UiPath Reviews

The business side of our company has different processes and they send us requests to develop automation for them.

Almost all of our processes are end-to-end automations. Our company looks for a single solution provider and the minimum number of tools needed to automate a whole process. We don't want to jump between different systems where the owners have to get more approvals to get the automation done. It's better to have one simple solution that can work on different scenarios.

Another benefit is, obviously, that processes that don't require human intervention can comply with security requirements and then you can host it on a VM. You then schedule the automation and it will run. It's really good compared to competitors, like Automation Anywhere, which have not yet reached that level.

UiPath also speeds up digital transformation in many ways. People start thinking about automation and the processes from start to end. For example, if there are four steps in a process and one team member is responsible for the third step, by turning the process into an automation, he knows the whole process from start to end.

In addition, it helps reduce human error, especially for repetitive processes done with human effort, but that is true of any automation, not just UiPath. But I do think UiPath is the best solution. UiPath has sped up processes for many of our teams, and they are much happier. They can explore other areas in which they are more interested. Personally, UiPath automation has saved me at least three hours a day.

The key features that I find quite helpful include

• Orchestrator support
• Automation Hub 
• Process Mining
• Document Understanding
• Test Manager
• Insights.

On the Orchestrator side, I would like to see more controls and conditions for RPA managers. If they advanced in those areas, it would help.

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

It's stable.

We have over 100 users in our company.

We have UiPath on-premises so we usually upgrade the platform whenever they release a stable version. There is some work involved with UiPath web extensions, which we have to install on web browsers.

We usually talk with our account manager. UiPath's technical support team is good. They are always approachable.

Positive

I did not work in RPA before I started using UiPath.

UiPath is costly compared to Power Automate Desktop, but if you want to do most things, UiPath helps a lot. The more you use it, the cheaper it gets.

UiPath is the industry leader in RPA. Other tools, such as Automation Anywhere and the Power Automate platform, are notably lacking in most of the features.

There is a big learning curve if someone is new to programming. It would be better to have gone through some basic data types or to have an understanding of how logical sequences work. But apart from that, it is easy to build automations. Once you understand how to use logic, it's easy. 

In our company, people are still adapting. It's not 100 percent done. We are asking many teams to start learning UiPath and automating simple things first.

There is a desktop studio and any citizen developer can develop an automation without learning much. It's quite simple to use. When you want to share something with other team members, you just publish it to Orchestrator and share it with UiPath Assistant. That is quite helpful for any team looking for automation.

The UiPath Academy has different certifications and, on my team, everyone has done some kind of course there and received certification. They know what they're doing and understand how RPA works.

I would suggest developing a basic understanding of how to use UiPath Studio, which is the IDE. Try different things and, then, if you're stuck, go to the UiPath forum for help. If it requires more detailed knowledge, then go with a video course in the UiPath Academy. But most of the time, we Google an issue and find answers on the UiPath forum or documentation. Sometimes a YouTube video will help. It's not necessary to go through the video learning process in the Academy to start using automation.

We use UiPath to automate the processing of large volumes of data. The company has multiple sites, but the organization's data warehouse is at one location. Around 80 people use the solution. 

UiPath enabled the company to reduce staff. We can now perform more work with fewer people. We decreased our manual work by around 60 to 70 percent. UiPath freed up personnel to do other tasks. We still have people doing about 30 percent of the data work, but we hope to increase that to 100 percent. We've cut costs by about 40 to 50 percent.  

We are launching new products using existing UiPath workflows built for our older core projects. When we get new requirements from the client, we can easily implement them. UiPath has expanded our capacity to take on new clients. 

The most valuable aspect of UiPath is that it doesn't require much coding. We can do most of what we need using the basic functionality. We can implement the code with drag and drop and basic modular programming.

The user interface could be better. There have been advancements in UI design and user experience in recent years. UiPath could do a better job of keeping up with these trends.

I have used UiPath for about five or six months.

UiPath is stable.

UiPath is scalable because we can reuse our workflows. 

I rate UiPath support an eight out of ten.

Positive

We used Microsoft Power Automate for one or two months. UiPath has more capabilities, and we can do more with it. 

Setting up UiPath is straightforward and requires some maintenance. The deployment team does that.

We're getting more clients using UiPath, so the price we pay isn't an issue. 

I rate UiPath a nine out of ten. I would recommend it to my clients and colleagues. It doesn't require much coding knowledge to use. It's also much cheaper than paying human employees to do the same work, and bots are less prone to errors. 

I'm using it for automation.

UiPath saves us a lot of time as well as money. It has saved between 50 and 80 percent of employee time, processing our tasks efficiently. It boosts our productivity and helps to scale up our business.

It has sped up digital transformation in our organization for sure, and also helps to reduce human error, although that depends on the task you are automating.

It's very helpful in terms of everything.

It offers me various benefits such as AI capabilities and works very well for me on all types of processes. It makes our tasks easy and provides accurate results. For example, if we have a web application we can automate the entering of login credentials.

It provides end-to-end automation, which is very important. We can integrate it with third-party tools, like SharePoint or Outlook, and perform various tasks.

The user interface looks modern.

And the user community is great. We use it as a knowledge base and for training purposes.

It sometimes lags when internet connectivity is poor. It depends on the location. Otherwise, it is the most fantastic tool ever.

I have been using UiPath for the last three and a half years.

It's very stable.

It's very scalable. I give it a 10 out of 10 for scalability.

We have 5000-plus users of the solution in our organization.

Customer support is very important and they resolve issues immediately.

Positive

Sometimes we deploy on the cloud, sometimes on-premises. The deployment is very straightforward.

It doesn't require any maintenance. It works well.

We have seen a 50 to 80 percent ROI.

As an application, it is not very expensive. It's very reasonable.

The time it takes to see results depends on the task. Sometimes tasks are bigger and sometimes tasks are smaller. Sometimes it gives your results within a minute, and sometimes it takes time. On average, it takes a few days.

I'm fully satisfied with this great tool. It is the best solution for all types of businesses, both small and large. I recommend it to everyone who wants to become an RPA developer. It is a fantastic tool and plays a vital role in RPA.

Our use cases are a lot of both data scraping and data reconciliation. We tend to find that we're going into web portals, we're going into spaces that require a user interface, and extracting some kind of information or data from those places. Then, we transform them. Sometimes it's just as simple as saving it as a different type of data. Still, it can sometimes be rather complex to combine that data with SQL queries to enhance it, or even just clean up and remove extraneous data that our users don't need.

We touch on other areas, such as averting risk by double-checking things or replacing manual transcription. We find that due to the size of our team, we're relatively small, and the biggest bang for our buck tends to be in the data reconciliation and gathering.

We have about 40 bots in production right now, which is pretty good for a small team. We're only really two developers right now. We're able to get pretty good value out of those bots. They're running probably about 50% of the time, which is pretty good since, as a financial organization, we're really seeing peak hours in the early morning and late evening as we're getting in all of the morning data and closing out for the day. We have a pretty good amount of utilization when we're busiest.

It is easy to build automation. For building them, we find that there are two categories. There are some that are quite simple and some that are quite quick, and then there are some that require some additional thought, some additional background knowledge, and some additional expertise. One of the things that we like about UiPath is it really does have a lot of pretty solid integrations. They can really get us what we need relatively quickly, but we still find that there's a level of expertise required to make sure that everything matches the way we expected it to, whether that's formatting or the data types. We need a little bit of expertise to fit them all together. However, the pieces of the puzzle are all there. It's just a matter of finding where they go.

We use a lot of unattended robots. We're almost entirely unattended right now. We find that those are the best early bang for our buck. We were able to completely replace a manual step from beginning to end. That's where we focused our efforts. 

We're interested in expanding into attended; however, we're still looking for the best way to find the more business user level, or the champions who need some knowledge of RPA to be able to utilize it properly yet also have the flexibility to be doing their normal day job and their normal day-to-day tasks without it interfering.

We have about 40 automations in production. Those are business related. That said, we are also starting to add a few more now. Probably on the order of five at the moment. We're hoping to continue to expand it in what we refer to as maintenance processes, things that allow us to automatically restart our own jobs when certain restart error conditions are met, and things that allow us to monitor the health of processes and make sure that there aren't missed exceptions over the course of our day-to-day. Therefore, we have about 45 total, with 40 business related, and then we're slowly growing this number that allows us to better and more efficiently perform our automation functions.

Those five robots are dedicated to maintenance handling exceptions and things like that. One of the things they do, for example, is scraping the logs and they'll look for keywords in our logs. The obvious one is exception or error; when they see those, they'll flag them and bring them to our attention. 

We're currently working on expanding that functionality so they can be a little bit better about proactively helping us. We're currently testing the use of the API calls within those monitoring jobs to restart ones that hopefully, just a simple restart will fix. For example, a slow or broken web portal that otherwise wouldn't be an issue.

That's a big time-saver. Our bottleneck as a small team has been how we support them as we get more and more processes into automation. We decided that the best way to help ourselves is to automate some of these support and repair tasks. We see that as being a big boon going forward to us.

The most valuable feature is the flexibility it offers. It really can integrate with just about anything you need it to. It has places where it is preferable to be used; however, in a pinch, you really can finagle whatever kind of circumstances you need out of it. We found that a lot of the time, it's not the perfect tool for the job, yet, thanks to the speed and agility with which you can apply it, even if it's not going to be a solution for 12 months, for six months it might be exactly what you need to get somewhat over the hump.

The user community has honestly been really impressive to me. The UiPath forums are genuinely a spectacular resource. It's really rare to come across an error, issue, or challenge that hasn't been at least discussed to some extent on the forums. That has been a great value add for us. Even if something is eventually going to be technically possible, you can frequently at least get an idea of how difficult it will be to implement it by seeing how much people have talked about how hard or easy it is. It really gives you some flexibility to quickly assess how doable it is, and then make a decision to move forward with it or drop it.

I used UiPath Academy several years ago now, in 2019. I know it's pretty different now. My team members have also used it. The courses are very valuable. There's a lot of great knowledge in them. 

One of the improvements that could be made is the support interface. I've talked to one of the product experts today about how they could better show when there are issues with a particular job. Right now, we tend to find that everything just looks okay unless we really go out of our way to highlight issues. What we would really love is for there to be a way to flag in Orchestrator exactly which jobs had warnings, exactly which jobs had business exceptions, exactly which jobs had exceptions that were handled, and which ones had unhandled exceptions. Right now, we are forced into this success or failure state. The lack of granularity makes it very difficult for us to quickly and easily find where we need to address issues.

There is no out-of-the-box way to configure granularly. This is where our maintenance processes are starting to come in. They're trying to fill those gaps, yet realistically, it would really be better to just have those visuals right there in Orchestrator without us having to rely on making our own API calls and checking for special criteria outside of what UiPath would be able to detect on its own since we're setting it within the code itself.

The UiPath Academy courses are disorganized. We have trouble identifying exactly what we want people to learn from within the list of courses, and since they've changed so much, it's sometimes hard for me to know what my coworkers are learning versus what I learned. I don't know where either my gaps or their gaps are. I don't know if I need to assign extra training or if maybe I need to go back and take a newly added training. That can be difficult for us.

I've been using UiPath for about four years now.

The stability has been good. I don't have any complaints generally about the stability. There aren't any particular issues I could name that would cause me to have a negative opinion, which I would say is probably about as good of praise as that perspective as you can get. 

We are not using the cloud. I know that the scalability is a lot better with the cloud features. We are an on-prem using preassigned VMs. We really love the ability to bring them on and off as needed. However, I will say that I know there's a whole universe of adaptability out there that, unfortunately, I am not allowed to partake in.

I have worked with technical support a little bit. I would say they are decent to good. They have been timely responses. Still, they are not always as detailed or helpful as I would like.

Neutral

I did work on Blue Prism for about two years.

It's been a few years now, so I can't speak to the current state of Blue Prism. That said, one of the ways I really struggled with it, was it just did not have the connectivity that UiPath has out of the box. A lot of applications we use regularly, such as PDFs and Excel documents, just did not work intuitively. I remember specifically having to write the code to handle passworded PDF documents manually. And so, that lack of integration in things that you typically use in every single process was a real frustration with Blue Prism.

That was one of the first things I noticed about UiPath is they handled those integrations much more smoothly. There are many more of them, and they are much more ready. The other thing that I would really give UiPath credit for is they are much quicker to iterate and build out new helpful features. Blue Prism was frustratingly slow to fix these problems once identified. You would face the problem and be forced to solve it with your own code since you couldn't rely on Blue Prism to get a solution to you in a good amount of time, unfortunately.

I'm not involved in the infrastructure deployment.

In terms of robot deployment, it's relatively straightforward. UiPath offers good tools to allow us to do it. My company, in particular, needs to streamline our ticketing system and our release process a little bit. Our particular process makes the best use of the tools available due to internal limitations, which we're planning on working on. For example, we currently do not integrate with Git, and that's something we need to fix.

My understanding is that we have seen a return on the investment. From my perspective, we just need to continue to highlight the value add and make sure that people are aware of what we're able to do to further expand the automation. There's a lot of untapped potential there.

I don't get too much into the licensing and costs in my role, so I can't really speak to them.

We do not really use AI/ML capabilities. We're a smaller group; we just don't have the resources to learn and utilize those tools the way we could. We're in the process of moving over to some better workflow management and BPM-style tools. We're trying to build one in-house. That will allow us to take advantage of some of those machine learning and data integration features, and then once those are fleshed out, and our business teams can continue to get onboarded into the BPM workflow, we'll be able to start utilizing those tools more heavily.

My advice to others would be to go through some of the UiPath Academy pieces of training to see if any topics are covering issues they are facing. They generally do a good job of showing you how to tackle those problems. Do a proof of concept and validation of it. UiPath is a tool. It's very good at some things, yet it's not very good at everything. Like any other tool out there, it's an excellent product if you find that UiPath is the right tool for your job. That said, you don't want to shoehorn it into something that really could be done better elsewhere.

I'd rate the product a nine out of ten. UiPath does a great job of iterating on its product, adding new features, and combating the negative sides. I've really been impressed by how quickly they do that. Every time I have a criticism, I find out that somewhere in the pipeline is a new solution coming to help me with it. That said, they're not always perfect when they come out. Sometimes we don't adopt them until after they've been iterated upon a couple of times, yet, just the fact that they listen and build these solutions is really helpful.

Right now, we have nine production animations.

Our first use case is to convert video to audio and then upload it to a legacy system. We have another use case that takes an Excel spreadsheet of 2,000 rows and searches one row at a time on the federal court website to get the results of our cases. 

We also have another use case that generates an SAP report daily, downloads a report, and feeds a Power BI dashboard. 

The last use case monitors a client's email, and as soon as there's the form request, we open the request, and we add it to their system automatically.

Thanks to COVID-19, since everything went digital, it added a lot of manual work to employees. It helps reduce manual labor. It just saved time. The robot now does the amount of work that got created due to COVID. It went back to normal in terms of workload now that we can get help from UiPath.

I love the REFramework and the Azure Queue and Orchestrator. Those are great features. They all work well.

The UiPath community is awesome. That's one of the reasons I use UiPath. There's so much stuff available everywhere. For example, if you go on Google and search for a subject, you are going to find information on either YouTube videos or community sites. There's just a lot of information available about everything. Also, a lot of super complete documentation is on the UiPath website. Any question we get, it's super easy to find technical information on that subject.

I've used the UiPath Academy courses. It has helped me start very quickly since they're all free, and there are many courses to choose from. When I started, I used my first two weeks to just do Academy training, and that's how I started. They have a complete curriculum. It's pretty nice.

The speed of upgrades is really hard to follow. It's great that there are continuous improvements just for us; however, it's just a bit hard to keep up with all of the changes.

I wish I could use the SaaS version. Our only con is the SaaS offering is not accredited in Canada, so we're working on that. That's not a UiPath problem.

I've used the solution for about two years.

The stability is awesome. It is very stable. It recovers itself. It doesn't err. It's very easy to carry on, and exception handling is very easy to manage it. I have no problem with it.

It's super easy to scale. I'm sure there are always ways to improve, and we're a small group, so I only have six bots in production right now. However, I already have some processes that could be scaled. They're using two robots now, yet I could easily put that to four or five if necessary. If you create workflows correctly, it's super easy to scale.

Technical support is pretty good. I've used it a couple of times and had no problems.

Positive

I did not previously use a different solution.

I was involved in the initial setup, and it was straightforward. 

The installation instructions were pretty easy to follow. The orchestrator was pretty easy to set up, as were the studio and the system. There's nothing complicated. I find it's just a regular install.

I was given the license information and just went along with it. We are a small department. I was in a team of one. We didn't have a real strategy. We just had to start somewhere and do a proof of concept and move on from that. That was my strategy.

We did not use an integrator, reseller, or consultant. It was implemented in-house.

I have witnessed an ROI. For example, when converting video to audio and uploading it. Each video was taking about 30 minutes to upload manually, and we produce about 280 videos per day. The robot does it in four minutes right now, and it does it across Canada. Three bots do 280 videos in 20 hours. The ROI there alone would be huge.

I don't deal with the pricing aspect. That said, I don't see it as a problem. I see that it brings a lot more value. We save a lot more than the cost of their license.

I touched Power Automate a bit. I heard about Blue Prism. However, I did not really look into it. We just started with UiPath. When I joined them, my company had already purchased UiPath. So for me, I just started with UiPath.

We do not use the AI functionality just yet, although we have plans to in the future. 

I would for sure recommend UiPath. I haven't really tried other solutions. However, I've heard that people were trying them and returning to UiPath.

I'd rate it a ten out of ten. The product is awesome. The support is great. The community is also huge. It's super easy to find information, find support, and find stuff. I find it very easy to start using the product and can show value and benefit to clients.

We use it for everything. We use it for very simple things, such as moving data around in Excel, and bigger things that include using more advanced technologies, APIs, and some of the newer stuff that UiPath has had, such as Action Center, etc.

We have not yet used its AI functionality in our automation program, but we plan to do that in the coming months.

The company is growing so fast, and we've been able to use automation to keep up with that pace. We've started rolling out to individual citizen developers. We're trying to change the whole company in terms of the way people work by using this technology.

The way they stay on top of Orchestrator is really helpful because that has been the platform that controls everything. The dedication to that is pretty helpful. Every time there's a new release, it seems there are more and more features. It's also not hard to learn.

When it comes to the UiPath Community, everybody is helpful. If you don't know how to do something or you want to learn about something, it's pretty easy to connect with other people or talk to people at UiPath to get that knowledge or learn how to do something. You can also just point somebody to UiPath Academy. They go from knowing nothing to being pretty good with things pretty quickly.

One improvement that could be made is in terms of keeping the documentation updated. Some of the online documentation is outdated. Because things are always changing, it is understandable that information becomes outdated pretty quickly, but sometimes, when you want to go use something, deploy something, or troubleshoot something, the documentation says, "Do this," but what it says to do no longer exists.

I have been using UiPath for a little over four years.

Its stability has been really good, especially lately. It has always been relatively stable, but as they've added things, it still seems to be pretty stable.

Its scalability is pretty good. Orchestrator is able to handle whatever you're throwing into it. If you need to add a bunch of processes or jobs, it's pretty easy to do. The only thing that would slow that down is if you need new servers or something from IT. So, from the UiPath side, it's pretty easy, but there are other variables.

They're pretty helpful. If you submit a ticket, somebody reaches out to you pretty fast, but usually, I'm able to just reach out to our account managers and get help within a few minutes. I'd give them high remarks. I would rate them a 10 out of 10.

Positive

UiPath was pretty involved with it. So, it was pretty straightforward. We're about to move to UiPath Cloud though, and our account managers are pretty involved in that, but it has been pretty turnkey and straightforward.

Our implementation strategy was to get a platform that works and start building things. I'm not sure of the overall strategy. Some of the decisions were made before I got here.

We worked pretty closely with UiPath. They've been great and pretty helpful. 

We have definitely seen an ROI. I don't know any of the specific metrics per se, but I know the values out there. We're just getting hammered with use cases everywhere. We did something literally last week that took us three days to deploy, and it saved a team 100 hours of work.

I came to the company as they were just starting to use UiPath. I don't think they evaluated other options.

My advice to others evaluating the solution would be to compare what UiPath is doing to all its competitors, and none of the competitors would scratch the surface of what the offerings are.

I'd give it a 10 out of 10. I liked UiPath so much that I went to get a job strictly in RPA. That wasn't directly UiPath, but before I started where I am now, I was working with UiPath just a little bit, and then I was like, "I want to pursue that for long."

I'm a web developer. This solution is used in the backend and frontend of my organization. 

The solution is deployed on cloud through AWS.

It doesn't take a lot of effort to understand UiPath's features. It saves time, effort, and increases performance.

Automation has minimized our on-premises footprint. UiPath speeds up and reduces the cost of digital transformation.

The solution has reduced human error due to the automation and scripts.

The solution is deployed across multiple locations. We currently serve between 50 to 80 clients. They are mostly small and medium enterprises.

UiPath has a very good user interface, and the automation is a great feature. New users can easily understand UiPath.

I would rate the ease of building automations and using the solution as nine out of ten. 

We use UiPath for automation and architecture design in the backend. It automatically generates data for us, so it saves resources and the work of extracting data.

UiPath enables us to implement end-to-end automation. End-to-end automation is critical for us. For the past 20 years, we have been dependent on it.

There's some latency when changing from one page to another, so that could be improved.

I have used UiPath for one year.

The solution is very stable.

It's scalable.

I would rate this solution as nine out of ten. 

UiPath's technical support is very good. When we have required information, support is available 24/7.

The setup involves load balances, and UiPath is involved in the automation and architecture of the backend. It took about one month to understand the automation feature.

We have a team of 40 people for development. Only 10 people were necessary for deployment. Some of their roles were backend, frontend, architecture, and AWS.

The solution has reduced the time our employees spend on certain tasks because of automation and scripts. We save about 60 hours per month.

We save approximately $1,000 per month with UiPath.

The solution isn't very expensive.

My team evaluated other options. They chose UiPath because of its community and positive reviews.

I would rate this solution as nine out of ten. 

I would recommend this solution because of its great technical support and its automation features. UiPath also has a great community.

The beauty of RPA is that it has many different use cases. We use the product as a standalone and as part of a bigger solution. Obviously, the tool itself is designed to automate activities that humans would do. But as the tool is getting smarter, we are able to do more types of activities.

There were two big challenges in the early days. One was the complexity of the rules that you needed to adopt for a particular task and the other was the type of data that was being used as part of the business process. As we've gone along, the product has evolved and allows us to do more of the business process.

We are able to offer more automation to a business process than we could before. It's all about the business process and how much of that can be automated and what still needs to be handled manually. UiPath gives us the ability to do more with automation and need less human involvement.

We used UiPath to automate processes for a good cause, free of charge, during the COVID pandemic. We used it to build automations that would take care of activities that nurses and doctors were having to perform, to free up their time to treat patients. Reducing the admin they normally might have had to do, rather than being front-of-house and dealing with very ill patients, speaks volumes for itself. We freed up time for our nurses and doctors to treat very sick patients.

When it comes to reducing the on-premises footprint, what we've seen over the last two or three years, with the pandemic, is the move to the cloud being accelerated. The whole digital agenda was accelerated. What we're seeing now is that most of the organizations we work with are more open to using a cloud solution. However, it depends on each organization. Some of our government organizations are not allowed to use the cloud. They have to use on-premises solutions because of strict data rules. But more companies are now open to using the cloud and that has an impact on the total cost of ownership. They're not having to invest in services and that helps reduce TCO.

AI models are now being pre-trained. There's a risk there because, obviously, you are using someone else's data and someone else's bias. But if you put those aside and use the pre-trained models, it's going to reduce the time to value because you're not having to train models. You've got something that can be run out-of-the-box. To be honest, we will always build our own models rather than exclusively use UiPath's. For instance, they have an email reader. We tend to use their model in conjunction with our own and that has helped us reduce development time on our AI models and our training.

On the subject of human error, anytime you ask a human to do an admin activity where they're typing in data, there's an opportunity for human error to creep in. And that can cause catastrophic events, downstream. Where you have an automation that is guaranteed to enter data that is 100 percent correct, you're always going to reduce human error.

Automation can also be used where a decision is made. Sometimes, human decisions can be fallible. If you have a decision being made by an AI model, it's not going to have human bias. It can have other biases built-in, but you can see an improvement in some decision-making as well. What we have to understand here is the introduction of AI into RPA is still in its infancy and there's a long way to go in this area. But there are definitely improvements being made by the introduction of artificial intelligence. It depends on how you use it and how smart your understanding of it is, as well.

Automation is all about trying to reduce the touch time of a human in a process to free up their time. If the automation is implemented smartly, it does so. If it's poorly implemented, you can end up with people being given so many exceptions that the bot actually becomes redundant. But as a rule of thumb, of course, it does free up peoples' time.

Similarly, if it's deployed smartly there are some benefits in terms of cost savings. However, we're not using it because it's saving costs. We are using it for our staff who don't want to do manual activities. It's not just about dollars and saving time. It's also about our staff and not having to do menial tasks, which can be demotivating.

It's not about the tool, it's about the business process and which component works best. The most valuable feature really depends on the use case. My favorite now is Document Understanding and the AI models that are being pre-trained. That's allowing us to do more, out-of-the-box, without having to do custom programming.

When I ask my developers which product they would like to use when we are doing RPA, they always say UiPath because of its closeness to Microsoft's .NET. Again, what UiPath are doing is enabling more out-of-the-box functionality without having to do customization and coding. The developers, and I, would say that it's getting easier to use for simple automations. It still requires planning and thinking for more complex automations, but you are able to do more with fewer skills. 

UiPath has something called Citizen Developers, which is where they encourage people to build their own robots and the functionality available is greater. Whether that's a good thing or a bad thing is a question for governance.

UiPath's user community was one of the strongest aspects from an adoption point of view in the early days. The forums, the community, were always something that they invested heavily in, and that was a smart thing to do. The community is still strong. They have a Community addition and the feedback we get from some of our customers, when they first play with this, is that it's a friendly community. People are encouraged to play with UiPath, and if they get stuck, the community is willing to provide them with advice and guidance in a friendly way. Not all communities are the same, let's put it that way.

We actually teach the UiPath Academy courses. We are a UiPath-accredited trainer, but we have, at times, with smaller organizations, suggested that they take some of the training themselves. It's another great area of UiPath, in addition to the community. Their training is available free of charge. That has always been a strong point as well.

Their licensing is poorly constructed. It's too complicated and not well thought out. They also outsourced their support model, which sadly has become less friendly and more automated.

It's very much in the early days, but another area they can continue to look at is bots building robots—the ability to take a task capture and turn that into an automation. There are always concerns over that: Who's going to police the police?

I've been using UiPath since before it was called UiPath. It was previously called DeskOver. I worked for Capgemini and I worked with the product when the company consisted of 30 people in a room in the very early days. Capgemini adopted DeskOver and then it became UiPath as a growth partner. So I have been using it for coming up on 10 years.

UiPath is stable. Like any product in the early days, they were updating all of the time. That used to not sit well with our bigger customers because of their update plans. As the product has matured, it's become more stable and the release plan has become structured. You now get four updates a year. It has become more mature.

It's scalable.

The environments that it can be used in can be very complex, such as "multi-tenant," where a tenant is the protection of data from Orchestrator, where you have segregation or air gaps. We've done some projects with a defense ministry that are very complex and we've done some very simple ones.

Most organizations start small. There will probably be a pilot with a cut-down version of what is needed. As they grow and scale, they will invest in more tenants and in more infrastructure and more components of the platform.

I would rate their support at seven out of 10, but the dial is going the wrong way. Because they've outsourced their support, you're no longer dealing with the original product team. I had a very good relationship with the product team where I could almost pick up the phone if there were some proper technical problems.

Now, that is gone and we're having to deal with a third party. As UiPath have grown, they've needed to focus on their core areas and outsource other areas. But it's getting harder to get good quality support because my customers are no longer dealing with them directly, they're having to go through a third party.

Neutral

We started off with Blue Prism, which was originally designed, and still is, for back-office processes. What we used DeskOver for was front-office automations, almost like "your little buddy who sits on your desktop." As UiPath grew, it started to erode the Blue Prism market because it offered the ability to do both front-office and back-office automations. That's why it became number one. It recognized that there were two distinct markets: front-office and back-office. Blue Prism always has done back-office, and successfully, but never offered the ability to do front-office. Customers didn't want to invest in two different technologies as that would be too expensive. That's why UiPath stole the match and has never looked back.

Back then, 10 years ago, there wasn't much else to choose from. It was really "macros on steroids." The market was very different. It was Blue Prism or some of what were very young companies. Automation Anywhere was just coming in as well. 

But at Capgemini, we recognized UiPath, and we liked Daniel Dines, who was their CEO at the time and is now Co-CEO. We liked his enthusiasm and we liked the price point as well. They were from Romania, they were cheap, and they were eager. We were able to work with a company that, at that time, was very competitively priced. And we were able to get them to start building stuff that we wanted as well, as Capgemini was one of the big six. We had a lot of control over their roadmap in the early days.

Each organization we work with will have different design principles. As a general rule of thumb, we encourage investment in the cloud license model because it reduces the time that it takes to actually get the implementation up and running, and it simplifies things when it comes to TCO. However, there are organizations that are constrained by security, and therefore they can't go down that route.

I'm an architect by trade and my job is to oversee complex delivery and deployments. It's all about the architecture. An architect needs to work with the client, in the beginning, to come up with a plan and a solution that's going to be fit for purpose. In addition to architects, you need a project manager, some engineers to actually do the implementation, and you're probably going to need a tester to test and commission the environment.

The initial deployment has gotten better. When Orchestrator, which is the main administrative console, is built-in as part of the cloud offering, rather than having it locally, it makes a big difference. The cloud has made the time to set up a pilot and deploy into production much shorter than it used to be with on-premises.

Most IT projects probably take three to six months to deliver a success. Whether or not the payback happens straight away depends on the investment costs. The benefit of UiPath and RPA is the rapidity with which you can get automation into production and beginning to pay back. RPA has always been liked by people in the business because it is a rapid deployment rather than something more strategic that can take one, two, three, and sometimes, five years if it's a very large IT program of work.

ROI isn't just about the dollar. It can be other things as well. If a program of work with RPA and UiPath is deployed smartly, you can see a decent ROI. But that ROI also depends on the declarations by the business involved. How many times do they execute the process and how long does it take to do it? How many exceptions are there? How many people are involved in that process? 

Business often thinks that volumes are higher than they actually are, and they may forget that other people may have to be drafted in if there are peak periods. Due diligence in building a business case is important. What you also need to do is revisit it six months later or a year later: What did we declare? What did we actually hit? Did the bot fall over because of X, Y, or Z? It is a continuous improvement process, as well as ROI. If you get the two working correctly, you get a stronger ROI.

What we find is that some businesses who don't use our consultancy skills will try and do it themselves, and they will come across some of the pitfalls that we are fully aware of, but they may not be aware of because they're learning, and that has a big impact on ROI. If they try to go after a business process that's very complex, at the beginning, without the right skills in hand, they can suddenly find themselves in a downward spiral from a development point of view, where costs and time are overrunning. Before they know it, the declaration they set has passed and they've not been able to hit those targets. When that happens you start to see an erosion of confidence from the business side as well. It all comes together. It's all about strategic understanding and technical know-how.

We now have the challenge of cost. It depends on what you want to do. If you want a very simple robot to execute normal front-office transactions, I would recommend Microsoft Power Automate because it's free. If you are investing in more complex things, then I would always recommend UiPath. 

UiPath is starting to price itself out of the market. It's getting expensive. That's fine if they continue to push the envelope of what they offer, but it's all about perception. And the perception over the last two years with my customers is that it's expensive. I trust it, but it's expensive. 

We're seeing year-on-year price increases. There's a price point they're getting to that is about the value and they need to be very careful about that. 

UiPath, as an organization, has changed massively. When it IPO'ed it was a Romanian company and very much a European company. Now, it's an American company with American values, and I think there is a misunderstanding of the European market compared to the American market.

In terms of implementing end-to-end automation, it depends on the process. We can do more with the advancements that I've mentioned, but every business process is different. I always say to my team, "This isn't about the tail wagging the dog. It's not the technology, it's the business process, and whatever tool is right, whatever fits." There are still exceptions that need to be handled by people so we're probably not there yet with end-to-end automation. 

Most good-sized business processes have business exceptions that require involvement from people. It's what we call "human in the loop." Two or three years ago it was 80/20 between automation and human involvement. We're now probably at 85/15 or 90/10, with more of the process being automated without human involvement. That's because there are smarter bots using AI—the brain—to execute automation tasks that previously had to be handed back to a human for decision-making or some other activity.

On its own, UiPath doesn't speed up digital transformation. It's a tool. It helps, it's a contributor, but as a standalone, it doesn't. It needs other things.

I had a quick look back at what their offering was in 2019 and what it is today. That's a good way of looking at how well they've listened to their customers. They've been smart in not just providing RPA. All their components now are far more than just RPA.

They've recognized one of the biggest areas is process identification, that whole journey of identifying an opportunity and taking it through the life cycle, with things like Automation Hub.

Generally, the response I get from my customers is they're impressed with the number of solutions that are available under UiPath's Enterprise platform.