UiPath Reviews

We are using UiPath for automation processes in an insurance company in the finance department.

The most valuable feature of UiPath is if you set a form and there's an interaction with the user, it's easy and fast to build than the other RPA tools. Additionally, it is simple to use the connectors.

In UiPath they should improve the input and outputs of processes. I found it very complicated.

In a future release of UiPath, they could improve the OCR engine to make it better. All the RPA tools use some OCR engine, while UiPath's is the best but it is hard to configure and set up for your projects.

I have been using UiPath for approximately six months.

The stability of UiPath is highly stable.

We have approximately four people using this solution in my organization.

I have not used the support from UiPath.

We previously used Blue Prism.

UiPath gives a return on investment, it does what it is supposed to do.

UiPath is an expensive solution but it is worth the money. You have a lot of features. 

The licenses need to be improved because when you have to use UiPath on another system, you have to set up the processes manually, and you are not able to change the process the time if you configure a process running at the system. You have to stop it and then run to the other system. It's not too easy to configure it according to the system. If you have a large deployment, for example, 10 to 20 bots, it's hard to configure.

UiPath has a lot of free training and a lot of free processes ready to go. You have to see the best practices in order to receive the best way of development. It is important to see the best practices guide.

I rate UiPath a nine out of ten.

UiPath is great because it's highly stable, it's fast to develop, and easy to configure. However, there are some improvements to be made.

We've used it to automate most of our processes. Our organization is completely technology-driven and we have been able to automate a lot of our processes with UiPath. The main thing that we are using it for is document creation with multiple fields and approval processes.

We're using it to automate daily tasks, using small bots for multiple processes. In the long-run, they're actually connected together. A lot of people have left our organization in the past couple of years and, instead of hiring new employees, we actually try to build a bot for whatever the work those employees were doing.

By not replacing employees who have left, we have been able to achieve our aim of running a lean company. We are able to save a lot of money on HR costs as well as on the costs of hiring new employees.

In addition, our document-processing time has been reduced for every customer that we are catering to, and that has resulted in great ROI as well as customer satisfaction.

We have compared the performance of humans with the bots who replaced them as they left the organization. The humans were making a lot of errors compared to the bots. The bots are not perfect and they do make their share of errors, but they are quite different from human errors. Everything is logic-based, and everything happens with triggers, so the possibility of an error is minimalistic when something is being handled by a bot. That is especially true for a bot that is created with UiPath because it's so mature. Overall, there are hardly any errors that come out of the bots made with UiPath.

Another benefit comes from the UiPath Academy courses. It saves us on training costs because we don't have to develop the content for training new employees. We're not product experts when it comes to UiPath and the Academy delivers training in a fashion that is easy to understand. There's a lot of support provided with the training courses as well. Not only does the Academy help in terms of training-development costs, but it has minimized the duration of training for each employee who starts to use UiPath. The results are great savings for the organization, both monetary, through automation, and non-monetary when it comes to training.

The AI and machine learning that are built into these bots really help us to make bots at a mature level where they're able to track with real-world customers. They also help with employee engagement and business productivity and take them to a whole new level. Obviously, we cannot develop such technology from scratch. We used built-in processes and automations in the past, but once we found, first when we were using Automation Anywhere, and now while using UiPath, this type of technology, it really took over the technology suite that our organization had been using previously and replaced it completely. UiPath is a complete suite that can handle most of our needs by itself.

Document creation is one of the most important features for us. As a healthcare company, we have a lot of documents with complex fields. For example, if a treatment is booked by a customer in another country, a lot of paperwork has to be completed. That paperwork first goes to the healthcare provider and, once accepted there, it comes to the company to be approved by the management. Then it goes back to the customer.

In addition, the process has been integrated into mobile apps. That way, a senior manager gets a request on the mobile app and to approve the transaction they just have to press the "Accept" button and everything else happens on its own. All of that happens in a matter of seconds.

Also, the UiPath Academy courses are very user-friendly and enable us to achieve a lot more. Those courses have taught us a lot, especially for our new automation employees. Once the basic courses are completed by any new employee, we actually recommend that they complete the certifications that are available via UiPath, and some of them are actually free of cost. Only after completing certification do we allow them to work on the floor. We have found the Academy content to be really amazing in terms of design as well as its functionality. We have made use of all of the courses there are.

The UiPath community has grown quite a bit, but it's still not on par with the kind of support that you would find with Automation Anywhere. That is still missing because UiPath is a relatively new entrant in the market. The community support is growing, but that is definitely one of the areas that can be improved.

Also, sometimes there are failures in the cloud during migration. Say you're migrating it from one instance to another instance. There are failures and there's not much support for such cases in the UiPath documentation. While it is a rare instance that we need to migrate, whenever we do have to migrate, we generally face some issues. I feel that there are bugs in that area.

We've been using UiPath for about three years.

The platform is really stable. There's never been a point when it's been unstable or has had runtime issues. There have been really minute server crashes, unexpectedly. But I don't think that is due to the platform. It is more due to the server environment and the hosting environment not being configured properly. There are no problems whatsoever in terms of the stability as well as the performance of the product.

The product is very scalable. It is meant for scalability. It is specifically meant for a situation where there are a lot of tasks that have to be completed by and it automates everything. Even if large volumes of data and tasks have to be completed with lightning speed, that is exactly where UiPath fits in. It does the job beautifully. That is the reason it was able to replace the whole technology suite that we were using, a suite that consisted of different products.

The technical support has been great. The only issue that we've had is that there aren't enough specialized support people who can help with the server issues. Configuring Google Cloud Platform with UiPath can be challenging. There were some errors that we were not able to figure out on our own. There are two support teams that we could reach out to, either the server support or the UiPath support. Sometimes both of them were confused about what was causing the issue. And sometimes, it takes more than the anticipated time to resolve the issue. But overall, UiPath provides great support.

Positive

At first, we were using a completely in-house technology system. After that, we used Automation Anywhere for a couple of years. But once we started using UiPath, we were able to replace that completely.

The initial setup was fairly easy. We've been using the Google Cloud Platform to host the entire automation platform and there isn't much documentation for deploying it on GCP. There are a lot of settings and configurations that are location-specific and that relate to the load and the number of bots that you are going to make with UiPath. There are a lot of things that come into the picture and the documentation is not up to the mark.

To sum it up, it is a little difficult, but not impossible to deploy it initially.

It only takes a few days but it depends on the complexity of the kinds of bots that you plan to run with the platform. Certain bots could take time. For that situation, there are consulting services. Also, there are certain bots that are already there as a template and you can customize them. But if there are processes that require a custom bot to be built from scratch, that could definitely take time. That could take from months to a year if it's a very complex bot and you're creating it with an in-house team.

Our implementation strategy was to take one step at a time. We had designed a complete project deployment roadmap, in which we had certain milestones that we planned to achieve within a few months. There were then more milestones that we planned to reach within a year. We did have to take on some consulting services from UiPath partners for the customized bots, but that resulted in the development costs being reduced, as it went a lot faster than it would have gone without the consulting support. It has gone pretty smoothly.

Apart from the consultants for the customized bots, the initial deployment was completely handled by our in-house team. There was a fair bit of documentation provided with the system itself and we found it sufficient to take care of the initial deployment.

The ROI has been really excellent. We're able to save a lot of costs that were previously paid for subscriptions to multiple suites of software. We were able to save all of that and invest it into one product, UiPath, as well as into development of the bots.

The ROI has been very positive for us. The main issue is that there is an initial investment that you have to make. Once you do that, the ROI keeps on growing year-on-year. For us, it has only been three years. If we compare our costs and ROI over a longer period, I'm sure we'll see a lot better ROI.

The costs are related to infrastructure and development and, of course, at a later stage, include monitoring and maintenance. If you compare all of that over a longer period of time, you'll see savings of anywhere between two and 15 times compared to an equivalent system, over a period of about five to seven years.

Another area with room for improvement is the pricing. Initially, the pricing was a lot more affordable. Now, it seems a bit excessive.

Get an estimate of the cost from UiPath sales representatives. Don't just include the UiPath cost, but also the consulting costs that you might have to pay, and the number of licenses that you might need as an organization. The third thing to consider is the development cost of the bots. All of that has to be considered well in advance.

I don't think there is anything that UiPath bots aren't able to do. But be aware that the budget could become excessive by using UiPath because there are so many different costs that come into the picture. You could require trained employees, people who have previous experience with UiPath, to develop bots that are a custom fit for your organization.

Cost would be one of the things that I would recommend that other organizations consider in advance to see if it suits their budgets. They should also consider whether they have the resources that can deploy and design bots that are able to automate the tasks and the processes that they want to automate.

Apart from UiPath, we also used Automation Anywhere. The reason we use UiPath far more than Automation Anywhere is because we have been using it for some time and we have some resources who are quite well-trained on it. It suits us pretty well. It has automated most of our processes and really kept our system moving. Whatever issues we have had with the product have been very well resolved by the customer support team in a very timely manner, and that is another reason we prefer UiPath over Automation Anywhere.

You need to have resources who are trained in UiPath. You could take the initiative of training employees, but you need some senior resources who have prior experience with UiPath who can be project managers and guide the development and analyst teams on how to reach the goals that the organization is trying to achieve.

UiPath was a fairly new product when we started using it. They were giving a 60-day free trial and were also providing free certifications for that initial period. That is how we started with it. Over the years, we've seen that the UiPath community has grown quite a bit. From being a new entry in the automation market, it has grown into a very mature product and it has now taken over as the main system that our company is using. We rely on technology to support our backend processes and we need a system that is very reliable in terms of delivery. UiPath has turned out to be a system that works out very well for us. The UiPath community really helps whenever there are bugs or glitches that our company is facing. You can reach out to the community where there are very senior developers as well as analysts and you can get a lot of help there, apart from the customer support.

It runs in its own private cloud in the Google Cloud Platform. We have some projects that are run on UiPath that are given to independent contractors to work on. We give a contractor a license for the system and they have to install UiPath on their computer and complete whatever work they have to complete on that. But for our internal organization and employees, we have a private cloud over which UiPath is running.

The biggest lesson would be to just take one step at a time. Make use of the partner support at the beginning. Initially, we tried to build everything ourselves and that cost a lot more than it would have if we had used consultants. There are companies that provide consulting support and there are companies that will actually build your bots exactly to your requirements. That way, you can just deploy them from day one. They also provide maintenance and support for the bots they have developed for you.

We primarily use the solution for operations processes in our corporate investment bank. For example, screen scraping, querying from databases, or any transactional processes. Those are what we're really looking at the most.

The orchestrator is very valuable for us. The ability to have processes, especially transactional processes, be fed into and triggered from there is excellent. I really like the ease of use that allows not just typical developers to use the Studio version, but also StudioX, which allows citizen developers with little to no coding background to be able to automate their own process. Studio limits a lot of the coding you would generally do in Visual Basic and offers a pretty easy use case for people who want to get into development, who might not have that background.

I’d rate the ease of automating within UiPath at an eight or a nine out of ten. Maybe even a perfect ten. They make it very simple. It's a really good platform and for everything I've used it for so far, I can't think of how I would do this X, Y, or Z differently. I really like it.

In terms of our adoption of it, we just started using it this year. We haven't had a large volume of bots delivered and put into production, however, with what we're using, we have a lot of proof of account sets and use cases that are getting pushed along that are going to save the company time in man-hours.

It's going to save the company a lot of potential risks in terms of manual error. It's also something that can be used to automate processes that are very heavily related to compliance procedures as well, where you don't want as much manual touch for the same reason and you don't want to risk, even if it doesn't take that much time for a person. With automation, you remove the risk of somebody making an error.

We don’t have a crazy amount of metrics. We're really in the process of adopting it into the organization. I'd say within the next year, we're really going to be seeing a very large adoption of it.

We have seen direct savings in costs. Every project we deliver in time save has an associated cost reduction to it. If you're saving, for example, four hours a day on a manual process, you're saving that money. You’re also saving on anything that's related to risk. I don't have any hard numbers on the amount of time that's been saved, however, it’s been positive.

Our teams have used the UiPaths Academy courses. It’s helped make the process of getting employees up to speed with UiPath very straightforward. It's one of the better learning platforms I've seen. Between them and Alteryx, they both have very good learning platforms.

What's really important is that you don't need to wait for instructor-led training, which is infrequent. We have it sometimes, still, even when we’re having it a few times a year it gets expensive. The online training, which covers most of the same material, is a really good way for people who don't want to wait for the instructor-led training and want to immediately get their own feet wet.

The Academy is very comprehensive. It's well structured and training is easy to follow. I've used other tools that have been much harder to follow online. This one I really like.

The biggest values that we’ve seen From UiPath Academy are ease of use and ease of scalability. The solutions you make based on the infrastructure that's built around it can be made to be very scalable. There's so much that depends on other terms, such as the data that we have on our own processes, that it's going to be the yes or no, whether or not a process we build can be scalable automation for other teams. As long as we get the data and the processes lined up in the right way, we can make very scalable processes, which is good as that's more cost savings for fewer bots and that's really like what we want to see.

There are some external dependencies. When we have APIs available, UiPath does have that option that we can hook into APIs. That's really where I'd like to be down the line, more like hooking into APIs, data warehouses, so that you don't have to worry too much about the screen scraping functionality, even though that's a great big part of what it does.

I would really like the ability to bring OCR connectors into StudioX, if possible. Right now we're only using OCR and Studio as that's where the plugins are available. I don't know enough about the back end of what makes this feasible versus not feasible. However, at the moment, with StudioX, you can only really read and digitize PDFs. If they can bring in the OCR connectors, they'd allow citizen developers to be able to read in a larger breadth of documents that they would generally need Studio to do.

I've been using the solution for about ten months. 

The product is as stable as it can be for the processes we use to expand on that. We do a lot of screen scraping and web scraping a lot. I want to move away from this in the future. However, the stability of those bots is going to ultimately be reliant on how that webpage looks.

We're looking at very specific parts of the website, such as the HTML tags. If those stay stable and we build our identifiers on those sites to be relatively dynamic, the process will be fine. 

We do plan to increase usage.

The idea is to train up more citizen developers. We need to strike a balance between getting the tool out to the citizen developers and making sure that they're following the governance procedures as well. There's also a little bit of risk of it due to the fact that you give people licenses to build and then they can build something on their desktop. They can just, without going through the proper governance, run it. Therefore, you need to make sure things go through the correct governance. That's why we're trying to make sure we have a very good system in place so that when we grow and are training system developers, everything they do goes through the correct controls and governance process.

We're planning to keep building the users over time. We really want to start looking in the next year from more of a top-down perspective, across larger organizational issues where we can make more scalable bots rather than strictly or mostly automating one-offs. We're looking for where there's more commonality across different businesses that do similar processes, and maybe access similar data sources.

I'm not sure exactly how many people are using it across the organization currently. My guess would be at this point there are 75 to 100 users. However, I could be completely wrong. I'm just guessing, as I don't know all the citizen developers, and who in the operation's teams are using it.

I have not used technical support, however, some people who work for me on my team have. I manage a small team of developers. They have worked with UiPath consultants who are on contracts with our COE. They've been extremely helpful with working out some kinks that they've come across in their projects. 

I haven't used blueprints on my Automation Anywhere. We used to use Automation Anywhere and we are moving off it in favor of UiPath, though I never used those other tools myself. I use ALteryx and it has some RPA abilities, although I use it much more for just basic data transformation workflows. I have coded RPA bots and Python before. What I like, with UiPath, is it's still a tool that's based on code - Visual Basic, VB.NET. However, the coding is really for the most part restricted to your data manipulation, working with variables. The control flow that you normally would need to code in Visual Basic is all drag and drop. I really like that versus straight coding. It still gives you that flexibility of a lot of development environments, however, you can have that drag and drop canvas that allows you to really not need to program as much of that control flow. 

We moved towards UiPath as it's cheaper per bot and it enables more of a citizen development model as well. Automation Anywhere bots were only developed by our COE at the time and UiPath COE's going to use them also, however, they're allowing users in operations to use both Studio (if they have the taste for it) and StudioX. It gives a lot more citizen development capabilities for more advanced functions and automation-type stuff, whereas previously, you would normally need somebody on your team who happens to know BBA to do it. 

In the past, if you have someone from the team who knows BBA and makes something, and they leave and their code breaks, you're screwed. However, if you have a StudioX bot, if it breaks, it's going to be much easier to look into the issue and fix it. It's also supported by our C0E's tech infrastructure. Those are the main driving points for shifting off as well.

I was not involved in the initial setup. I've interacted with UiPath only as a user. I was one of the first users, however, I had nothing to do with deploying the tech infrastructure and developing the governance and controls. I'm just a developer.

We have seen a return on investment. Every project we've delivered that has some sort of time savings to it has had an intrinsic ROI. I don't know the total ROI across the organization, however. I work in one specific part of the company and it's been adopted in a few places. I don't know the total ROI that's been delivered yet.

It's my understanding that it's delivered close to a full headcount so far, in terms of productivity of capacity. There are approximately eight hours a day of time-saving for every workday of the year. That's where we are right now, as we've really just begun adopting it. We're not really deployed into production, and the larger-scale projects aren't in place yet. So far, the projects have been smaller tactical builds that we've been using and it's been delivering up around eight hours of time saving a day. 

I don't know the pricing enough to really comment on it. I know we're getting a better deal in automation than what we had with Automation Anywhere bots, at least per bot deployment. However, I don't know what the licensing costs are.

We do not yet use the Uipath apps feature or their AI functionality in our automation processes. That said, with AI, we're bringing it in and we're definitely planning to use it in the future.

I'd advise new users to make sure you have the controls and governance structures, first and foremost, and you want to make sure those controls are going to be in place and understood before you start deploying licenses to users. I make sure that everything is going to be done and compliant with the audit. As somebody who works in financial services, which is a very heavily regulated industry, that's something that really needs to be kept in mind. You don't want to develop what are essentially just user tools that are not going through the proper controls and treat it like a lightweight software development lifecycle project. You need to make sure those controls are in place, and yet, don't do it too much to the point where it's going to deter the users. At the end of the day, we're not making software, however, we still need to strike that balance.

I'd rate the solution at a nine out of ten. Nothing is perfect. I know you UiPath wants to improve the stuff that has not been perfected. I'm not going to say it is a ten out of ten, even though I'm struggling to think of what I don't like. Something that would be very helpful for UiPath is to go back to try to build OCR in StudioX. That would be ideal. Also, being able to implement different types of loops in the Studio would be great. Right now, you can only do a four-loop in a repeating loop. If we could implement wall loops, that would be nice. 

My experience in using UiPath, in general, is in developing traditional bots, assisted bots. There are the typical mundane applications that we're trying to remove in order to add value to customers. 

The solution is used for extracting information from documents and consolidating data, maybe from various Excel sheets. I've used applications, such as PDF, Tableau, and a number of different entities as well. It varies.

I haven't really followed up so much in-depth, however, I know that a lot of the end-users that I've worked with and talked to, that have removed some of the processes, think it’s great. I've got many more strategic types of tasks to do. The one thing users look forward to when they come to work is when something’s been removed from their plate, one piece at a time.

Collectively, I find the UiPath features really complement each other. If you have one tool or another resource available, you're really able to get it into a solution.

They've implemented their stuff very well, considering how fast they've come up with new tools. Usually, it’s a messy situation, however, with UiPath, I've not found that to be the case. It's pretty impressive, the rate at which new tools are released and how well they're thought out, and how usable they are.

From an employee morale perspective, the company is getting positive feedback.

We’ve seen some reduction in human errors and time savings. Depending on what it is, your time savings could be two to three to ten times more in terms of time saved. It’s easy, too. Error reduction is absolutely almost down to nothing.

In terms of cost savings, some of this was done pretty casually, so the numbers are maybe not official. We’ve got 20 data samples, and we're timing it exactly. However, when it comes to time savings, there's always been a very significant amount.

When it comes to ease of use, some of the tools they're providing are in discovery or task capture. You can go out and send this off to somebody and it's pretty self-explanatory in a half hour. Prior to that, people might be using different steps with built-in Windows pieces, which is horrible for capturing automation. If all you have is a hammer, everything looks like a nail. Therefore, adding in this ability to annotate the screenshots with ease, that alone in the development process helps significantly. I'm really liking the discovery tools that complement the product.

All these discovery tools are making building automation easier, from an analyst perspective. It removes the wheat from the chaff and narrows things down, and you begin to see what you need. By clicking on different elements, you can see where they can annotate. It saves a lot of back and forth and time. Not only does the subject matter expert not have to spend time away from their work, you're also not going back and forth and trying to clarify items any longer. It makes things more compact and it’s easier to get to the end goal.

I completely trained on my own as a developer with the UiPath Academy. I was able to do it for free. It's the only onboarding I received. I had nobody else to go to, except for the videos and the forums.

The greatest value of UiPath Academy is that it is free. Now, it’s completely about motivation, and not cost-prohibitive. You just need to be motivated to learn and you can jump in. You don’t have to spend something like $800 and have maybe a company sponsoring you to get started.

People, in their careers, can become relevant again. If they are in a dying industry or disrupted industry, they can get into something that's growing rapidly. If you have a computer, and a decent internet connection, you can have a new career in a fairly short amount of time.

The forum's a great place, however, for a new person, it was better some years ago. It's grown too fast, and it's not that nimble. Previously, if you asked questions, the response time was quicker.

Since I've learned UiPath, there's so many more people rushing and getting into it. With the demand for RPA jobs, the ratio of expertise to novices is very, very low. Before you had a small community and you had a lot of experts and just a few new people trickling in at a time. The influx of new people, it's just growing factor by factor. Where previously there was one person that only had a few questions to answer, now maybe that ratio is now 20 or 30 people. You're not going to get the answers that you need as fast. Luckily, the quality of the Academy is so good, if you look around, you can eventually figure things out.

The issue is that, with so many people, a lot of questions are getting asked before anyone even looks to see if an answer is already there. It tends to make it harder to find relevant, real questions that need to be answered. There are people who are not doing the due diligence and looking at the tags and spending a little extra time before throwing the question out. It makes that part hard to manage.

With people that have already been up-skilled, or already been skilled in the past, UiPath needs to find a way to send some sort of notification to them when items update or change. They need to send out a message to experienced developers to say: “Hey, look at this and push it out."

If you're not going to the Academy and looking for something new, there needs to be some sort of way to say: “Hey, you've been certified. You haven't been in this course. You should look at these things.” I started looking at the Academy and found new elements. When I mentioned something, like, "What's that?" the new guys were aware due to the fact that it was in the Academy from when they started and was not there when I finished.

Basically, just having some sort of mechanism for spreading awareness to existing developers, or pushing something out to them, maybe even through the interface, would be helpful. Whether it’s a little highlight or a little icon to alert users to “hey, here’s something new, something pushed out.” And it’s not just something where you have to go in and read some boring five or six pages of notes, to know that this thing is there. It needs to be visual.

I started using UiPath, which started with training, in the fourth quarter of 2018.

It's a very stable product. I haven't had any issues. If I found or thought something was unstable or something, it usually ended up being me, or an operator error.

I've seen UiPath scaled. Personally, I haven't had issues one way or the other, however, I've heard good things. That said, I can't speak too much on it from the perspective of personal experience.

I have had some interaction. They had a pretty good SLA, in terms of response time. Of course, that has nothing to do with actual solution time. That said, what I remember with everything was that nothing stood out. Usually, you remember some anger or something. I didn't have anything like that.

I'm certified in Automation Anywhere as well. Right now, Automation Anywhere always has two products out, in the sense of getting ready to move into their A360 with the newer product. They're just trying to get that product to maturity. Right now, we have different deployments. Automation Anywhere is cloud-native. 

While they're both RPA, they each have I think a different niche, depending on what the customer needs. 

As a developer, the learning curve in version 11, the prior version, had an easier learning curve compared to UiPath. Automation Anywhere has an edge, in terms of ease of learning for business users and citizen developers.

360 has made the learning curve harder. It's going to add more features, more flexibility. And with that comes a learning curve. Still, the learning curve might be a little easier. 

My deployment experience was not just through UiPath. If anything, I'm pretty agnostic to any platform. I was an analyst, and I was involved with, in general, putting items into production, and going back and forth with developers, and seeing if there were any issues or problems.

I've talked to other developers, and I haven't heard of any particular issues or problems, with UiPath, or anything that was more than just human error or an oversight.

If you're smart about it, you understand what your needs are, you can get an ROI out of it without having to go get the full-blown solution. You don't want to drop $20,000 on an orchestrator unnecessarily. You can ease into it, into adoption, without dropping a lot of money. Maybe some attendant bots, and an unattended locally on a large scale, in a small area.

If you do that and start easy, you'll get a return on investment. Eventually, when we start scaling, we'll pay for the orchestrator. You'll need that when you start getting a lot of bots, and it becomes like herding cats. It gets crazy. That's what you need an orchestrator for. While you can avoid a cost at a certain point, you're probably getting diminishing returns, and then it's going to be more costly to manage something all over the place. It's best to start small and then add on. 

We haven’t been using an orchestrator. It’s a bit like having your hands tied behind your back, as you're not using some of the features that are available with that. However, it still provides these workarounds. You are able to still do some really robust work. It's been great.

We are using, more or less, the more recent versions of the solution.

Before starting with UiPath, a company needs an understanding of the culture at their company. You need to ask if your employees are resistant to change. Certain companies where people are entrenched in their ways, or scared of bots taking their job will be worried. A company needs to lean in and give them an understanding of expectations and pay attention to them before starting. Just pushing it might throw people off.

The personalities of people are the biggest factor. I used to come from a lean Six Sigma background. When companies bring in these Six Sigma programs, it's the same thing - resistance. People say “oh, you're the job cutter.”

People throw that out as automation, and I say, "Hey, people have been automating since steam engines. It's been consistent. It's just the face has changed a little bit. It finally hopped back onto computers. However, automation has been nonstop." 

You just have to realign and adjust yourself. You can’t be resistant to change. Change could be a good thing. Not all things are, however, workers need to be rational and think about it. If your company doesn't move faster, adapt quicker, then your company's going to go away, and everyone will be gone. It’s competitive. That's sports. That's business.

Overall, from what I've used, and what I've touched, and some of the things I've seen without actually putting my hands on it, I'd give UiPath a nine out of ten.

I'm just not the type to give out tens so freely. I haven't gone deep and wide enough to touch everything. From what I've seen before, if you span that out overall, I'd probably put them up in the nine range, personally.

We are using the solution to create application reports. What we've done is take all of that information, where somebody was initially doing everything as it happened, and create templates that work in another application. Due to our business model, we have multiple applications that are similar but very different. Rather than have somebody go into this application and update it and then go to another application and put in the same information, we've developed bots. We'd go to the template, input the information one time, and let the bots go in and open up the other applications.

The solution has improved the organization just by freeing up the resources to do that MBA work so that the bots can actually do things for you.

We use the solution's UiPath app feature. It has helped to reduce the workload of our IT department by enabling end-users to create apps. That said, I myself am in IT and not a developer.

The UiPath’s apps feature has increased the number of automation created while reducing the time it takes to create them. We're just now starting with that. We’ve only got 10 bots in production. We've got another eight in development right now.

Likely, the automation we’ve created has saved us probably in the neighborhood of one full-time person.

The solution’s ease of use and the UI is great, specifically for the users. Not necessarily the developers. The people actually using it find it very easy to use.

In terms of the ease of building automation, from what I've seen, I'm very impressed. We're using a partner. We built the COE and everything that they're developing right now. Obviously, we're just starting down this path. This means we're going to go work with a partner while we're developing our own guys. We can get to market quicker.

We've got our own VA. The next step will be looking into building our own developers.

The solution has reduced human error. There are still errors in the templates. People still have errors with bigger things, however, we're able to catch it before it gets into any of the applications. Reading the information across the other applications, you can stop it before it gets synchronized into the applications due to the fact that it is the same source. It doesn't go into "A" if it's not going into “B”, for example.

This has had a big impact on our business. In our model, it's a little complex as our customers are our clients. For example, in the ATM business, they charge us a fee, so we partner with a large retailer like Walgreens or CVS and we share the revenue. We actually pay our customers as they use our services. With the help of UiPath, we’re able to keep everything synchronized. We’re not sending stuff to the wrong site, or to the wrong corporate headquarters.

The solution has freed up employee time due to the amount of work that it's doing. We’ve got just one bot and it can do triple the work, covering three full-time employees in a week. Likely, existing employees now can focus on higher-value work, including more customer-facing tasks. We're getting a lot of financial requests and maintenance. They require human interfacing rather than doing manual transactions.

I can’t think of any direct places where improvements need to happen. Whatever I need, it appears to be there. That said, any app could use some form of improvement.

I've been using the solution for a year now.

The stability is very good.

I don't see an issue with scalability. We are nowhere near capacity yet.

While I have not dealt with technical support directly, I have not heard anything bad from anyone.

We did not use a different RPA solution beforehand. About two years ago, in the second quarter, that's when we started opening our eyes to the possibility of automation.

The initial setup was pretty straightforward. We have a partner that assisted in the implementation. 

From the time we signed up until the time of setting up the COE and then getting going, it might have been a few days to deploy the solution.

We have a partner that has assisted us in the implementation process. 

Everything that we've done so far, due to the fact that we run everything through COE and then submit semi-annual budgets, has been good. From the perspective of everything we submitted so far, we've been pleased.

Over and above the subscription fees, we're paying probably $51,000 a year right now.

The pricing is okay. It's not out of balance with what it offers. We are definitely getting value for it. 

We didn't really evaluate other options. We were new to it, and we had a partner that steered us towards UiPath.

At this time, we do not use the solution's AI functionality in our automation program. We also have not yet used UiPath’s Academy courses. We may in the future.

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

We are using Orchestrator and robots.

Our primary use for this solution is Accounts Payable invoice automation.

We run automations in the virtual environment provided by the Amazon service. Our implementation has been finicky at times. The latest release is a lot more stable, but I've had a two-week production outage where DLLs weren't registered and someone from Vegas had to log in for eight hours to our servers. They had to uninstall and reinstall the solution, as well as all of the different apps. I lost a bit of faith in the solution with that incident.

With respect to how easy it is to automate our company's processes, on a scale of one to five, I would rate it a four. It's pretty easy to use, but it wouldn't be a five because it isn't doing everything for me. Things still need to be done.

I have not taken the Academy training but my team has. On a scale of one to five, judging how beneficial it is, I would rate the training a four.

From the point that we purchased our UiPath license until we had our first robot was approximately two weeks. The process was pretty straightforward.

With respect to saving time, the last company I worked with was trying to save one thousand FTE. So far, they are already at sixty FTE, and in Australia, we're at ten FTE.

This solution has helped us to reduce human errors, although it has created other errors.

Orchestrator has a lot of good features including the configuration, the queues, the transaction reporting, the logs, and accessibility.

This technology gives you the ability to build a solution using any legacy system.

I would like to see more support for the cloud in Australia.

A tool that better identifies the processes, watches the computer and works it out for me, would be an improvement.

The stability of this solution has improved since we started using it. Now that I have done an upgrade, it seems to be a lot better.

I was running High-Density on the 2016.2 or 2016.3 version, and I had a lot of problems. I couldn't determine whether they were just UiPath issues or it could be partly attributed to the client app. What we noticed was that if you log in as Console, you have far fewer issues than if you run High-Density.

These days, I would rate the stability a four out of five. 

We had between fifty and a hundred people working in the automation program in the old company.

I have only used technical support once and my experience with them was not good. That was during our two-week outage.

We used Blackbook.ai to assist us with our implementation and our experience with them was awesome. 

We have seen ROI from this solution in terms of money saved. Just in Australia, we have saved a million dollars. In India, we have saved maybe five million dollars.

At the last company I worked with, the annual licensing fees were $700,000 USD.

From a cost perspective, I have an issue with the price of the bots. At the company that I was with previously, we were paying $3,600 USD per bot. With the new company that I am at, because we're new and we don't have the size, we are paying $8,000 USD per bot.

It was 2016 when I evaluated this solution, and it had a small market share at the time.

Everything I had read about Blue Prism said that it was too heavy, too old school, and had too much development ramp-up time. I looked at Automation Anywhere and UiPath. Automation Anywhere had a good price point, especially for a PoC. However, in between Blackbook.ai and what I saw out of UiPath, I felt that UiPath was the better option.

This solution is pretty good. It's an enabler. There is a lot of investment and a lot of new things. My advice to anybody who is implementing this solution is to make sure that it is set up to scale correctly.

What I would like to see is everything as a SaaS, completely, bots included, and I want it hosted in Australia.

I would rate this solution a nine out of ten.

We're starting within our finance group, so a lot of different processes in our finance group are being automated. Our main project was for our tax department, extracting data from PDFs and putting them into Excel.

We have two people involved with RPA in our company.

We just purchased this solution last week so we're still installing everything. We did automate four processes with the community edition. The length of time in development varied by the process. The longer ones required help from UiPath. They came on-site for the PoC, so that helped us out. Some other easy ones we just did ourselves within a couple of days.

With respect to how easy it is to automate our company's processes, on a scale of one to five, I would say that it is a four. But with Studio X, I think it will probably be a five. I say four because as you get more complicated with your processes, you need to learn how to code and there's a brunt learning curve. A lot of people will get turned off by that. So, I made some good sessions with Studio X, it's all drag and drop, mostly, so that's perfect for the business users.

On a scale of one to five, judging how beneficial it is, I would rate the training a five. We are actually in the process of taking it right now. It's good that they have something like that available. There are not that many who have aced it.

So far we haven't gone too far, but I expect that people will be a lot happier because they won't be doing the jobs that they don't like doing. They'll have more time to learn and up-skill technologies like this, which can help further their careers rather than just learning, or not learning by copying and pasting.

The most valuable feature is automating processes and tasks, giving users time for more value-added activities. This results in cost savings.

The free community edition allowed us to test out the technology before investing in it.

I would like a better ability to connect and integrate with other software systems. An example would be integration with data and business intelligence tools. I don't think they have a native connector yet. So, just something that a user can connect, and have RPA in the middle, would be helpful.

I would also like to see an easier UI for the user. It may have already been taken care of with Studio X, but I think if they keep improving that, it's going to get a lot of people interested because users are attracted to it.

We were just using community edition for about six months.

With respect to the stability, on a scale from one to five, I would rate this solution a five. I mean we haven't used it too much so we haven't really pushed the boundaries, but for the stuff we've, done I would say it is stable.

Their sales and pre-sales support is very good. They've been very willing to come onsite and help us out and help with our pilot as well.

We got introduced by RPA from PWC. They came and talked at one of our finance summits.

The paid version, I'm still learning how to use, how to connect everything together. There is still a little learning period for that as well. Learning how Orchestrator works, how the licensing works and things like that, were necessary after using the community edition.

UiPath helped us with our PoC and they were great. I mean they came for free and through just a pilot or a proof of concept. We could actually see if the technology works for a use case.

Before we start anything we evaluate the process and we take down how many hours it saves, the costs, and ROI. In our main project, it took someone approximately three hundred hours a year to do all that data extraction, data input, and that also came along with errors because someone could fat-finger the value.

Then, through the PoC, they're able to turn around within two days. A bot can basically do that entire process and do it error-free as well.

It is a savings of three-hundred hours, and the cost savings is a multiplier of hourly pay.

We also use it as an ETL tool sometimes, so instead of paying for an API connection, we can use RPA. Simply just to run a simple report of the system.

I don't have any other software vendors to compare it to, but I would say if you're fully utilizing it then there's definitely an ROI in it. Obviously, if you have only one process running five minutes a day with the bot, it's not worth it. For us, what we did was we built enough use cases before we bought that enterprise license to make the ROI on it. We've got eight or ten and then we realized that we can cover that license cost easily with ROI before we purchased it.

Ultimately, we realized ROI within six months.

We got purchased the basic minimum package and it was around $35,000 USD, annually.

We tested out Kryon RPA, and we looked but did not test Automation Anywhere and Blue Prism. Those two were out of our price range, and at that time, neither of them had a free community edition, so we couldn't test out the technology.

UiPath sort of fit our company well because it was priced reasonably, and they also had a free version so we could test out the technology. Ultimately, we chose UiPath because of the price. It was not as expensive as Blue Prism or Automation Anywhere. It has a free community version where you can test new technology, which was huge. They also have a local office next to us so we can get their help pretty easily.

They have announced features in the next release, and I think that they are all the things that users would want. There are easier ways to document processes and a better and more user-friendly UI. A lot of people just got turned off by having to learn code. So that was a lot easier, and then being able to track all your RPA projects and the ROI on them saves time. Doing them manually is time-consuming. Fortunately, we're a small company because I couldn't imagine if you're trying to implement this for a bigger company.

My advice for anybody who is researching this solution is to, first of all, do their own research on the ratings and independent research. Secondly, I would just say a lot of them now have free community editions, so there's nothing holding you back from testing out the technology and seeing if it works. I think Blue Prism is the only one that doesn't have it now. That's a really high cost and a barrier to seeing if the technology works. Just going and validating the software and doing a simple automation task is important. All of those vendors have free training so you can just go step-by-step and learn something. I think that's the biggest thing someone can do, and then obviously finding enough processes within your company as well.

This is a good solution but there is always room for improvement.

I would rate this solution a nine out of ten.

Our primary use case is IDP. We're in the Fed market, so a lot of it is all IDP driven. AI and automation are priorities. We're not exclusively a UiPath shop, but we're shifting to utilize it more because we know there are opportunities, especially in the realm of document capture.

For us, it requires fewer resources, and the time to get to the production environment is quicker. It hasn't significantly impacted our stakeholders yet, but people know the brand. When we talk with customers, they ask if we know about about UiPath and if we're a partner. 

We're moving away from the current platforms because they're less robust. The RPA tools we've used previously haven't kept up with the pace of change. UiPath is a leader that has continued to progress with RPA development and invest in improvements. 

We're still in the early stages with UiPath, but two things that will help are the Copilot and the Autopilot. We'll be able to generate new processes based on the learning that's taken place. It will have a significant impact on the things we do. Generative AI is not new to us. We've had these discussions for a while, and our CEO is well-versed in generative AI. Software companies are coming to realize the value and implement it. 

UiPath has spent the money on research and generating libraries. The out-of-the-box libraries are extensive. In the past, we used standard capture products, where we had to create all of the extractions in the zones and all those things. UiPath offers faster implementation. 

UiPath's pricing could be improved. The margins for us as a bottom-level tier partner are not great, which can be a hindrance, particularly when we present it to the customer. Other than that, I don't have any areas of improvement at the moment due to our limited experience. Maybe after six months to a year, we might have more feedback.

I have been using UiPath for several years, although I only started with this company a couple of months ago. Previously, I led a team for four years with another organization.

The stability of the solution has been good. I haven't experienced any platform issues. Any issues that arise typically relate to coding or interactions with third-party vendors.

Reflecting on my previous organization, UiPath was able to scale effectively.

I rate UiPath support eight out of 10. My previous experience with UiPath's customer service was really good. The support from the sales and presales levels and the technical specialists was excellent. They were all willing to help and work with us.

Positive

We eventually switched from our previous solution because it did not keep up with the pace of change. The company did not invest in their product and failed to keep up with the latest and greatest technologies.

It's too early to tell if there's been a return on investment with UiPath.

Pricing is a significant area for improvement. We see little margin as a bottom-level tier partner, which makes it challenging when communicating pricing to the customer.

I would rate UiPath an eight out of ten.