regular users are able to perform all of the other functions.

It is definitely a scalable solution, being cloud-based and SaaS. It is also very customizable. Customizability is the unique selling point (USP) for this particular product, given the number of customizations that are available and the number of features that can be added.

The technical support staff is brilliant. They are very knowledgeable and very quick when it comes to addressing our queries. They don't ask us to wait for long when we have a problem, and we normally have a resolution within hours.

There is also a community forum that helps us to deal with problems ourselves, without the dependence on the technical support team.

I would rate the technical support a ten out of ten.

Positive

We did not use another RPA solution prior to UiPath. Before this, we were doing everything manually.

I was not involved in the initial setup and deployment.

As we opted to implement the cloud-based model, the maintenance on our part is minimal. We just have to update the software from time to time. The amount of maintenance that we perform is not only easy but saves a lot of time for our IT team.

The team of people for maintenance consists of six or seven junior IT staff. They perform the updates and nothing more.

Using the automation cloud offering has helped to decrease our time to value. An example of where we saw the benefits of this solution was with an Excel automation that we created. This process involves an Excel worksheet that contains between 20,000 and 30,000 records. We had to manually search for particular records, and the process to approximately a week to complete. Now, with UiPath, the same process is completed within a couple of minutes. 

Once we signed up with UiPath, we instantly saw growth in our entire business. It was a win-win situation. 

The additional time has enabled our employees to focus on higher-value work, such as R&D, customer engagement, and improving our brand. It also has an effect on employees' satisfaction, specifically, mine.

A lot of time spent doing repetitive and redundant work is something that was irritating me a lot. Now that the automation is in place, I just have to set up the workflow. It has definitely increased my overall morale and satisfaction. 

One of the downsides to UiPath is the cost of the enterprise version. It is a little bit on the higher side.

UiPath's cloud offering is a centralized, all-in-one platform. It saves money because you don't have to invest as much in other software, and it's cheaper than some solutions because you don't have to maintain the platform or the database. However, because it's not cheap, the overall cost reduction is not drastic at first. Taking a holistic view, it does because overall, it will reduce costs.

There is also a Community Edition that can be used free of charge. This is an option for users that find the price to be high. One main differentiating factor with the Community Edition is the number of updates. There are fewer in the Community Edition.

Also, the support offered for the Community Edition is not as quick. People will not have a great user experience. However, it is important to remember that in terms of cost, the Enterprise Edition is a little bit pricey for small and medium-scale enterprises. 

About a month ago, we started using the AI functionality of the software to design robots and processes. At this point, we are looking to use AI for our internal applications.

One example is that we are working on security-related automation that triggers an alert when somebody inserts or removes an external hard disk from a system. Taking advantage of the AI capabilities has helped us to maintain a much safer work environment, in terms of data security.

The AI functionality has definitely enabled us to automate more processes. A lot of manual work and redundant work has been reduced. Also, the number of errors that we had occurring during our manual processes has been greatly reduced.

This solution has definitely helped to free up employee time. Tasks that used to take approximately a week, now take just 30 or 40 minutes. This is a lot of time saved, which allows us to concentrate more on other aspects of the business. For example, improved customer engagement has resulted in gathering more leads. Also, we have more time for R&D.

I estimate that we are saving approximately five hours per day, so 20 hours per week, per employee. In addition to the areas that we have more time to concentrate on, it has helped improve the value of our brand overall.

My advice for anybody who is looking into implementing this product is that it's a must. This is the go-to software that I would recommend for anybody looking to automate their business in a smooth and efficient manner.

Cost, of course, is something that has to be considered but if they can afford this solution then they should implement it. It has a wide variety of features and functionalities, which are market fit and market ready. 

I would rate this solution a nine out of ten.

We have a web application, and we also have iOS and Android applications. We are automating the regression testing part for these applications. Mainly, we are navigating and interacting with UI elements, and we are verifying certain buttons. We are also verifying certain data with RDBMS outputs.

UiPath enables us to implement end-to-end automation, starting with process analysis, then robot building, and finally monitoring of automations. UiPath has been doing well in terms of Orchestrator and how we can see the execution and the reports and results of our test cases. It is doing well in these aspects, which is very important for us. We are doing end-to-end automation and monitoring using Orchestrator, and it is quite useful. This is something that we were looking for while deciding on the automation tool that we would like to go with, and that's why we decided to go with UiPath.

It has been helpful for regression testing. We are developing a big web application, and we are expecting changes every quarter. The development and deployment have been going on every quarter for the past two years. Previously, we had a team of seven or eight people who were doing the manual testing. By automating the testing, we have reduced the team's size to half. The remaining team members are not just analyzing the executions that we are doing with UiPath; they are also providing support. It has increased employee satisfaction because they don't have to do repetitive work again and again. It has been quite good.

It has been useful for unattended automation, and it has also reduced human errors in our organization. Reduction in human errors is the best benefit that we have got from the UiPath implementation.

Automation is most valuable. When it comes to web automation, data scraping and UI-related activities, such as the Find Element activity, are quite useful.

UiPath Academy courses have also been very useful. Whenever we have to work on something new, I go to UiPath Academy and browse all the resources that they have provided. When I started working with OCR about two or three months back, I used UiPath Academy courses. They are very helpful, especially for new people who join the team. New associates need exposure to the tools that we are using, and the content that is present in UiPath Academy is quite good. It gives them an idea about the tool and the things that they can do with it. UiPath Academy has been quite helpful in training new associates.

UiPath is developing day by day, and there are certain products, such as AI Fabric, that UiPath has launched lately. These products are quite new to most of us in the RPA industry. Because there are courses available for these products in UiPath Academy, we are able to get an idea about a tool, its capabilities, and how to use it.

There is a big room for improvement when it comes to mobile automation. The Find Element activity is not present in mobile automation. There are activities to extract data, but we don't have data scraping in mobile automation. These activities are available for UI automation of web applications, but they are not available for mobile automation, which is a drawback when working on mobile automation with UiPath.

There are also so many bugs in mobile automation. I've been working with mobile automation for the past six months, and in the past six months, I have found so many bugs. We have reported them to UiPath. Some of them are posted on the forum, and I haven't seen any positive feedback in terms of whether a bug has been created or they are working on improvement. So far, there is nothing like that. 

There is also a bug related to the Pick Branch activity, and we can't really work with the UI elements in this particular activity. This issue was first reported by someone in 2019, and this post is available in the forum. It has been more than two years, and this bug has not been fixed. 

For mobile automation, there is a tool provided by UiPath called Mobile Device Management (MDM). We do the automation using that tool. In our project, we are using cloud APM services. UiPath Studio communicates with MDM, and MDM communicates with Sauce Labs, which is the cloud APM service provider for us. There is a huge gap in the synchronization of both of them. I have observed a visible difference. When I execute an app activity, it gets executed at Sauce Labs very fast. The final output that we should be getting first comes to MDM and then UiPath takes that output from the MDM, but there is a synchronization gap. There is a visible difference, and UiPath is lacking in this part. So, mobile automation is the part where UiPath can improve a lot.

I've been working with UiPath for almost two years. I'm into development, and I have worked on Excel automation, mobile automation, and web automation.

I don't have any opinion on its scalability at this time. In terms of its usage, we have to create 2,000 automations for our client, and we have already implemented more than 1,000. We don't run those automations every day. We run them as per the requirements, so there would be 200 to 400 processes once a week.

In my project, there are five people who are working with UiPath, but in my company, there are many more people. One of them is the manager, and four of them are working on development. 

There have been some bugs for which we connected with UiPath support. It was a mixed experience. There were some technical support experts with whom we connected, and they tried to get to the root of the trouble. They did their best to provide us with the best solution possible. We have also had other scenarios where there was no answer or explanation for the issue. We didn't get any positive feedback from them.

I had posted a few queries related to mobile automation on the UiPath community, but there was no instant solution. I was expecting a reply within one or two days, but there was no reply. Because this is a niche field, there are not many people working in this domain, but I got replies from the UiPath team on some of the queries. So, overall, the experience was good. I would rate them a six out of 10.

I was not involved in its setup.

It reduces the cost of digital transformation in a way. When it comes to the scenario of our automation, UiPath isn't so fast, and there is the speed issue that UiPath can fix, but because a bot has the capability of working 24/7, there is a reduction in the cost of digital transformation.

We evaluated Blue Prism. We didn't explore Automation Anywhere. After comparing it with Blue Prism, we decided to go with UiPath. As per our client's requirement, there were three applications to be automated, and because UiPath supported web automation and mobile automation for iOS and Android, we went for UiPath. We just had to buy the license for one, and we could automate all three applications.

Rather than implementing RPA on a big scale, I would advise starting at a small scale and doing good process task mining. It is very important to identify the right process to automate.

UiPath is quite an impressive tool. It was the first tool that I started learning when I got into RPA. Recently, I got familiarized with Automation Anywhere. I used to think that Automation Anywhere is better because it is on the cloud, but now that I know that UiPath also has a cloud option, I'm going to explore that option. It is a good solution, and UiPath is doing well when it comes to the improvement of the product. My experience is good overall.

We have not used AI-enhanced Document Understanding in our automation program. We are planning to implement it, but it may take a while.

I would rate it an eight out of 10.

We are on-prem within the insurance industry. Our use cases are in auto reports and micro use cases within that.

The biggest benefit we see from UiPath is the overall platform. It's not only the functionalities. As we started tying that all together in the platform view, with the orchestration forms and the workflow function, it'll be key, because it's been around in the industry for 20 years, but hasn't been tied to everything. 

It saves us costs but that's only one part of it. We are looking at it in terms of employee centricity, customer centricity, reducing the risk, and improving the accuracy. There's a multitude of factors that we are looking at.

We have seen a reduction in human error using UiPath. We are an audit firm at heart. We do a lot of audit and tax work, which is all related. Within use cases in those spaces, we see a change in terms of accuracy. It eliminates manual errors. Instead of just looking at 20% or 30% of the big picture, you can look at 100 of it because it's automated. 

The most valuable feature is the fluidity of the products. When I want to use RPA, I can use RPA. When I want to do process mining, I can do process mining. Those are the two top that I typically use it for. 

Building automations is easy. It's drag and drop. If you are a developer and want the full functionality, you can actually dive into it at a little bit more of an API level.

We use the Academy. I am the training and certification lead for our UI group of 200 practitioners. It's probably the only group in your partner community that's 100% certified. We are tied in into your training and certification piece and we are using and reusing the licenses to make sure that we are pushing out the updates from the platform through the training store.

Our training and certification programs are still gaining maturity. We recently signed the USN Certification with UiPath, which gives us access to brochures and AP credits. It makes it a little bit more formal because the process was there, but it was very informal. We were exchanging emails, but now it's tied together with the workflow. It's getting there. 

The breadth of the courses is the most valuable aspect of the Academy. This is my third year doing this. There has been an increase in courses being offered. 

The path forward is probably to tie this all together in a platform and look at the workflow automation. At this point, we are doing snapshot automation, point solution, and staff automations. The term RPA itself is a misnomer, it never was a robotic process, it was robotic task automation. We are automating tasks and the way to get away from that is to look at process level automation end-to-end. That won't be done with RPA tools, it has to be with the workflow tools. How do we tie in and how do we tie into, either the orchestration function or decisioning functions? They will tie into a broader transformation initiative. It'll be dual-edged.

I have been using UiPath for two years. 

The stability has improved in the last two years. As they push more functionality on that and go more cloud-centric, I think it will be much more stable. We just got through an issue yesterday, but it was resolved quickly. We knew what to do. We could figure out the root cause. 

Scalability has come a long way. UiPath is probably the leader in this, but as we look at broader solutions and a process-centric automation suite, we also have a long way to go forward. We are at a midpoint in the journey. It's on UiPath and the department of community to try to hook that together.

UiPath is our biggest alliance in the automation side for my company and the plan is to increase the usage. There's a commitment from the very top on both sides. We have stepped away from past automation and stepped into the broader use of it and the transformation journey. There have been micro transformation journeys in all sectors, whether it's financial services or outside of that and commercial, national accounts, and the public sector. That's how we're looking to scale and become even bigger in the next few years.

We use Automation Anywhere, Blue Prism, and Pega Robotic Process. Some of it is just down to the differences between what the tools offer. I've used all four of them.

Each solution has its pros, but in terms of speed to market, and improving the quality, the partner network, the product suite, and the product roadmap itself, UiPath is a few years ahead of the rest. That's reflected in the analyst reports.

UiPath is something that people can dive into. My advice would be to take a few courses, everything is available online. It really comes down to people's aptitude and whether they want to get into this. I don't think it's very difficult.

I would rate it a seven out of ten. Purely because there is always room for improvement, but it's on the right track. Product roadmaps and positioning are in the right space.

We are a services company. In terms of how we use UiPath, we handle a lot of the financial processes, including our customer billing, our time tracking, and our time reporting exceptions - such as looking at who has not submitted a timesheet. When this exception happens, there are automatic emails that go out using the RPA, from UiPath. 

The whole process from our inventory, which is our asset, is automated. With the asset, which is the time that our people spend on clients, we make sure that we capture what we need to create and send invoices out. The whole collection and AR process, including making sure that we get the money and send reminders to clients, that whole process, is automated - with human intervention, as needed.

The solution has decreased the processing time of the client's invoices for IT. Just IT. Not the rest of the organization. That said, just there, that’s 600 hours of annual savings in one department. On top of that, we’ve decreased processing time by 90%.

The automation cloud offering helps to decrease the solution's total cost of ownership. More than that, it creates agility so companies don't have to worry about delivering the infrastructure team and setting up sellers and all the things that they need to do to get to the stage of actually installing the software and internal security. That all takes time to go through. With the cloud, you avoid all that. You basically create agility for the clients to jump onto automation and not wait for all these things. It can be frustrating sometimes in large companies. That's why we tell clients to avoid all these headaches. With the cloud, you’ll get going very quickly within a matter of a day or so.

RPA is not the only thing we do. We do a lot of ERP, CRM, all of these things. Traditionally, we are a full-service organization for clients and their journey to the cloud. Everything's going to the cloud. There are some organizations that still have on-premise ERPs to migrate from the on-premise to the cloud. When those fundamental applications are going to the cloud, automation is a no-brainer. We would always promote the cloud version over on-premise.

The RPA is the most valuable aspect. The power of machine learning and AI along with the document understanding capability that UiPath has is great.

By implementing that portion of the solution, we get clients to 95% accuracy in reading invoices for processing into the ERP. While running basic automation will continue, the world is moving towards intelligent automation, which is with all the machine learning and AI.

Overall, the solution has saved costs for our clients.

It has reduced human error. Machines can do anything faster, cheaper, and of a higher quality than humans can do. That is just a universal fact. I don't think we have measured the accuracy, however, there's no doubt accuracy has gone up. The client recognizes that the accuracy rate has improved.

We're not talking about removing errors. In some cases, errors may happen. However, when I say we’ve seen a 90% efficiency rate, it doesn’t mean the remaining 10% are bad decisions. We're talking about how it could not read those things. The confidence level is low, and therefore, it's kicked to a human to review. It did what it's supposed to do, which is to flag for human review, which is how processes should happen.

The solution has allowed the employees to focus their time on other higher-value work. That's what we pitch to our clients. We never tell clients that oh, you can lay off people. We do not tell the clients that that's what they should do. Rather, we advise clients that what they can do with automation is free up people's time. That means either freeing up a portion of the time or fully freeing time or completely reassigning a job. 

After automation, you may have to reorganize your department. However, with the freed-up time, departments can focus on the most important thing, which is what can they do to create focus on the customer and create an experience for the customer, where the customer feels they want to be connected with your brand.

I have a case where I was talking to the CEO of a big restaurant company. HR, payroll, finance, all those areas that reported to him. He also handles customer experience. I told him about automation and the power of automation and how it will free up people's time. He said, “So what you're telling me is I can free up a portion of my staff so they can focus on all these customer complaints we're receiving?" For him, that is going to be a game-changer.

UiPath has also positively affected the employees themselves. They've become a little bit more satisfied with knowing that they can focus their time on higher-value work. In most cases, initially, there'll be fear for them. They don't know what automation is, and why they're doing it, and what it's going to do to their position in the company. That fear will always be there with humans. That's why leadership needs to focus on change management and communication. Those things become very, very important. Once you do it right, people will actually feel happy. They will no longer have to say "Oh, no, I don't have to stay until six o'clock, seven o'clock every day to finish the SaaS." Now it's much easier. They can focus on the things that they truly enjoy, which has nothing to do with the heads-down work that they do all the time.

We use the solution's AI functionality in our automation program for our clients. For simple processes, you don't need AI. However, the complex process where machines need to mimic the human thought process requires AI. AI is not perfect. It's not a holy grail that is going to solve all problems. That's not the case. We have to be careful. However, if you use it right in the right way, then you can truly solve complex problems.

I’m not sure if the solution's AI functionality enables us to automate more processes overall. It's hard to say. For me, the way I look at technology is that it is not a hammer that's looking for a nail. You have to look at your business needs and then figure out what technology will best fit or solve the problem. It could be simple AI, or, maybe in some cases, you need more advanced AI. I would look at it as what's the right technology for what purpose. That's the way I look at it.

We do use UiPath’s Academy. We have several people that we've pushed through training and certifications through the academy. It’s helped get those employees up to speed on the solution.

Also for us, as we are a services company, that gives us a stamp of quality seal in order to market our services better as we are certified and qualified.

UiPath continues investment in machine learning and AI. That's one thing they have to do. The fundamental thing UiPath needs to understand is the competition, the market, is not Automation Anywhere or Blue Prism. Rather, big competition is coming from Microsoft.

It's around the corner and Microsoft is going to come in a big way. I’d advise them of the parallel of Power BI. Power BI three years back was not a good tool. Other tools, like Tableau, were the kings of the BI space. Fast forward three years and today we do a lot of BI for clients. Almost every client of ours is migrating to Power BI, like Power BI's matured to 80% of Tableau, and that's good enough for them. On top of that, Microsoft was throwing free licenses to their customers. When you do that, versus buying $2,000 a pop or $1,500 a pop from Tableau, users line up behind the free tool to reduce their costs. Microsoft is doing that with Power Automate now. I just talked to a client, a big client, a $10 billion company, where they were at Blue Prism. They just told me that Microsoft just gave them 70 free licenses. Now, they are forced to bring Microsoft Power Automate into their RPA strategy even though before, they were not considering that.

UiPath should take several steps forward to be prepared for this competition and create differentiation with capabilities that Microsoft does not have. The innovation within UiPath is going to be very, very crucial. However, the most important thing is to clear the differentiation in the messaging. That's very, very important. They should be ready and arm their partners with information about why UiPath and not Power Automate.

I've been around the industry for 35 years, and I've seen lots of incumbents getting blown away in various technologies at various times. The big power comes down hard. UiPath has got to be ultra nimble to not get crushed.

We started working with UiPath in 2018. We partnered with UiPath in late 2018. It's been about a three-year journey so far. 

In terms of stability, I've not heard anything bad at my level. That means no bad news is good news.

We do plan to scale beyond the client's IT department and to the rest of the organization. When they scale it up to the rest of the organization, and this organization operates in 25 countries, they have over $190 billion in assets in these countries that we can add efficiencies to. The scale of efficiency that we will get with what we did will be huge. That’s the next step is to roll it out to the rest of the organization.

General scalability is an issue when it comes to processing large data sets. However, with the right creativity, you can solve those things due to the fact that you can have the right infrastructure to catalyze or do whatever you have to do to create scalability. We are used to doing that. We deal with ERPs and we create architecture and design the environment in such a way that it can scale. That said, you need to know how to do that. 

Technical support is very good. We're very pleased with that. When we ran into problems with a client, with the document understanding, initially the success rate was not very high. Then we had to reach out to the support and they actually jumped in and assisted us and told us what we needed to do. Once we did that, then things took off and we got to 90% accuracy. Initially, it was only 50%. Therefore, for us, it's been good.

We did not previously use a different RPA solution.

We did partner with Automation Anywhere,, however, ultimately, we didn't do anything with them.

The initial setup is straightforward.

We're a consulting company, and we work with several clients. For some deployments, we were able to do the first deployment in 30 days. With other clients, it took about three months or four months, depending on the use case or the initial use cases that they picked.

Different companies operate differently. I always advise clients that they need to pick simple use cases and deploy them first before they go into complex stuff. Sometimes clients make the mistake of picking their most complex use case and say, "Oh, let's try that." No, that's not a good way. It's not a good way to embark on a journey that's long-term.

You've got to think big, start small, and be agile. If you get a complex use case at the beginning, you lose agility.

We looked at Blue Prism, Automation Anywhere, and UiPath. The momentum was with UiPath. I knew where the momentum was and how we needed to align ourselves. That's why we did UiPath.

We looked at where the market demand is. For example, Blue Prism. We knew that Blue Prism is a lot more IT-centric, IT heavy, programmer heavy, which defeats the whole purpose of self-service automation. It's never going to succeed in the marketplace today as we promote self-service for everything.

That's why we didn't want to waste our time with Blue Prism. UiPath obviously has the community edition, which was brilliant. Basically, they saw a gap in the market. That's a parallel to what we do, for example, in Vtech space. Also, for example, Tableau is a good tool. So many people love Tableau. They've used Tableau. You had the established players in BI space like MicroStrategy and Oracle OBIEE, however, they were very IT-centric and Tableau came in and beat them. They sold out into the business and you could download, pay $2000 and download a license and start creating your dashboards. I was glad that UiPath took a similar approach by creating a community edition, and then letting end-users download and then play with it.

We basically help clients think through their RPA strategy, their automation strategy and figure out what the right technology would be. We are a reseller. If it makes sense, we'll resell and we'll advise clients regarding UiPath for their RPA journey. We also use the solution ourselves. We have automated certain things, certain processes within the company. That becomes a practice round and a learning ground for our people so that when we go to clients, we can take some of these ideas and do to the clients as well as reaping the right expertise.

I'm not sure if we are using the UiPath apps feature or the applications feature. In my role, I just lay the strategy and the team executes it.

A lot of times things stall. In company setups we see a lot of cases where they did a few automations, a few bots, and then things stalled. That's a problem in the industry and the way to solve that and truly embrace the art of the possible is with automation. To get there, you need to execute across senior leadership. Without that education, they just don't put their weight on their departments to do the journey. Education is one thing that is very important. They understand the art of the possible.

Another important aspect at the outset is having RPA as a corporate strategy. Pushing to make it a corporate strategy is really going to help. That way, you can stall it for some time, however, eventually, it will have to get done. Otherwise, they are left behind when your competitors take advantage of the agility. There needs to be a center of excellence and companies need to develop internal capabilities. If they don't have capabilities, then they fear not knowing how to handle something. Those are common problems. And those need to be overcome.

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

We are using it to automate business processes in the organization.

UiPath has impacted our operational efficiency quite a lot. There are a lot of scenarios where it has helped the end users. We also have benefited financially from it. We have streamlined the processes to an extent. We initially started with a basic data migration process, and now, we have our own intelligent automation and hyper-automation framework. We just get the requirement, put it in the framework, and start automating. We have progressed a lot.

UiPath enables us to implement end-to-end automation. There are certain instances where we do not get end-to-end automation, but those are the things that are out of RPA's capabilities.

End-to-end automation is important because we can showcase our capability more efficiently in front of our management and the client. We can show that something can be 100% automated if there is a use of 100% automation.

They have UiPath Academy. When UiPath was new, we did not have any online resources to go and learn. The YouTube community was small. There were no courses on Udemy or any of the online platforms. The offline platforms were also minimal. UiPath Academy was one place where we could go and learn and prepare for the exam. I got certified when UiPath certifications were free. I have done all the learning from UiPath Academy. As I move up in my role and responsibilities, if I want to learn a few more things, UiPath Academy is still the best place. You get a very crisp and clear understanding of everything.

We use UiPath’s artificial intelligence and machine learning capabilities for hyper-automation. In my understanding, RPA in the initial days was limited to redundant process automation, whereas now, the use of AI Fabric and other components makes the automation more intelligent. We can add decision-making to existing automation. There were many processes where we had stalled the process just because the next step was a decision-making step, and someone had to come and make a decision to move forward. Now, we have our own AI team to build the code that can make decisions on behalf of a person and also learn from the existing behaviors. That helps quite a lot.

UiPath saves time. It saves about 50% of the time. It never saves 100% of the time because we also spend a lot of time maintaining and doing enhancements to the process. Processes are never stable.

We have integrated it with multiple tools. The outcome has been very good. There have been challenges at times with the development, but the integration has been smooth so far.

Computer Vision is one good feature. AI Fabric is another good feature. The holistic Orchestrator platform is another feature that is very useful.

The RE Framework provided by UiPath is quite extensive. It solves a lot of problems and gives us a lot of time back. We do not have to create our own framework.

UiPath is more user-friendly than other RPA solutions that I have used. UiPath also has the biggest community.

Automation Hub needs to improve a lot. About two years back, it kept on crashing. It has improved a lot. We use it but not to a great extent. We try to build our own dashboards by using any of the data analytics tools.

It should give real-time data, and the integration with the servers is not that great. It can be because of the infrastructure that we have.

They can also consider integration with other automation tools because nowadays, a company does not have one automation tool or RPA tool. A company has multiple RPA tools. They can think of integrating the data from other automation tools in one automation hub so that it becomes centralized.

I have been using UiPath for close to seven years.

UiPath is quite stable. I would rate it a nine out of ten for scalability. It does crash sometimes. That could be because of the infrastructure we are using.

The reliability of any process that goes to the end user is tested with a set of data. We do rigorous testing because, at the end of the day, any error in production ends up in a financial loss, so we test the automation that has been built to quite an extent.

I would rate UiPath a seven out of ten for scalability. No technology is 100% scalable. As technology evolves, new features, such as GenAI features, need to be added. Scalability-wise, it can never go to a ten. Another reason why I rated it a seven is that I want Automation Hub to be scaled to its full potential. It has not been scaled up properly. I have got this feedback from different people across the organization.

The organization I belong to works on the use cases for building automation for given processes. We have around 15 developers doing this work.

I would rate UiPath support a ten out of ten. They have been quite supportive when we have raised any query with them.

I have been in the automation field for the last 12 years. I started with RPA with Blue Prism. I have worked with almost all main RPA tools such as Power Automate, Automation Anywhere, etc. I find UiPath to be the most user-friendly. There is the ease of having all the activities in the same panel. You can have the Studio setup and you can review the code as well with the analyzer. It gives a lot of flexibility when you are developing.

The one feature that is very good is that the marketplace is open. People can build their own set of activities and post them there, which is very useful. I myself have built a lot of activities. I have also used activities by other developers to complete my work. The marketplace is very helpful.

UiPath has the biggest user community. Its community is bigger than Power Automate, Automation Anywhere, and Blue Prism. Other than the community, there are also several groups. There are a lot of developers. If you are stuck with any issue, which is quite common, someone will have a solution for it.

Developing automation with UiPath is much easier compared to Power Automate, Automation Anywhere, and Blue Prism.

The deployment is handled by another team. I do not handle the deployment because the infrastructure team handles it. It should be a one-man job. It is not that difficult.

The deployment duration of a process depends on how big the process is and how much time and resources it requires for development. Usually, it takes two to three weeks. It can also take ten weeks depending on the process. 

All tools require maintenance in terms of upgrades, but that is probably handled by UiPath. We only maintain our own processes. If there are some changes to the selectors or any of the UI components, we have to update the project.

With RPA, it takes one or two years to see an ROI. It is not cost-efficient till then. When you start building hundreds of processes and utilizing the full capacity of the bots to work 24 hours, you get a good return on investment. Initially, it was expensive, but as we scaled up, we could see an ROI. We have seen a good profit.

Initially, the ROI is less. It is about 5% to 6% per year, but as the processes mature, the headcount reduces, and the human intervention also reduces. It eventually moves to 30% to 40% ROI.

It is the most user-friendly RPA platform, but it is also the most expensive RPA platform.

I would recommend UiPath to others because it is the most user-friendly. It is also developer-friendly because of the community. It also works across systems. These are the three reasons for recommending it.

We run a roadshow across the organization to understand which processes are redundant. We try to understand which part of a process can be automated by using the general RPA automation and only one tool. We also categorize them in terms of what can go under intelligent automation where a certain amount of decision-making is required. Another category is hyper-automation where we try to understand how to include different tools, such as machine learning code, AI code, NLP data set, or data mining set. If we have an existing tool for data mining and process mining, the final steps can be automated. These are three major criteria. For basic automation, we try to assess the type of automation. Is it desktop automation? What kind of resources are required? Do we need an attended automation or an unattended automation? Based on my experience, almost all of them are unattended automation. We then try to pull in the use cases, prioritize them, and start automating.

UiPath keeps on enhancing its product. Four years ago, there was no AI Fabric or Automation Hub, and now, we have all those things. They help a lot in delivering the project and having a prototype view for all the projects that are running.

Overall, I would rate UiPath an eight out of ten.

We are developing processes with UiPath for clients in the government and banking sectors. 

UiPath is flexible and has various automation capabilities. I like PDF automation, and we have multiple other tools, such as the AI Center and Document Understanding. There is more than one way to automate the same process. We can broaden our experience and use our imagination.

UiPath facilitates our digital transformation. We have an auditing team for our client that was manually collecting data every month from eight websites across different Indian states. We also have to validate the files we get. It takes a person three days to do that manually, but UiPath automation allows us to complete the process in a day, and it's more accurate. There were no errors, which is what the audit team requires. The banking sector is undergoing changes, and by using automation, the banks are improving.

The solution reduces human error in cases where we have Excel automation invovling some formula that needs to be copy-pasted, or we need to fetch the data from PDF to Excel in a particular column. It's easy to make a mistake when both keys are next to each other.  For example, we may make an error while writing "S is equal to A," and we might ignore it. A UiPath bot will perform that without making an error. If the process is properly designed and trained, we'll get the correct output. 

I appreciate UiPath's ability to automate complex processes. It's the best thing. The Action Center, Document Understanding, AI Center, and all the other components of UI Path are also good. I prefer UiPath over other automation tools.

It's easy to build processes in UiPath. I am from an engineering background, but UiPath is a low-code solution, so it's easy for a user with a nontechnical background to understand.  It's simple to explain things to business users. If I need to explain things to my clients, it's easier for them to understand how UiPath works. 

I have developed multiple end-to-end processes, including SAP, web automation, Excel, Outlook, PDF, and directory automation. For example, we might extract the information from the PDFs in a folder. A recent one involved invoice process automation. Invoices for rent and expenses needed to be processed for nine websites, which were automated in UiPath. It included SAP, web, and Excel automation.

The UiPath community has been helpul in cases involving clomplex logic. By getting in touch with the UiPath community, we could see all the new things that have been developed or released in the latest versions. We have community meetings. 

I've also obtained multiple certificates through the UiPath Academy. There are foundational and advanced courses. I was certified in solution architecture, fundamentals and methodology, SAP automation, administrator automation, AI Center, and Document Understanding

The time needed to learn UiPath depends on how much time you're willing to spend practicing. I completed the UiPath foundational and advanced courses in a month because I was working on it day and night, practicing with the different tasks we got online. Some of my colleagues took three or four months.

We use UiPath's AI features for Document Understanding. We have to train the AI model repeatedly so that it extracts the data correctly from the PDF. We correct it when there are mistakes so that it trains the model. Similarly, we have the AI Center, where we can choose from different models available from the UiPath or create our own.

A lot of the UiPath processes are capturing information from government websites. It's difficult to capture the correct format, so we need to use a third-party application to capture the information correctly. It would be better to have that capacity with UiPath, so we don't need another product. 

I have used UiPath for more than two years. 

I rate UiPath seven out of ten for stability. The stability varies from machine to machine. If you have enough RAM and CPU, it should be fine. Sometimes it lags on computers with older processors. I'm using an i7 11th generation, and it works perfectly fine. Also, sometimes there are issues in new versions, but it runs smoothly in the latest stable version. 

I rate UiPath support seven out of 10. The response speeds and the solutions they provide are excellent. I have contacted them multiple times to open up cases. Recently, a URL was not working due to some architecture issues, and they responded within two hours. 

Neutral

I have done one process on Automation Anywhere, but it was only an Excel automation.

The implementation varies from process to process and the availability of the process team. I have done processes on various timelines. It sometimes takes a week if the process is small. A few took around three or four months because the scope was larger. It covered 10 to 12 human steps and involved manipulating data in SAP and Excel. It doesn't take as long if it's a simple process that involves moving a PDF, copy-pasting, or bulk emails. It depends on the process length and the testing needed before we can move the process into production.

I handle the deployment because the infrastructure team does all the installation and orchestration. I have admin access, so I can publish and upgrade packages and maintain the licenses, machines, bots, queues, etc. It is all published in the Orchestrator and run on the production machine. Maintenance is required of ther are changes in a URL or some input. 

I rate UiPath nine out of 10. UiPath's license costs more than other tools, but once it is all set up, it's easy to use and is effective at multiple types of automation. If you don't have experienced developers, you can learn to use the UiPath Studio to develop some basic code.

I am a consultant working on RPA solutions in general. UiPath is one of the solutions that I am using.

The use cases depend on the clients. I have done automation of sending mail with invoices in it. We have used it for analyzing PDF documents, getting information out of these documents, preparing in three different languages depending on the client, and sending invoices by email.

We are also checking VAT numbers on the EU side to validate the client's VAT numbers and related data. We have automated the generation of reports out of SAP for two different managers and teams. We have also automated including specific signature images within PDF documents and sending them to the related service or email address.

We have mainly used UiPath to focus on processes related to the finance department. The targeted processes are the ones that are the most repeatable and require a lot of effort but there is no real focus and attention from the user. Because of its repeatable nature, the risk is that users do not pay attention to the process itself and make mistakes.

Generally, we do not implement end-to-end automation. The idea is not to automate an end-to-end process but to automate a part of the process that takes a lot of time and resources. That is the focus point, so it is not a matter of having an end-to-end process implemented. It may occur, but often, it is a part of the process where the focus needs to be reliability or time and resource consumption.

The benefit for our clients is time and reliability. They quite often see the benefits in terms of the reliability of executing the process, even reporting mistakes or errors that happen during the execution of the process. That is something quite valuable for them.

Usually, it takes our clients at least one month to realize the benefits. If the processes are executed on a daily basis, then it is quite fast, but there are processes that are triggered every month or every quarter. In that case, it will take at least a month or a quarter to see the benefits. Once it is executed, there is quite an immediate benefit. On the other hand, it takes time to analyze the process because often processes or procedures that are written are not in sync with what is executed by the user. We have to modify them. Often, by questioning the end user, you end up finding the shortcuts and implementing them, so the analysis takes more time, and the implementation takes less time.

UiPath reduces human error. That is one of the main reasons why automation is done for customers. Two main reasons for automation are reliability and resource availability. 

UiPath saves time for our customers, but it is hard to know how much time it has saved because it varies from process to process. For example, the process of validating the VAT numbers on the EU website used to take two or three resources every quarter, whereas now, it is reduced to less than half an hour. These time savings are valuable, but the added value is reliability.

UiPath has not had a lot of impact on the digital transformation because the processes that are requested to be automated are already digital. The reason for automation is to speed up the process or make it more reliable. There is no real impact on the digitization of processes.

In terms of the reduction in the on-premises footprint, I am not always aware of the eventual use of the processes that I am implementing for the clients with the bots. I see that some of the bots are not used anymore because they have their own application that includes a big part of what has been automated on their side. It depends on the way they use it and how often they use it because I have bots that are running every day, and I also have bots that are running once a quarter. The ones that are running every quarter are harder to evaluate because people are not always able to see the resources released from executing those processes. Because they are executed every quarter, they are usually not measured. Our clients generally go for automation for reliability.

Specifically in the recent versions, the ability to change the interface is valuable. One of my clients had to upgrade the SAP version and move to a web-based UI. This was handled by isolating the UI interaction within the library for the targeted SAP on the client side. I upgraded that library to handle the web-based, and the bots worked fine after that without modifying anything in them. The usage of libraries is very important for me because it helps a lot in this kind of upgrade, specifically because SAP is used across the company. It is impacting a lot of different businesses within the company.

It is quite intuitive and fully handled by a visual interface. It is no big deal for me. I have been a developer in the past, and I have used Visual Basic and C#. If I need to specify something exceptional, it can be done. It is not a big deal. For me, it is very easy. There is a competitor with an open-source solution called OpenRPA, but for me, UiPath is far better and more intuitive.

There should be the ability to customize the building blocks instead of having to specify everything in every step. We should be able to combine these building blocks to make specific processes faster.

There should also be some kind of templates, similar to Power Automate. Power Automate provides templates for a specific context.

I have been using UiPath for two and a half years.

I am absolutely satisfied with its stability.

I did not have to worry about it so much because usually, my clients want to take control of their bots. They want to execute it when they want, so I have had no experience with the scalability of UiPath. 

I have not contacted their support. When I am developing, I try to make a bot quite stable. I am aware of what is happening and what it is doing, and I can notify people with logs or names of different events that are occurring during the process execution. I know exactly what is happening and where. It is quite easy and fast to diagnose and fix if there is an issue, but it is not often that I have to intervene in production. If a process is designed correctly and safely, not much intervention is required. Clients look for this kind of stability because that will save the time that they will have to spend fixing things in the production environment.

They have a UiPath Community, but I have not used it often. If there is something blocking, I go over there, but generally, I find the solution to the issues through my colleagues.

It has always been on-premises. The setup is quite straightforward. If there is some kind of Orchestrator to be installed, it is more difficult, and it takes more time. Usually, they want to have someone internally to handle the Orchestrator. I am more focused on the bots and the triggers for these bots to be executed. I am not that often involved in the implementation of the infrastructure of UiPath for the operational side.

Bot development duration varies. It depends on the process, but it can take a few weeks to several months. I have bots that were developed in two or three weeks, and I also have bots that took at least six months because they were quite heavy and complex. Generally, it does not take longer than that because then it will not be as valuable to the clients. If it takes more than six months, it is better to have it developed in their own software.

Bot deployment is quite straightforward for most of my clients because, during development time, I take care of environment parameters. So, deployment is quite straightforward. It is a matter of deploying and pressing a button to have the package deployed. We then set parameters in config files, but it does not take a long time to have it deployed.

Bots usually do not require any maintenance, but if the source of data has been upgraded or modified or the UI has been modified, they might require some maintenance. Usually, once the process is running and every source is stable, there is no need for maintenance. When the data source changes or the infrastructure changes, such as the main server being moved or renamed, then there is a risk over there, but it is not a big deal to adapt.

Generally, two or three people might have to investigate the cause of the issue. If the issue is inside the bot, it is not a problem. One person is enough. If it is related to external data sources or infrastructure, it may take two or three people depending on the segmentation of the clients' people in their departments and services.

I do not know about the exact price because I am not selling anything. I propose several solutions to the clients, and the client does choose one of them. If UiPath is chosen, they contact the official reseller in the country. In one case, I had the prices in front of me, and it was not expensive for the service it was providing.

I would recommend it depending on the needs. UiPath can do a lot of things, and I have covered only 20% of UiPath functionality. Based on my experience and the needs that I had so far, UiPath has been quite valuable.

I would advise defining your use cases. That is the rule for everything. Once you have the use cases analyzed, you can specify what is needed, how you would do it, and what is the best solution to have it implemented. One thing that I am doing is that I am mixing solutions, where, for example, UiPath interacts with Python processes that I have developed. Python processes provide information in files. Web scraping is not difficult in UiPath, but it is quite heavy. In Python, it is faster to develop and use than with UiPath. It also depends on the number of iterations and resources available to execute it. It is a matter of the quality of a particular functionality in UiPath. UiPath relies on the .Net framework, and it has its own limitations. It has quite a heavy set of libraries and frameworks. It is a matter of balancing what you are expecting of it.

I would rate UiPath an eight out of ten. It is a good product. It is well-designed and well-executed.

We're a tech consulting company that works for insurance companies. We use UiPath for tasks related to payment processing, deductibles, and denial of coverage. We check each part of the process to ensure that the patient has met a set of criteria. We're checking the deductible to see if it has been met, and we update the notes on the platform. UiPath is useful for all of our clients regardless of the industry. For example, we have used it for payroll and payment processing at Citibank and Doshi Bank. 

A bot can run 24/7, reducing the human labor required. That is UiPath's major advantage. It reduces the number of manual tasks while also improving and enhancing human labor. A manual task that took 10 minutes in the past can be completed in two or three. We are saving a lot of time. 

Let's say we have eight people doing a particular task eight hours a day on a five-day work schedule. Once we automate that task, we can run the bot 24 hours a day Monday to Sunday. Automation reduces our costs and human error. The accuracy and data security are high. It's beneficial all around.

Uipath facilitates data sharing between systems. We have some shared folder packs that enable us to share the data from one system to another. This functionality can be important, depending on the project and type of data. We use some encrypted features. If we want to share data in encrypted mode, we can put it in an Orchestrator folder on-premises so only those with access can see the data. 

The business will share the data, including employee and patient records. All the data is shared within the database.  Either the employees can send data over, or they can access the data from that particular folder. UiPath offers a central portal for managing patient information. We've done a lot of things to extract and utilize patient information, ensuring that it can be accessed by the appropriate teams. We have to train our bots to capture the right information, like the patient's name, address, ID, location, etc.

UiPath is good for data scraping and extracting information from websites. UiPath is approachable, and it makes life much easier by automating repetitive tasks with the help of drag-and-drop flexibility, eliminating human interaction. The drag-and-drop APIs make it easy to get data from the API quickly.

I also like UiPath's security features because it gives us lots of tools to secure sensitive information. We can encrypt the customer data and store it in UiPath on-premises. We can also control access so that only authenticated users can obtain the data. 

Citrix and email automation could be improved. We can use the features, but the accuracy isn't 100 percent. 

I have used UiPath for the past five years. 

I rate UiPath support eight out of 10. They provide us with assistance while we are developing bots. We can send the Orchestrator logs to UiPath to find out where a process is failing. For example, a web-based process might be using an old particular password. The support team will notify us that we need to update the password in the production environment. 

Positive

Before we implemented UiPath, we tried Automation Anywhere. I like UiPath the best because it has capabilities like Document Understanding, AI, fabric, etc. UiPath has more features than Automation Anywhere. When we did a POC of Automation Anywhere, we found that the data scraping wasn't as accurate when working with PDFs. 

The deployment may be straightforward or complex, depending on the project. Before each project, we have a testing phase of about seven to eight days. We have a 10-day monitoring period. In that 10-day period, the developer is also involved with the support. We have a different support team that takes care of most of these things, like deployment and monitoring the processes. If something goes wrong, they have to open a ticket and reach out to the developers. 

Our implementation process involves checking all the business requirements. We look at the software and machines our clients use and the steps involved. Once we know the business requirements, we start working on the modules. We determine how many modules we need and the amount of time it will take to develop them. 

After that, we have a daily scrum call. If we have issues, we reach out to the business, and they will come back with a solution. We need to undergo this initial development phase before starting anything. Once the development is completed, we have multiple process design documents detailing the processes and steps. We also work with third-party integrators. About seven or eight staff members are involved. 

This solution does not require much maintenance once it is deployed and we've granted the access required. Once we've ensured the process is running and done the initial updates, we don't need to maintain it.

I haven't calculated the ROI, but I've heard that other people have seen 60 to 70 percent return on what they invested.

The pricing depends on the project and how many hours we will charge. 

I rate UiPath nine out of 10. There are still a few areas that require improvement. Before implementing, I suggest doing a POC so you can evaluate other tools side by side to see which one is best.