UiPath Reviews

Our client wants to reduce their manual work, so they feel an automated solution would work better. The company has one staff member who is well-versed in automation, but they wanted us to suggest more solutions. We decided we should stick with UiPath since they are familiar with it. It's a local community bank with many feeds at the end of each business day. They have about 50 agents handling those feeds.

The client caters to poor people in the community who tend not to trust banks. The community bank sends agents into the fields and shops. They show them a card and suggest that they save a certain amount of money each day. They collect it and take it in a book. They then have to bring the book back together with the money. They're helping the poorest of the poor to save money. Based on what they've saved, they can get a loan. 

The bank encourages customers to save, so they collect daily. They were bringing this data back to the office and entering it by hand. We showed them that UiPath could do all that for them.

We prefer a cloud-based solution because we are a digital-transformation company. However, the client wanted to keep everything on-premises, so we needed to show the benefits of migrating to the cloud. In Africa, power is a problem. Energy costs a lot, and power outages can disappoint customers. In the end, we won them over by showing them the advantages of the cloud, so UiPath is deployed on the cloud. It's highly available, and they want their data to be accessible all the time.

We have about 30 UiPath users, most of whom are IT Administrators. We use the generic term IT Administrators. The company is structured so anyone can be deployed anywhere at any time. We use UiPath extensively in the particular scenario that necessitated our initial use. If we get more clients seeking to reduce repetitive tasks, I believe we will continue to expand our usage. 

With UiPath, we could automate many of our client's data entry tasks, making the process easier and more efficient. I would estimate it helped us to eliminate about 80 percent of repetitive tasks. The Automation Cloud helped us reduce costs and ensured the solution was always available. In the event of downtime or disaster, everything can still be recovered from the cloud.

We would recommend cloud solutions from Azure, AWS, etc. Using UiPath made us see that we should not just rely on cloud-native tools alone; we should look outside the box. Because of our experience with UiPath, we are more open to tools that will help the client work more efficiently. This made the client's life easy because it enabled them to reduce hiring costs and become more efficient.

UiPath handles all the infrastructure, eliminating the maintenance burden because we don't have clients constantly calling us about technical problems. UiPath helped us achieve our objectives faster than we would've normally. The project was supposed to be delivered in 10 months. However, because we eliminated repetitive tasks, we delivered the project in about six months, saving time and costs. UiPath Automation Cloud also reduced the total cost of ownership from infrastructure, maintenance, and updates.

Automation Cloud helped us handle as many customers as possible because the vendor takes care of the maintenance and everything. We can spend more time focusing on the work we're supposed to do to handle as many customers as possible. UiPath provides a preconfigured solution, which offers more value to our clients because we do not need to configure anything. 

It reduced our team's workload by enabling end-users to create their apps. We can easily walk them through the process over a Zoom call. Instead of throwing the whole backload at us, we can give them instructions over Zoom in an hour or two, and they can pick it up from there. It has dramatically reduced the stress on the IT department.

We've used the UiPath Academy courses. Sometimes, a client will call you, "Your company recommended this to us, and now we're having problems." They expect us to know everything, so we need to get information from the academy. The most significant benefit of UiPath Academy is that I don't look like an idiot in front of my boss and the customers. It makes me much smarter and more authoritative.

The UiPath community is also a valuable resource. When I have an urgent question, I post it on the community forum, and someone who has had a similar problem will respond quickly. I don't need to spend time researching. Product support is better with the UiPath community. 

UiPath reduced the costs of digital transformation. Digital transformation would always involve some costs, whether you like it or not, but when you look at it holistically, it's still cheaper than doing things the other way around. It also reduced the cost of automated operations by an estimated 65 percent and overall costs by about 45 percent.

The solution dramatically reduced human error. No one on my team or my boss would ever want to return to when we weren't using these solutions. We've discovered that it saves money on hiring costs and reduces many problems. It has freed up employee time. We delivered a 10-month project in six months. A technician gets assigned to a client for a specific number of months. If you finish earlier, you can spend time on another fun project you want to take on in the company.

It had a positive impact on employee morale. We were excited because we had four extra months. My colleague began attending an online school that his work usually would not give him time to focus on. He used that time to finish his master's degree, so he's happy. 

I like the fact that UiPath makes everything fast, and you don't need to employ as many people to do all the dirty work. All of our clients only used UiPath. I've never tested Automation Anywhere, but UiPath is excellent. They are doing a lot to stay ahead of the competition. I feel that if they continue doing what they're doing, the competitors would always have a lot of work to do because they will always be on top of the league. It helps with end-to-end automation. We discovered that we don't want to do tasks manually, so automating the entire workflow helped to achieve that.

The attended automation feature has been helpful in my experience because my company works on other companies' projects and solves their problems. If I'm assigned to a particular company, and I feel that this would be the easiest way to get the work done, I'll use any of the automation possibilities that we have.

The AI functionality makes life easier for everyone because it helps us deal with complex processes. We use machine-learning models for the most difficult problems. At the end of the day, the solution understood the problems because we had already created models. It understood what the problems were and could follow through to solve them.

What I'd like to see is more tutorial videos on YouTube. Maybe they could have a YouTube channel, and the community could empower more content creators to make how-to videos. When clients call us with issues, we wouldn't have to explain. 

If a client using Azure has an issue, we assign an engineer. Let's say you still have a problem after the engineer has consulted with you and referred you to the official documentation. It would be helpful if there were a content creator on YouTube to explain the problem in an accessible way.

I began using UiPath a little over a year ago. I work at a consulting company, and one of our clients uses UiPath. They needed advice about how to undergo a transformation. 

UiPath is stable.

UiPath is super scalable. We are a company that always likes to think outside the box. We invest in research and development to stay ahead of the market and our competitors.

I rate UiPath support eight out of ten.

Positive

In the beginning, we had some issues. We found it complex initially, but it became simpler over time. The deployment didn't take much time. It was less than a week. There was a learning curve, so that's why it took us so long. Maybe it would only take a day if we knew what we do now.

No matter how much you complain about the price of a SaaS product, it's still cheaper than building your own data center and other infrastructure. That's my perspective as someone who works for a company that does digital transformation. The price is cheaper than building and deploying your own solutions. 

I rate UiPath 10 out of 10. I recommend trying it for a month. We tried it, and now we are hooked and still use it. I don't think anyone on my team or my boss wants to switch solutions anytime soon.

Our company is in the insurance industry and uses the solution to run RPA processes for the claims department to free up staff time. 

The scheduler tool is valuable because I can slow or speed up run times during peak use. 

Our solution is on-premises so we are unable to utilize phone apps.

I have been using the solution for three years. 

The solution's stability is 100% and really good because it never goes down.

The solution offers the best scalability of any known product. 

I have not utilized technical support because that is handled by other team members. 

I personally did not use another product prior to learning the solution. 

I was not involved in the initial setup. 

We track ROI quarterly and through Q2 we have saved more than $100,000 by using automated processes. 

We are getting to the point of reaching full ROI but need to build more automated processes to reach that goal. 

I am sure my company evaluated other options but the solution was already in place when I joined the team. 

I utilized Academy courses to understand the solution's full capabilities but haven't yet used many of those features such as AI. I am currently learning about OCR and plan to use AI in the future. 

Learning the solution is a case of "I don't know what I don't know" so it is important to become aware of all the tools at your disposal. 

I rate the solution a nine out of ten. 

Our company uses the solution to automate used to be a completely manual set of processes. 

The solution has cut down the amount of time needed to process certain transactions. We went from fifteen hours to three hours of processing time. 

The solution has freed up human resources to work on other things. This has created a better work-life balance because staff are not stressed when working on a particular process. 

There is much enthusiasm around using the solution and we plan to take advantage of courses offered through its Academy. 

The solution is easy to use, has a good user interface, and processes transactions quickly. 

Initial deployment is very complex and some integrators need better training. 

I have been using the solution for one year. 

The solution is stable. 

The solution is scalable.

Customer service is good and I rate it an eight out of ten. 

Positive

The solution is the only one we have used. 

The initial setup was complex because our vendor was not as qualified as we thought and created code that did not work. The process to correct that was hard.

We implemented through a vendor but had many coding issues to correct. 

Our vendor experience was a four out of ten. 

The solution has gotten pricier. 

We did not evaluate other options. 

So far, we are happy with the solution. It seems very stable and scalable with many different uses. We are still in the early stages of using the solution, but things look promising. We are not yet using the solution's AI function. 

I rate the solution a nine out of ten. 

We're a blockchain company that provides finance and analytics solutions, so we have multiple use cases, including organizational process automation. We do some end-to-end automation and automate some repetitive tasks. In the future, we plan to target some advanced processes like blockchain and machine learning. 

One example of a specific use case is market auditing. We are auditing our sales team and plan to audit our customers. This entails inspecting data produced by two third-party platforms, Salesforce and SAE, and combining that data into one Excel workbook to perform some calculations. We perform some analytics and then export the data from Excel to our CRM. Transferring the customer data to our CRM is incredibly time-consuming because we deal with more than a thousand lines of data. It takes a minimum of two hours to upload all the data to the portal.

UiPath helps us extract the numbers from the CRM side and share them with our marketing and financial team. This involves four processes that we combine into one automated endpoint process. The reduced workload across the three involved departments translates to cost savings equalling about 2.6 FTE monthly.

Another use case is to promote our components, services, and products. We are building a promotions portal that is attached to Excel. The promotion will involve maybe 500 line items and multiple roles. While you can do this manually, there is a significant potential for human error that could mean a loss of revenue. For instance, if we accidentally offer the same customer two discounts, we have to honor that. We haven't had any errors using UiPath in the last six months. 

We have three offices in our country, but the solution is deployed on a virtual machine in the head office. If a branch location requires process automation, we automate that solution at headquarters, and all the infrastructure is centrally managed. The primary users are six people from my team, including me, a business analyst, a developer, and three consultants. There are also two people from another group managing the UiPath infrastructure. 

We use UiPath Action Center, a capability that allows us to engage businesspeople and incorporate them into our automation. In total, we have about 12 to 15 people using UiPath, but some of them have limited privileges. 

Management prepared a presentation last week detailing how we've benefited from the start of 2021 to June 2022. We uploaded 149 processes into our unattended environment, and the robot runtime is 15,028 minutes, so we saved 75,114 hours. In the last year and a half, we saved the equivalent of 43 full-time employees.

 We have automated many tasks that would've been done manually, and we are reassigning our employees to other valuable tasks. This translates into a cost savings of about $98,000 for the last two years. Performing repetitive tasks is also demoralizing. If you're constantly performing representative tasks, your motivation level very goes down, so keeping our employees motivated is an added benefit. 

I am not an experienced developer, and working with UiPath has taught me a lot. We use UiPath Orchestrator with a combination of unattended and attended bots. That functionality allows you to manage your platform virtually. You can monitor everything and assign new roles to users. 

I would like to see more native AI and machine learning functionality. UiPath doesn't cover all the options for a few tasks that we require, so it's hard to do advanced automation. For example, UiPath chatbots are one area where machine learning capabilities could help. Users ask the robot questions, triggering those kinds of processes. 

We started using UiPath in September 2020.

UiPath is a highly stable solution. We haven't encountered any bugs, downtime, or other issues since we started to use the solution. We also don't experience any instability when working with components in other projects. 

UiPath is a highly scalable solution because some of its capabilities can be used in other projects. This means we don't have to rebuild the solutions we have already developed. With the help of these solutions and features, we can reduce the development time. 

I rate UiPath support eight out of 10. Technical support is generally good, but there's one thing I don't like. UiPath support's technical expertise is impressive, but the response time isn't ideal. When you raise a ticket on the UiPath portal,  customer support can sometimes take up to 24 hours to respond. 

Positive

Setting up UiPath was highly straightforward because we had help from the vendor team. Our deployment team had eight people total, including me, a business analyst, a developer, and two IT people plus two people from the UiPath side. It took approximately one month because we implemented the UiPath solution on-premises. We had one or two technical meetings with the UiPath team and we needed to build some architecture. They suggested that we leverage our existing servers on Microsoft Azure and Google Cloud.  

Then, we integrated all those solutions on the UiPath side. We installed a UiPath solution in the dev environment where we were developing the processes and one in the live environment. We have more than 32 licenses, so we created 32 virtual machines on Google Cloud and Azure. 

Every organization needs to cut costs, and all customers try to negotiate a discount on licensing. When we initially tried UiPath, they offered a discount of nearly seven percent, but they haven't since. UiPath's price is a little high compared to other solutions, but it's easier to use and maintain. We purchased a three-year license.

We tried Blue Prism, Automation Anywhere, and another tool by IBM, but I didn't care for those solutions because they were too complex. UiPath is easy to use, monitor, and manage. Automation Anywhere and Blue Prism lacked some of UiPath's features. For example, UiPath allows us to maintain our environments remotely through UiPath Orchestrator. 

I rate UiPath nine out of ten. It's a great solution. I highly recommended UiPath over other automation tools I've used.

We are working with automation, and it is very useful for my enterprise and our clients. We are using UiPath for building applications for automation purposes. Some of our clients are in the banking industry. They ask us to create applications to automate their processes, and we use UiPath for that.

Our overall productivity has increased because the bandwidth of our people has increased. Previously, when we were manually doing a particular task, it used to take us two hours, and after building the application with UiPath, the same task is taking around 10 seconds. From two hours, the time has come down to 10 seconds, which increases our bandwidth and productivity.

We are moving into robotics, and in robotics, advanced NLP and AI are being used. As tasks move from being manual to being automated, it definitely reduces the effort and improves productivity. The saved time can be utilized in a better way.

Its ease of use is valuable. For building an application, if I give this product to a newbie, he or she would be able to easily use it and build an application with minimum knowledge. No extra training is required. Its features are self-explanatory, and anyone can understand them, which is the main feature of this product.

I extensively work on the automation part, and I like the drag-and-drop functionality for workflows. Its graphical workspace or visualizations make it a unique product. It provides good visualizations, which are helpful in understanding the workflow. I am very impressed by its drag and drop functionality, and I would recommend it to everyone.

It can be improved in terms of platform integration. It is platform-independent, but it should be easy to integrate with different platforms, such as Windows, Linux, Cloud, etc. If I am using AWS for my server response, I should be able to integrate that into UiPath. 

If I can get some manuals along with the product, it will be good to see all the features that are available in it.

I have been using this solution for the last eight years. I have been in the software industry for about eight and a half years, and I have been using UiPath very regularly for my day-to-day work. 

Its stability is good. In the last couple of years, I didn't have any problems. I would rate it a nine out of ten in terms of stability.

We have a team of 30 to 40 people who use this solution. At this time, we don't have plans to increase its usage. If the usage of this tool grows, it would definitely be better. It will increase productivity and more efficient use of our company.

I would rate them a nine out of ten.

Positive

I have used Visual Studio previously to build applications. I switched to UiPath because I like its interface and the drag-and-drop functionality. When I am building an application using this, it's very easy to edit the flow. I am very impressed with UiPath.

I'm involved in the development and deployment of applications. I have the knowledge, so for me, it is straightforward. Most of the features are self-explanatory, but there are certain features for which a newbie might have to refer to the manual.

The duration varies from application to application. It can be anything from 30 minutes to six hours. For the development of applications, we use the SDLC model. When our testing is complete, we deploy the application. We have a team of six to eight people for implementation. They are from the product team and the support team. They are software developers at different levels.

In terms of maintenance, it requires upgrades. It is a timely activity, and it happens once or twice a year. We do not have a separate team for maintenance. The same team involved in its deployment takes care of its maintenance.

We are able to build applications for our clients, and they are also buying them. So, we have definitely seen an ROI.

We are an enterprise. So, its price is bearable for us,  but I am not sure about the small industry. It might be expensive for them.

It is a promising tool. It is very helpful for my day-to-day work. For automation applications, this is the best solution. Its drag-and-drop functionality and visualizations make the work easy. It is a very good tool for me.

I would rate it a nine out of ten because I'm very impressed with this tool.

We are an agency, and we implement it for our clients. We are not a direct reseller of UiPath. We manage the marketing services and the operations for some companies, and we provide the service of implementing it without having any contracts with UiPath. It is just a service from us.

It is being used in almost all industries and departments, but we have been focusing on finance and operations, such as handling the orders, getting invoices, reading invoices, and managing the orders. We use OCR to read invoices and process them. We also use it for the service department. UiPath is perfect for service and finance.

It is deployed on the cloud and on-premises.

It is very easy to build automation by using UiPath. It is very easy to use. It is different from other platforms, such as Automation Anywhere, which are more difficult to use. The user interface of UiPath is more smooth and easier than the rest. It is easy to build automation without any coding knowledge.

It is helpful for end-to-end automation. We can start with the automation of a simple task, and we can get deep insights and discover new tasks to be automated.

It saves time and money for us and our clients. It has improved the data entry accuracy and minimized the work, human errors, mistakes, and risks. We don't have mistakes anymore. The time saved is now being utilized for more logical things that a person should be doing. 

We are having deeper connections and relations with our clients after using UiPath and fully transforming their operations. It helps with digital transformation without needing any other tools. It can be enough to successfully do digital transformation and achieve success, which increases the customer satisfaction score and saves a lot of time and money. 

Their automation cloud offering has decreased the time-to-value. You can start seeing the effect of UiPath and the automation in the first month. Especially the businesses that have never automated their tasks and never used AI and machine learning for their operations can see the effect in the first month. It is incredibly effective in many aspects, such as time, money, operations, and risks of mistakes. We are able to speed up all the operations. It has improved our communication with the clients. We are able to resolve customer errors and deal with tickets faster.

Their automation cloud offering helps to decrease the total cost of ownership, but other tools also have the same benefit. It saves us a lot of money when you use it with big data or a large volume of data sets. We had an on-premises setup for other clients, but it required big servers and containers to handle a large amount of data. 

If it wasn't a cloud offering, and it was only on-premises, we would be spending thousands on other platforms on hosting and deployment. On-premises setup requires a lot of processing speed and bandwidth and large disk sizes. The cloud offering is not very heavy. So, it saves a lot.

It helps with fast innovation when it comes to automation. It has a lot of intelligence. I could find use cases that I never thought could be done with UiPath, or I never thought could be automated. UiPath helped me to discover the use cases to automate almost the entire operation.

We use the UiPath Apps feature, and it has helped to reduce a lot of workload, not only for us but also for our clients. This was one of the main features that everyone loved. We used it at the beginning for building apps for the clients to handle the workflows. We didn't need expert developers to do this because it is low code. It helps us create professional applications for our internal use and for our clients. Our workload is reduced by 250% by using the UiPath Apps.

I can use the templates to create apps in no time. I can prototype an app with drag and drop. There are multiple templates, and with drag and drop, I can easily build apps and put features and automation that are otherwise time-consuming.

With attended automation, we get the benefits of our employees and robots. The robots provide digital assistance to our employees. We can create robots to assist our employees, and we can create integrations with the ERP and other software for a fast and smooth operational workflow.

We love the AI inside UiPath and the AI center. With the preconfigured templates and out-of-the-box models and templates offered by UiPath, we can take everything to production quickly. Its AI is the main thing that helps us discover what automation needs to be done after deploying it for one week or two weeks and letting our users and our clients work normally. From the insights and the screen recording, the AI starts to learn and recommend what we can do. With the very deep insights that it provides, we are able to find automation opportunities.  We can use AI for decision-making. We are able to make better decisions based on the insights from user interactions, data, and performance.

It speeds up digital transformation. I personally find it enough to do simple digital transformation. 

The UiPath marketplace is valuable. I can easily find templates. They are easy to use, and I am ready for work. When I implement it for clients who have no experience at all, they can easily work with it by using the templates from the marketplace. They don't need to be an expert or have a lot of experience. Anybody can use it without good knowledge.

I love it for the deep artificial intelligence that it has. It has the AI to recognize the processes, analyze all the workflows through user interactions, and discover automation opportunities. It is very intelligent in these aspects.

UiPath's deployment is one of the easiest ones, which is very beneficial for us. It is the key factor in convincing the customers and clients to do digital transformation. When we explain and show them the capabilities of UiPath and the use cases based on different industries, they get convinced. They ask us to implement it for them, which opens the door to do other services for them. One of the highlights for us was being part of the Egypt digital transformation campaign. As a part of this campaign, we implemented it for three government institutions. It was a big achievement for us to be part of it and do this for them. It was based on the UiPath presentation and the explanation of its capabilities. As soon as they got convinced, they invited us to start implementing it.

The UiPath team is incredibly fast, and they are very good at handling the community and the requests for improvements and development. They do the updates frequently, and they fix bugs and listen to the customers.

I don't have critical dislikes, but there is a scope for improving it. Its deployment is easy but there is a learning curve in the beginning. Its onboarding isn't easy, and there is no onboarding guidance. They need to take more care of the onboarding guidance and improve it. It is user-friendly for me and for most people, but for people who have zero programming knowledge, it is hard. They have to turn to the community and other places for knowledge.

Its documentation is good and helpful, but it is not perfect. It is good for people who have basic knowledge about it. 

I have done UiPath Academy courses. I liked them, and for me, they were easy because I have an idea about automation and robotic processes, but most of my team had a hard time understanding and learning from the UiPath Academy courses. They didn't have a fast learning curve. It is not bad, but it is very hard for beginners and starters to learn from these courses.

When it is on-premises, a lot of times, when we are dealing with a large volume of data, it starts to freeze. It also happened once on the cloud. They need to improve the processing and workload capability of UiPath when somebody has a large volume of data. Currently, it freezes, and it is not so stable when dealing with large data.

It is also difficult to extract data from some of the things, such as IFrames. It is not easy to extract the data. 

Their customer support and licensing can also be improved.

It has been about two and a half years. I started using it at the end of 2019 or the beginning of 2020.

It is useful for almost all industries and departments. We have installed it for over 40 or 50 businesses. We have installed it for small-sized businesses, and we have also installed it for enterprises. We have gone through many industries, and we have been using it for almost all the departments. 

Their customer support can be improved. Based on the experience of our team and our clients, there have always been delays in answering and resolving the issues. So, we are always the people who fix the issues for our clients. They need to improve the quality of the training for customers and for their support team.

It provides a return on investment and solves any problems of operation monitoring and recurring activities. It saves time and a lot of money, but the most important benefit is time optimization. 

In terms of time, we have saved three hours a day daily from manual and repetitive stuff. This was a total transformation that affected our return on investment. We are capable of doing more things. This was the key factor in convincing our partners and our clients to get this solution because we have seen how we are capable of getting a ton of the tasks and activities done without a high number of employees. At the moment, we are a team of 37 people, and we are able to do the work that would usually need over 100 people.

In terms of savings, yearly, we have saved over $10,000 as compared to our previous cost of using different tools.

When I was using other solutions, it was hard for me to keep paying for every individual software to manage the processing, automation, document understanding, and files. All of them were separate, and I had to pay individually for each one, but UiPath provides all of them in one license. It is not cheap, but it makes it easy for me to sell it to my clients because I sell it individually with the license, apart from my fees for implementing and managing it for them. Before UiPath, I had no service like this for clients. I couldn't sell it as a service to the clients for implementing or managing it. After using UiPath, I started selling it to the clients. Now, I have over 40 or 50 implementations, and I am managing about 20 of them. The rest of them are being managed by the clients themselves.

I like that there is one license for all basic needs, but it is still expensive. Sometimes, we don't need all the tools or capabilities. We only need basic automation and processing for certain clients, but we're required to get the full license. They can improve its licensing and provide more flexibility. They can create more plans or packages, or they can let the users choose the capabilities they need and base its pricing on that.

I personally don't find it expensive because it replaces a lot of work. The work done by 5 or 10 employees or team members can be easily handled by UiPath. As compared to other tools, its pricing is not bad. It is fair enough.

I would rate it a nine out of ten. It is very different from other solutions, and they are making a lot of things easier and friendly for customers.

We are partners of UiPath, and we are also programming for them. We are using it internally in our group, but we're also using it to develop automations for our clients. 

In terms of its use cases, we have implemented several automations in financial departments, mostly related to preparing reports, but UiPath is not limited to that. We also had use cases in HR departments for calculating bonuses, for instance, for large companies with more than 1,000 employees or for centralizing the hours worked at certain building sites for a construction company, etc. 

We automate whatever a client needs to be automated. We will discuss possible use cases with a client and prepare a short evaluation regarding the costs and benefits, then it´s up to the client to decide.  

UiPath develops increasingly towards cloud solutions. We still have clients who prefer to have it on-prem, but new clients will mostly opt for cloud solutions. The clients decide on the cloud provider, and we basically use whatever the client wants. 

One of the most interesting use cases we had was for a carrier that has about 300 trucks all over Europe. They check the bills that the truck drivers bring back from the gas stations and compare the amount of fuel in the bills with the consumption the GPS system of the truck has actually recorded. In the past they prepared these reports manually, which was quite complicated. It took them almost half an hour for one report, and that 300 times per month. They had to compare the figures from the GPS systems with the ones that were stored in the cloud and with the figures that they had in their accounting based on the bills from the truck drivers. We automated the whole process. With the automation we could reduce the time for preparing a report from half an hour to about 35 seconds, and the process is completely running in the background. Apart from the data regarding fuel consumption, we also included some additional information in the reports that they always wanted to see, but never could implement, due to time constraints - such as when a truck is due for the next service, how much time the drivers use cruise control, and so on. This was quite an interesting and a little bit unusual use case.

Very often, UiPath has been helpful in centralizing data. TPA is a tax, audit, and accounting company, and internationally we are part of the Baker Tilly network. One of our international Baker tilly partners has to centralize the financial results of a multinational client from 40 countries every month by retrieving and processing information out of the balance sheets. Previously, they had to prepare this manually - automating it saved dozens of hours every month. At TPA, for instance we have a client with more than 200 companies. We have to integrate data of more than 200 general ledgers every month for them. That's something that we have automated internally.

In two and a half years of using UiPath, we haven't had any issues regarding its stability. It is working very well.

Their customer service is excellent. Whenever we have a question, we immediately get a response. We have calls with their teams, and being in Bucharest, where UiPath also has one of their offices, we are often able to meet them in person. That's working pretty well.

They are permanently improving their products, that´s a huge advantege compared to other RPA providers. In comparison, I have heard that Automation Anywhere sometimes has issues that remain unresolved for quite a long time, but UiPath is permanently bringing up new versions, new products, and new solutions. Until now, we did not run into any issues, we could automate anything we had agreed upon with our clients. We have not had one case where we would have reached the limitations of UiPath.

Some of the licenses, such as for Document Understanding, are a little bit expensive, and sometimes potential clients hesitate when they learn about the license fees. We hope that they will reduce the prices over time. Apart from this, I don't have anything to improve.

In terms of new features, it is already difficult for us to keep up with what they're offering because there is so much happening, and we always have to take care that we're not missing out on something.

We have been using it for two and a half years.

Stability-wise, we have had zero issues. It is working very well.

Their support is really very good. When it is about new products, such as Document Understanding, we have to understand:

• How does it actually work?
• What can it do?
• What it cannot do?
• How to sell to the client?

We often have very detailed calls with the staff of UiPath, and if the client is in Romania, we often go with somebody from UiPath's sales team to the client. When the client is abroad, we frequently include somebody from UiPath in the calls to have an introduction for the client.

Positive

When we started with RPA three years ago, we did not use UiPath. We used Foxtrot/Nintex at the beginning, which was quite unreliable, they had severe stability issues, especially with more complex automations. We stopped working with Foxtrot/Nintex after about three or four months because there was something going on all the time, and we couldn't offer it to clients.

Usually, we start with relatively simple automation. Most of the clients start with a small studio and one robot license, which is anyways included with the studio for an extended proof of concept. They have done automation where they see that it is working, and then they start discussing other more complex automations with us.

We also have clients who start right away with quite complex processes, sometimes almost too complex. If a process would need six months or more to automate, clients tend to lose patience. We always prefer to start with a process that can go live after two, three, or four weeks so that they see that it is working, and then extend it step by step. 

My advice would be to start automating something that really hurts but is not an extremely complicated use case. It should be a process that takes only a few minutes being performed manually, but is being performed frequently. These are  use cases that usually can be automated within a few days because they are not very complex processes, and automating them delivers quick results. Based on this first experience, you can have a discussion with us or the other partners of UiPath to see what else would be automatable in your organization. Many times, clients have some suggestions of what could be automated, in most cases classical RPA solutions, but there is so much more all around RPA to better understand your own organisation, such as process mining, task mining, and other solutions that UiPath has recently finalized and brought into the market. 

I would rate it a strong nine out of 10. It is not yet perfect, but then, nothing is perfect.

Some of our use cases for UiPath range all the way from development to operational support through to business enablement. Our biggest focus internally is to enable a business to do what they do best. We generally provide solutions through the use of UiPath to cater for streams, e.g., Procure-to-Pay, Hire to Retire, and quote-to-cash.

We are using it to build solutions that can heal themselves. So, we make sure that our operational team is aware as soon as something fails with the processes that we have built. If one of the use cases or failures has already been listed, we note the fix and try to implement that. If that doesn't work, then we hand it off to a human to look at the task. 

In terms of some of the use cases that we have in the business, we do quite a lot of ERP automation. So, we work with SAP quite a lot. We also have a lot of back-end data that we need to bring in and process as well. So, we use our SQL databases to perform tasks, e.g., allocating payments to bank accounts in our ERP system.

Because our development team is rather small, we try to create as many reusable components and solutions on the UiPath platform to make our day-to-day jobs a lot easier.

What has helped us the most from UiPath is that they haven't just provided us with a toolset or range of products, but actually provided us with a framework and hyperautomation lifecycle that we could use as a guideline throughout our own journey in automation.

UiPath has definitely assisted us in speeding up our digital transformation journey. We have been able to create a whole bunch of different components that we reuse throughout our solutions. This means that when we have great, new ideas that we want to implement into our solutions, we have now found ways to do it in such a way that we spend less time trying to implement the fixes or cool new enhancements and more time actually realizing the value. In doing so, we have also seen a reduction in cost and an increase in FTE savings.

From a development point of view, one of the most important, useful features in the deck is definitely some of the offerings that UiPath has in terms of UiPath Studio. Having the components for the Object Repository and Data Service available make your solution reusable and decrease your development time so you can go to market more quickly for products that you are offering clients. That has been really useful in our landscape. 

UiPath has gone a very long way to make sure their tools are easy to use and the products that they have in their end-to-end hyper automation lifecycle are easy to learn and teachable to people that you work with.

UiPath has a wide range of features that they have brought into their ecosystem. If I look at something quite specific that we would like to see going forward, that would be the integration between Data Service and Insights. It is great that we are able to visualize our return on investments using Insights. We can see a whole bunch of metrics and how our processes are performing. I think what would give us a lot more power is if we could link that to Data Service and actually pull through some custom information.

We have been using UiPath at the company internally for roughly just over five years. 

We have been a reseller of the UiPath product to our clients for roughly three years.

UiPath solutions are definitely very stable. It is very easy for us to build quality solutions and put them into production, then be able to trust the solution that we have put into production. For any automation center of excellence, that is quite important. You need to have a level of trust in your organization, inside of your environment and inside of your solutions. 

This also is attributed to the quality of our developers. We have strong, skilled developers. Without a product like UiPath, stability would not be such a great factor, especially if we had to go with a different approach or tool sets.

We have had a lot of experience trying to scale our solutions. Because of our automation journey, when we started out, we created processes that were very specific to the problems that we were trying to solve. They were actually quite static. The processes that we developed were aimed at addressing a problem specifically. As time went on, we started changing our design-thinking approach and our approach to designing and developing solutions, in such a fashion that we now try to create our solutions to be more dynamic. 

Because of the life expectancy of automations, and specifically RPA, a lot of experts would say that you need to go back after 6,12, or 18 months to reevaluate your solution and see if it needs to be redeveloped. What we have seen in our landscape is that if we try to make our solutions more dynamic, and actually cater for more than what we set out to cater for, having to enhance our solution later on takes a lot less development time. So, scaling out the solution has become immensely useful and our way of work.

We have roughly about 100 people within our organization directly communicating with our UiPath environment, either through our robotic assistance or bots, right down to the granular level of developing solutions. Some of the roles include our developers, operational support, and business users.

I would definitely say that the UiPath technical support is quite proficient. They help us quite quickly. Their responses always direct us to the answers that we are looking for. If they don't know the answer or can't assist us, they give us that feedback. They go ahead and find the answers or make the needed changes. They then come back to us and provide feedback. 

We have really enjoyed working with the UiPath team quite closely throughout our partnership. It has enabled our journey further. I would definitely rate them as 10 out of 10.

Positive

If I look at some of the other technologies and tool stacks that we have used to do RPA or automation, the adoption rate is a lot less. This is because of the way that developers need to struggle in some cases to get through the learning and usage of these tools.

I was not directly involved in the setup of the applications and ecosystem. From what I have been able to gather, we did have quite a lot of support from UiPath and the setup was quite straightforward. It took four hours maximum.

UiPath has definitely helped us realize some of our full-time equivalent savings (FTE savings) in regards to some of the reusable components that we have and have placed specifically in the business. With the offerings that UiPath has, we are able to easily see what our return on investment is, how we have structured and deployed our solutions, what we have deployed, how long it has been deployed, etc.

If we take a look at the last six months, we have about 105 processes that we have in production at the moment. If we single out a specific process that we have been working on and has been in production for quite a while, then measure that over the last six months, we can see that we have saved roughly about 380 hours on that process. Or, we have saved 380 FTE hours. That equates to roughly 77,000 rand. That has been quite a big savings. If you take the time saved across our 100-plus processes, we are looking at close to 2,100 hours that we have saved in the last six months. That has a financial value of between 500,000 and a million rand. 

UiPath definitely has reduced human error for us. Because a lot of our processes are quite focused within the financial space and we integrate it with our ERP systems, we have seen a reduction of human error come into play. We have also seen that the provisions made for human error have also been reduced.

In the RPA industry at the moment and in automation in general, UiPath's pricing model is the most consistent. So, if you are looking at year-on-year growth and pricing, or even if you are comparing solutions, each vendor has their own take on how they are going to generate profits and expand their return on investment. By far, UiPath is the most consistent with their pricing. They make it quite clear what they set out to achieve with their pricing and product. That makes their product so much easier to design for, as you don't need to change your pricing and go back to clients every time that you introduce a new aspect into the solution.

If I did have any advice or extra information that I could give surrounding the UiPath product, one of its strengths is that you know upfront what everything will cost.

We found that UiPath Academy courses that they provide, as well as the help through the forum, have greatly enabled us to more easily use this platform. Compared to other vendors and other tool stacks, it is a lot easier to use as well. 

If I look at the UiPath offering and compare it to Microsoft Power Platform, and while Microsoft Power Automate has definitely come a long way and done a great job of making its way into the market, there are still key differences between the two platforms. Because Power Platform is still relatively new, the resources and support are a little bit more tedious to get around than with UiPath. With the UiPath community, because of their extensive work that they have done within the community to build developers, you get a lot more support on forums. 

In terms of usability of the platforms, UiPath has been doing this for a lot longer. So, the user interfaces and all around user-friendliness of their platform definitely show, in the time that they have spent working on the product. 

If I look at some of the things that Power Automate offered before the latest updates in the UiPath offering, Power Automate was able to allow you to trigger processes completely differently to the way that UiPath does. UiPath has since taken a step up and released their integration services, which has helped bridge that gap quite a lot. Being able to link to a process is a lot easier than it used to be.

If I compare scalability, development time, and ease of use of Power Platform to UiPath, specifically around the RPA components of the solutions, there is definitely a noticeable difference. 

As an organization, we took Blue Prism, WorkFusion, Automation Anywhere, and those types of vendors and platforms into consideration when selecting our platform of choice when our center of excellence was formed. When making the decision at that time, the stakeholders involved decided to go with UiPath, mostly because of what they had to offer and their consistency.

The advice that I have to customers who are looking to start off their automation journey, or essentially take on a new vendor like UiPath, I would definitely say one of the challenges for us was getting our governance and standards right. As soon as we got that right, and we fixed our design-thinking approach, we realized how we could make sure our solutions were scalable. We then started seeing a higher return on investment. My advice would be to focus on the small things, make sure that you understand your processes and what goals you are trying to achieve, and then start with the beginning and end in mind. So, know where you want to end up and see how you are going to break your solution up into phases to be able to get there.

UiPath has had a very interesting impact on our environment. We have found it quite difficult to find RPA developers within our country, specifically those who have the skills that we need and can do what we do. So, we have had to rely on upskilling people as much as we possibly can to be able to deliver the solutions that we are delivering. In doing so, UiPath Academy has been quite helpful and handy, specifically because it is a lot easier to onboard a new employee or somebody who has less experience with UiPath. The training is free and easily available. If there are any issues or questions, the Academy team and the community are always around to support and answer any questions. 

What is quite impressive about UiPath is that they followed the same trend of having two major releases a year. I think those are the two most anticipated events that we have within our team as well. Because we have a roadmap, we know more or less what UiPath is planning and hoping to do. Our partnership enables us to have a closer view at that information. UiPath Insider Program allows us to see some of the previewed items as well. 

For those who aren't quite sure where they want to go just yet, keep an eye on the forums, blog posts, and UiPath in general. Look at their major releases before making any huge decisions. UiPath has a track record of consistency, and they have got some great reviews and implementations that I think we could really all learn from.

I would rate the UiPath platform as 10 out of 10.