UiPath Reviews

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

Building automation using UiPath is easy.

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

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

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

UiPath has helped minimize our on-premises footprint.

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

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

UiPath has helped reduce human error.

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

UiPath has saved us thousands of dollars over the years.

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

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

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

I have been using UiPath for five years.

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

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

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

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

One person is enough for the deployment.

The implementation was completed in-house.

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

UiPath pricing is average.

I would rate UiPath nine out of ten.

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

One to three people are usually required for UiPath maintenance.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The Studio and development boards are also helpful.

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

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

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

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

I have been using UiPath for more than five years.

There are no issues with the stability.

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

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

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

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

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

Positive

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Our use cases are all across our enterprise, from HR to finance, to customer service, to laboratory operations, to logistics, to compliance, to medical, et cetera.

The unattended automation is the most valuable aspect of the solution. 

When COVID hit, and we needed to manage 200,000 samples a day and figure out where they were in the world. It would take humans about half a day to get an answer. Within a week, we put together automation that pulled data within 30 seconds from every single information system across our network.

Building automation using the solution is very easy. It's super, super easy. We have a citizen developer model where I've got 60 citizen developers trained. I've got people who started out answering the phone in customer service who are generating millions of dollars of value in automation.

Overall, this solution has saved costs for our organization by as much as $10 million.

While the solution is reducing human errors, I don’t have specifics on that.

The solution has freed up employee time. It’s hard to ballpark as what we're doing mostly is consolidating time and not back-filling from there. If you had the same amount of people as before, you didn’t really save, unless you were able to have more revenue with the same number of people.

It's been incredibly instrumental in a number of brand new business paradigms that popped up over COVID. For example, pre-COVID, if you had a respiratory tract infection, you would go to the hospital to get care, however, during COVID, the hospital wouldn’t even let you in the door. Our business model went completely upside down. The average general practitioner has 2000 patients. Our order entries went up by 500 fold. There was a backlog of testing. Automation helped manage that.

We use the UiPath Academy courses. They have been extremely helpful for us due to the fact that UiPath actually allowed us to host the fundamentals foundation training on our training platform. Now, I can assign it. I can track it. And I can reward it. The advanced developers class has been great. Getting users through that is very helpful. I take all my citizen developers through advanced training. No Studio X, no halfways. They have to really know how to do it.

The pricing particularly on the bot licenses is placed to maximize revenue for UiPath and is not in the best interests of the customer. For example, if I have 150 robots, our utilization of that is about 27% as my demands come in spikes. Most of the robots sit there doing nothing, and I paid for them.

I'd say I need better error handling capabilities, however, the updated 2020 is going to give me a better interface, so that's already there. 

If I were going to wave a magic wand, I would like to see tighter integration of task capture through the PDD generation. That process is not quite as smooth as I would like right now. I haven't really deployed it as widely as I would like as I don't want issues surrounding the document. I've got the template built up, however, we have had trouble deploying it the right way. If the integration were better, the process wouldn't be such a concern.

I've been using this solution for three years.

The stability has been good so far. 

The scalability is fantastic. We learned that during COVID. Suddenly, we have to set up accounts differently. We were doing 15 to 20 a day. When I said "Oh, by the way, schools are going to start doing testing, and I need to be able to set up a hundred accounts a day" we got to a hundred.

We have 75 users currently on the solution. We do plan to increase usage. 

The initial setup was pretty straightforward. The deployment took about six weeks.

We had the infrastructure in play in December 2019 and were functional by April 2020.

We had pieces set up already, however, we had people running orchestrators on boxes hidden in closets. We decided to centralize. Now, everything is in the data center and going on the virtual machine. Everything's under that control. Therefore, in total, it took about four months to have it properly set up.

I am extremely unhappy with the pricing model. I want a model similar to an electricity meter, whereby if I use more I am charged more. That's the ultimate model. They should also make the Studio free due to the fact that they should want developers developing. You want to maximize that capability. Why charge for that? Charge me for the Orchestrator. Charge me more for licensing if you want, however, UiPath should be maximizing my ability to create automation.

We had some experience with Automation Anywhere, Softomotive, and Blue Prism.  When we got serious about it, we did a runoff and selected a single vendor.

What set UiPath apart was their handling and selectors. The selector was head and shoulders above anyone else. We had a lot of experience with automation platforms that did not do well. Screen coordinates and scraping and control methods to move to a script, for example, were not reliable methodology.

While we are currently on version 2019.10.2, we are upgrading the 2020.10.2 version this month.

We’re just starting to use the solution’s AI functionality in our automation program. It’s a bit too early to comment too much on it.

I'd advise new users to get their governance together early.

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

We use UiPath to replicate what medical coders do by inputting codes from certain medical systems into another. It also automates our billing cycle, allowing us to input the codes directly into the insurance billing system to receive payments faster.

Our hospital doesn't get paid if we don't get those codes to the payers fast enough. We wanted to speed up the process of getting paid from insurance companies. A full-time employee can only do so much. 

Many of these people who do medical coding don't have college degrees. They're normal people with a lot going on in their lives, so they can't commit to doing this coding every moment of every day. A person can code maybe 10 to 15 records daily, but the bot could do 50. You also don't need to pay bots or give them benefits and physical workspaces. UiPath enables our organization to be more robust in what we can do. 

The company doesn't currently prioritize AI use cases, but we're trying to get the leaders to prioritize them by showing them the dollar value. AI is growing. Every year, it's getting bigger. 

In healthcare, everything is still on paper. People still fax papers to each other. Doctors have a sheet of paper or a packet of information about a patient that they can't read quickly. UiPath's Document Understanding lets doctors get a document that's already processed, and they can ask it questions.

We are looking to add AI, such as generative AI, but it requires our organization to implement it. UiPath's chatbots and autopilot require UiPath Assistant on every machine, which is challenging because many people use the same machine in the hospital. Everyone knows how to use Microsoft Copilot or ChatGPT. Even a non-technical user can go on OpenAI.com and start chatting. But with UiPath, if you want to use their chatbot or autopilot, you need UiPath Assistant.

My enterprise has been using UiPath since 2021, but my team inherited the solution from another team in 2023.

The solution just went live recently, so its stability is not yet fully determined.

The solution is scalable, as UiPath helped to revamp and update our older systems.

I rate UiPath support nine out of 10. UiPath support is amazing, especially with hypercare.

Positive

We still use Power Automate and UiPath together. Our system is entirely on-prem because some of our hospital systems must be. 

We build and deploy some of the automations in-house, but we also had a parnter build some of our stuff. 

There has been a significant return on investment. The cost of replacing employees with UiPath has shown significant savings. We probably saved $45 million this year, and we're projecting $80 million in savings next year.

UiPath is more expensive than other automation services, but the ROI justifies the cost.

I rate UiPath 10 out of 10. 

Our company, Block Mosaic, automates the creation and management of DeFi (decentralized finance) applications. This involves streamlining the development, deployment, and maintenance of these applications by automating repetitive and rule-based tasks. UiPath enables us to automate tasks such as data collection, communication with customers, integration with blockchain networks, and the execution of smart contracts.

We mostly use UiPath for the integration of bots in websites, as it provides integration features for AI chatbots, and we use it for the deployment of smart contracts on a large scale.

Automation not only accelerates our application development but also reduces errors and increases operational efficiency. It has accelerated our development process, and that means that our time-to-market has improved for DeFi applications, giving us a competitive edge in the fast-moving blockchain sector. It allows our team to focus on innovation and improving the user experience of DeFi applications.

UiPath is very important for our organization. It improves the workflow of our company, and it helps our company publish more DeFi applications. It helps accelerate the process of managing accounts in our company, as the DeFi applications we create are for managing many accounts on a platform.

It has helped with cost-cutting because UiPath chatbots have replaced many of the employees. The employees were not that efficient in comparison to UiPath bots. The bots are very efficient and productive and can do tasks in just minutes or hours, things that used to take a lot of hours to do.

We have also used the AI functionality by integrating AI chatbots into our website using UiPath. They help with amusing chats with our users for their entertainment. Our users do not like the simple Python or bots that are made with C++. They like modern bots like ChatGPT, so we have implemented that.

AI has played a significant role in improving our efficiency. Tasks that a person used to do in hours are completed by AI chatbots in a shorter time. Also, human error has been reduced when compared to bots. The bots are highly efficient. The AI functionalities have helped us manage all the smart contract deployments as well as the management of our user base. It has also helped with database and account management and in settling many transactions. And it has boosted the number of KYCs that are managed per unit.

Deploying most of the smart contracts and managing our user base are now done by the UiPath bots. This saves us about 30 to 40 percent of our time and gives us time to think more creatively about our solutions for making better DeFi apps and improving their functionalities.

Another benefit is that UiPath has reduced the cost of digital transformation because our projects require a lot of web services. We have saved money by using UiPath instead of cloud services.

One of the best features is the workflow automation. That is the most valuable feature for our company, as it plays a pivotal role in the efficient development of our DeFi applications. In the dynamic world of DeFi, where integrated financial processes and smart contracts are the norm, UiPath's workflow automation capabilities provide us with a valuable advantage. It enables the orchestration of complex sequences of tasks involved in DeFi application creation, from smart contracts to blockchain transaction monitoring.

By automating these workflows, we can ensure that all components work harmoniously and efficiently and reduce potential human error.

UiPath is also a very easy platform to use. It provides us with a canvas where we can draw from our imaginations, draw our settings, and then convert them to automations.

It allows us to enable end-to-end automation.

The user community of UiPath is very big and very helpful as well. When our team hits an error, the community is sometimes very helpful. And the customer support we are getting is also very full and good. I am satisfied with the community. I would rate it 10 out of 10.

The debugging capabilities need to be improved in UiPath because it is very difficult to find bugs in the chatbot. In Visual Studio Code, by contrast, we have an excellent debugger that fixes all the bugs.

Also, task management is complex and needs to be improved. They need to simplify the user interface so it can work properly.

I have been using UiPath for six months.

It offers a great amount of stability, and the team at UiPath is adding more and more features that are increasing the stability of the platform.

UiPath demonstrates excellent scalability with its consistent addition of features. It's impressive to witness that it remains current and continues to evolve and incorporate new capabilities. I rate the scalability at nine out of 10. It offers a great deal of scalability.

I used Blue Prism, which is quite a good solution, but it's not as easy as UiPath because it requires a high level of coding. UiPath offers good drag-and-drop functionality, which results in better automation. Also, there is no orchestrator in Blue Prism.

Automation Anywhere does not have the features that UiPath has. It does not have as good a web-based orchestrator as UiPath, which manages all the accounts and services.

Deploying the system took a couple of hours, done by a team of three to four people.

It doesn't require any maintenance.

After implementing UiPath, our organization realized a substantial return on investment. This was achieved through a combination of cost savings, increased productivity, and improved accuracy. We quantified the cost savings from reducing labor expenses and eliminating error-related costs. There is also ROI from optimizing overall operational efficiency.

Furthermore, UiPath automation capability significantly improved productivity, allowing us to process more and more transactions, take on more and more customer needs, and respond to the customers as fast as possible. We have been able to handle the increased workload. This has translated into enhanced customer satisfaction and market competitiveness.

By automating error-prone tasks, we also saw a remarkable reduction in errors and compliance-related issues, leading to further cost reductions and process efficiencies. After factoring in deployment and maintenance costs, we calculated a positive ROI, and the payback period for our initial investment was achieved in a very short timeframe.

We've seen about 30 percent ROI through the growth of our company.

The price of the Enterprise version is high, and the licensing is very complex. For small businesses like ours, licensing is a very complex task and takes too much time. I face many issues with that.

All our people, about 50 to 60 staff, use UiPath because we do not have an alternative. There is Blue Prism, Automation Anywhere, and Microsoft Power Automate, but UiPath is the best solution. The only issue is that the pricing is higher, but it has all the features that make it worth it.

UiPath has reduced a good amount of human error, but there are some errors that the chatbots make. They are resolved within seconds or minutes, although longer ones can take hours. But overall, the bots make many fewer errors and increase efficiency. It has removed about 80 percent of human errors. Since using UiPath, we have gotten good customer reviews about the websites and improvements in all our sites and management.

Using UiPath has been a great experience. It's the best alternative on the market. No alternative is better than UiPath.

We use UiPath primarily to drive efficiency within the company and introduce a new technology, which is only going to become more popular and more prevalent in the industry in the next few years.

At the moment, we use Orchestrator, Studio, and unattended robots.

We invested in an RPA solution because competitors were doing it. They do it because it's the next wave of this industry, the fourth industrial revolution. Everyone's saying that you can't escape it. It's also because our company, in the shared services department, is thinking about how to challenge our existing models. Traditionally, you chose whether to take the processes onboard or streamline them offshore, but robotics and automation are a competitive alternative to outsourcing. It's very easy. We are challenging the status quo and making sure we're evaluating all our options effectively.

We had a process that was very manual and repetitive and took a team of 14 people, all keying in manually. Now, we've managed to automate it and save 14 employees worth of effort, which amounts to around 14,000 hours to date.

We run our automations in a virtual environment as well. We do Citrix environments when we're working with our offshore partner. We do it on Citrix when working locally. Both work well. I know UiPath has developed a lot on the Citrix platform lately, so it's getting better and easier to do.

Within my immediate team, I have eight people and we can also involve the other operational teams. Including everyone who's related to automation across IT and ops and us, you're probably looking about 20 or 30 people.

The main value within Orchestrator is definitely the scheduling aspect. That includes the way you can prioritize work and use queuing systems to make sure they're at the right points in time, as well as whether they'd be long term related, especially if we're looking at finance.

In terms of Studio, it's just getting easier to use. Studio X is basically the embodiment of that. Even at this point in time with the current Studio version, anyone could pick this up and run with it to develop simpler automations.

The best feature about unattended robots is that they do exactly what you ask them to do. They are as reliable as the code that you provide them with. I think as long as you've got the right governance in place, such as IDs you have created, and you looped in the right teams, the robots are just the shell that will do exactly what you ask them to do.

I'd rate the ease of use of automating our processes at three and a half out of five at this point in time. That is because we've been on a journey over the past year or so and it's not been smooth sailing. There have been issues. I'm not saying that UiPath's support hasn't been great. It has been, but there is still a lot of work to do. It's still a relatively new product in terms of the grander scene of the industry. There's still a lot of work to do there to make sure that the integrations with existing software providers as well as new ones and API connectivities are as they should be. Often, you'll find yourselves using the workarounds in order to address issues that they haven't quite solved yet. I know that's constantly being improved, but that is the journey that we've been on.

One of the issues is with the acquisition of new types of software and new companies. It's important to introduce process documentation and make sure that it's not just making it look like UiPath products, but making it feel and act like one to us. They need to make sure it's embedded and the integration is seamless. They should just keep improving how easy it is to use. I think it's very good already, but there's always room for improvement.

I would rate the product's stability as three and a half, based on our experience. This relates directly back to where we've had challenges. Some of the integration with more mainstream products, like Excel, for example, has been questionable at times. It's just striking that balance between the fact that we want it to be democratized and easy to use by everyone, while we don't want to be in a position where we're forced out of the route to use macros necessarily within Excel. We want the UiPath software to be just as quick and easy to use as that more technical solution. Otherwise, we lose the benefit of having it. It shouldn't be technically inhibited.

I think their support offerings are good. They're very responsive. I think the challenge that they face though, is that they don't always have the answer. They don't always know what the real root cause is. Unfortunately, that's where the real crap piece comes in, which is both a blessing and a curse. It gives me some way of getting around it but it doesn't give me confidence that the issue will be addressed.

It probably took us about nine months to deploy, from the initial UiPath license to implementing the first robot in production. The reason for that is the learning curve of the team as well as the education across the operational teams to bring them up to speed and make sure that everyone's on the same journey. We were also working very closely with IT to make sure that we've got the right infrastructure in place, as well as support models, governance frameworks, etc. Without it, you can't really get anything done. It's a new technology and it was a new concept for everyone. Needing a robot ID, for example, was something that was never discussed before. Lengthy conversations had to be had to make sure that we weren't putting anything at risk with data privacy, for example.

The setup was both straightforward and complex, really. Some bits we're quite straightforward, but other parts were more complex. Especially the infrastructure we're still dealing with now one year on still has some complexities. We're still thinking about credential management versus the use of virtual machines and whether we should be using high density or not. There is also the matter of all the different types of offerings. There's a matrix that you have to abide by and I don't think UiPath is even aware of all the conflicts between the different options. That's something that we're still working through right now, but I'm sure they're going to address it.

We outsourced the implementation.

The performance benefits usually you would see instantly. We had a realization that there were some process changes that we probably needed to make, which we hadn't done prior to going live. I think it took us probably three months before we really saw the benefit coming through.

It's the same as what you would see on any of their list prices. There is also a corporate discount because of scale. Overall, we think it was a competitive price offering. They were the cheapest out of the three, so that's why we went with them.

We looked across the big three: Blue Prism, Automation Anywhere, and UiPath. We did have a few others we considered, such as Kofax and Pegasystems. However, they're not dedicated RPA tools. That narrows you down immediately to probably select one of the top three dedicated RPA providers.

UiPath is a very unique example of being very technology-based from its history, but also its culture is very different to the other two. They're trying to be humble. UiPath has a different background and cultural fit, which is very much like our company. That was definitely one of the reasons we chose them. The other reason was the views. We just find it easier to use. The strategy, especially at the point in time when it was announced where the product was headed, was very much that they're trying to push this out to a robot for every person. We want everyone to be able to access it, too.

Do what you would normally do with any vendor. Check out the competition and see what is right for your company. I'll be shocked if you don't think that UiPath is the best because there's a reason why it's at the top of the Gartner reports all over the shop. It's got great user feedback on places like IT Central Station and other review boards. There is absolutely a reason for that. Also, assess the other values that you place importance on. It's not all about costs. Cultural fit was a massive deal for us. What would you envision your company looking like with the uptake of automation? Is it a cultural thing? Is it purely about efficiency or do you want everyone to be up-skilled for what the workforce in the future will look like? That means that actually having everyone being able to access the tools is very important.

I would rate UiPath as eight out of ten.

I have used the UiPath Academy RPA training, although not completed it. I am a bit busy doing a few of the bits, but a lot of my team have completed level one and some completed level three. I have one member of my team who just completed all the training available online. He's done every single module that you have available, including obviously the RPA Advanced Developers training. I think there is a wealth of knowledge there. It's incredible, but it's the same training material that's used internally for UiPath as well as other companies. I think as long as they stay on top of it and make sure that it never gets overlooked, it's a great resource for anyone to get, in order to up-skill in the new technology. If they constantly talk about the democratization of RPA, this is fundamental to that.

The training has helped my team get up to speed, apply best practices, and make sure that we're not wasting time. We were trying to work it out for ourselves in a bit of a haphazard manner. It also forces standardization, of course. Anyone else who decides to get qualified can use it. If you're thinking about doing attended automations, I think it's the right way to do it. Everyone has the same set of standards and rules to build off of.

I would rate the training as four and a half out of five because there's always room for improvement. However, I think it's very thorough and they've covered all the aspects, both technical and not technical. It is very impressive.

I think there are different perks to using one type of robot as opposed to another. The unattended robot cost is higher, therefore the need to make sure the utilization rate is high is paramount to getting your value out of it. I think that makes it challenging but worthwhile. There are different types of processes you will end up pushing towards with an unattended automation profile, whereas an attended profile, which we're starting to move into now, leads to other types of automation opportunities. Attended robots are cheaper, which means it is easier to achieve ROI, but you can almost expect less utilization because it won't be people's full-time jobs. They won't get back all the time and there will be licenses to honor which are being consumed. That has to be baked into the business case. I think you will end up with a portfolio of both. The big opportunities probably sit within an unattended fashion.

We use UiPath to automate ERP and CRM portal processes, integrate them with SAP and various external applications, gather data, and perform functions to generate reports. UiPath enables us to carry out numerous activities, and its usage is not limited to a single variable but rather multiple ones.

UiPath's primary goal is to enhance the scalability and accuracy of daily tasks within any organization. The core concept behind UiPath is to boost productivity by mimicking human actions, automating repetitive tasks and freeing up time for individuals to focus on other activities.

Compared to other RPA tools in the market, such as Blue Prism, Automation Anywhere, Worksoft Certify for automation testing, and Selenium, which uses high-level coding, UiPath is a low-to-no-code automation platform. This makes it user-friendly and provides a comprehensive library built into the tool, enabling developers to automate various tasks and processes efficiently.

UiPath enables end-to-end automation. A negative side of this automation is that it replaces a human already doing that specific job. A human previously did any automation implemented through UiPath. However, by automating through UiPath, we free up that employee's bandwidth, enabling them to focus on other tasks or housekeeping activities instead of repeatedly performing the same repetitive task.

The UiPath user community is extremely active and knowledgeable.

I recall a situation where a business had to generate quarterly reports. Before automation, they could only produce 200 to 300 reports per quarter. However, after implementing bots, productivity increased to around 900 reports. Additionally, UiPath's logic query feature allows for Excel calculations to be done in a fraction of a second, a task that would typically take a human around an hour. Many bots have reduced business processing times from one hour to five minutes, and tasks that used to take one to two hours are now completed in five to ten minutes with high accuracy.

To learn UiPath effectively, we need a reliable source that provides accurate information. UiPath Academy serves as the ideal platform for this purpose—additionally, companies value certification as proof of UiPath proficiency. If we aim to become UiPath certified, UiPath Academy is our best option, as its courses are specifically designed to help us succeed in the certification exam. While other platforms like Udemy or Coursera offer UiPath courses, we may need more preparation for the certification, which involves a mix of theoretical, conceptual, and practical questions. We can learn practical skills elsewhere, but UiPath Academy is the best resource for mastering the theoretical and conceptual knowledge required for certification.

UiPath helps reduce the cost of digital transformation by around 30 percent.

UiPath helps reduce human error by 95 to 99 percent. The bot doesn't make mistakes. Because of the high accuracy, we started with ten bots and now use 200 bots.

A UiPath bot can save one full-time employee's time per year.

UiPath is highly versatile, offering multiple automation options for various applications. For example, UiPath can automate email, PDF invoices, images, Excel documents, and websites. This flexibility extends to its OCR feature, enabling the automation of any invoice or PDF invoice. Secondly, UiPath's exception-handling capabilities greatly simplify the automation process. Lastly, UiPath utilizes minimal code, making it a low-code or no-code platform. Consequently, even individuals with limited programming knowledge can automate tasks using UiPath after completing a basic course.

The Excel operation needs some modifications. Image processing is also crucial. For example, if the image is clear, UiPath can easily read it. If the image needs clarification, UiPath can't read the object easily. To some extent, Excel automation, especially handling macros, needs improvement. UiPath needs a comprehensive feature set for automating Excel and has limited options. In some cases, we must use macro-enabled Excel files. Therefore, Excel automation and OCR require enhancements.

I have been using UiPath for four years.

Bots rely on numerous third-party applications, and several factors can impact their performance, including the virtual machine's capabilities and the responsiveness of the applications the bot interacts with. Therefore, UiPath isn't solely responsible for failures; issues could stem from your server or the third-party applications UiPath connects with. UiPath's stability is rated at eight point five out of ten.

I'm a delivery lead. As organizations grow, they add technology and features to their ERP applications. This requires frequent modifications to automation bots developed for specific functions. UiPath's scalability feature allows me to implement change requests easily at any time. Instead of extensive development, I can lift and test the desired changes within the existing code. UiPath also incorporates AI/ML features, which are in high demand in this generation. This addition of AI/ML capabilities will likely enhance UiPath's scalability.

I would rate the scalability of UiPath seven out of ten.

I used Worksoft Certify for automation testing, but it doesn't compare to UiPath due to its limited features. Exception handling is not well-defined in Worksoft Certify, and I find flowchart programming much more complex compared to UiPath. In many ways, UiPath is superior to Worksoft Certify, which has many limitations.

The initial deployment is straightforward because the UiPath team will be available throughout the process, participating in calls and meetings to provide comprehensive assistance with the deployment.

The deployment takes one to two days, provided all approvals are in place. Approximately 12 people are involved, including five from our team, as well as members of the server and networking teams.

We implemented it in-house with the help of UiPath.

I don't handle the costing aspect as it's not within my scope. However, I understand that initially, businesses or clients might perceive UiPath as expensive. While this is true to some extent, the features and flexibility UiPath provides often lead clients to realize its value in the long run.

I would rate UiPath seven out of ten.

We have 55 UiPath users in our organization.

Code maintenance is necessary for UiPath due to the bot's interaction with external applications and websites. The bot must be adjusted accordingly if any of these applications or websites are updated.

The primary challenge encountered during UiPath implementation is the disparity between development and production environments. Often, code is developed in a non-production system where access to certain applications, such as a client's portal, is limited. This necessitates dry runs in the non-production environment to ensure the bot functions correctly without making any unintended changes. Once the bot is moved to the production system, multiple controlled tests are required before it can be fully operational. The unavailability of a complete testing environment mirroring production conditions significantly hinders the development and deployment process.

I recommend UiPath to any user because it doesn't require a hard-code programmer to be an RPA developer. This makes it easier and more cost-effective to hire resources. Other tools on the market require good programming knowledge, which means you need to hire someone who knows both the tool and a programming language, making resource hiring expensive. Secondly, UiPath uses minimal coding, which makes debugging very easy. UiPath is also adding AI and ML features and upgrading the OCR features regularly.

We're focusing heavily on document understanding processes. We use it to extract invoices, data tables from PDFs, budget, and PITBULL automation that's heavily focused on UI navigation and PDF manipulation. That's our main focus at the moment.

We've had a few calls with UiPath where they've shown demos on how they use the AI Center, but we've yet to find something that we can look in and see because we are a financial institution. We want to trust AI. We need to build our confidence in that before we actually implement it. It's at an experimental stage for us.

It started off as optimizing redundant processes to make sure that we enhance department abilities. We moved into the research sphere last year, where we focused on taking large datasets and throwing them up into data tables, and getting that data from PDFs or web pages. We started using data extraction and table extraction, and that's what drove our projects from that point. 

Document Understanding is a key feature for us. We find that really useful because the OCR technology, the RedJack extraction that it uses, is easy to implement with a very level structure involved, even for unstructured PDFs and structured PDFs. 

We mainly use Studio and Action Center. 

In some cases, we use Task Capture to build outflows.

We started off as pure RPA, focusing on building out a citizen developer program with low code person-by-person automation that users can trigger by themselves. That then evolved into unattended automation. We started looking into document understanding processes and trying to get involved with the AI Center as well. 

From the start of the citizen developer program, it went really successfully. We moved into the unattended sphere, and we're looking into big data.

The document understanding has room for improvement. The handwritten documents need to be optimized further on the OCR extraction, making sure that we extract accuracy above 80% because we do see a lot of failure rates when it comes to handwritten documents. There's a lot of room for improvement there.

UiPath has referred to the fact that they are still building upon OCR and document understanding. But with the use of Generative AI, we're hoping to see improvements. We're hoping that might be something that we start later on. 

I have been using UiPath for four years. 

The stability of UiPath really depends on who builds the automation. 

However, the latest version releases, such as 2023.4.4, have been known to contain bugs. For example, we recently upgraded to 2023.4.4 and faced a lot of studio bugs, which forced us to downgrade to 2023.4.2. 

The upgrades on other orchestrators were fine, but there was a bit of a change to the UI that took some time to get used to.

Upon their version releases, there should be a bit more due diligence before they are pushed to customers because almost every time we're given the opportunity to upgrade, there are issues where we have to scale back, wait a while, and then upgrade again.

Scalability depends on the team. It depends on your vision, but UiPath definitely opened the doors for making sure that the framework is in place and that they are aligned with our vision so that they can help us in terms of scaling the automation to the degree that we want. 

When we are looking to scale up the automation that we have, the customer support guys are very much on hand to give us the technical support that we require. UiPath's scalability is pretty enhanced. 

When you buy the enterprise licenses at the tier that we're on, you're provided a technical or client manager, and we find that we can easily contact them. 

We have a weekly call with our team, and any support question is rerouted through them because their portal can be a bit slow at times. 

UiPath's endorsement of the community has helped drive the success of UiPath because no other RPA vendor really has the community of support that UiPath has. That's a big one for us.

UiPath does have a good community, but the support portal is probably something that they need to work on. 

Neutral

We use Power Automate as well. It is something that we try to marry with UiPath, especially when it comes to office app integration and things like that. Power Automate is simpler to use. 

We previously had some free Prism automation, and then we decided to switch over to UiPath simply due to the fact that the cost savings were a lot better.

Orchestrator was a selling point for us because our control room is something that we would be very interested in in terms of monitoring insights and transactional items. That's why we switched over to UiPath.

We've tried to take both tools and get the best out of both worlds. Anything that any of our automated processes involve Microsoft Teams, SharePoint, Outlook, or anything like that, we tend to use Power Automate simply because of the ease of use. 

We're using the local installation. Everything is localized to our premises. We have a lot of strict protocols, being a financial institution, so, we don't really want to open ourselves up to any sort of cloud orchestration.  

We tried to utilize Automation Hub to predict our ROI. The reason that we're using automation is to assist teams rather than just kick the task away from them. It's just very robust. 

We haven't seen any major cost savings, but we're an early team at Cowen. Maybe later on down the line, we'll get some solid figures.  

The pricing is a bit convoluted. We have an overallocation of licenses at the moment. Citizen developer licenses are something that we probably need to refine. 

They probably oversell it a bit to the point where we would propose that we may use x amount of licenses but in reality, we're probably only using a fraction of that.

There's room for improvement in how they sell their product.

I would rate the solution a ten out of ten. Out of all the RPA vendors that I've had access to, UiPath is the easiest to use. It's the most in-depth when it comes to being able to have automation and it works in the way that you want it to work. Other vendors like Automation Anywhere, Blue Prism, or Power Automate have rigid models. Some of them are web-based, which we don't really like because we're a financial institution, so we like local installations. UiPath tops them all.  

For anyone looking to enter the world of automation, UiPath should be the first point to call. They have a much better idea of how to generate a productive automation team for companies.