UiPath Reviews

We're doing a lot of accounts payable automation and accounts payable invoice automation. 

We have about 70 bots in production right now. They are unattended.

It's helped us to dramatically cut down on the number of people having to key in invoices manually. We've been able to repurpose some of the staff into other jobs and have the bot do all this work for them. It's really changed things. Our staff likes it since they're doing more meaningful work and not keying in invoices all day. I'd say it greatly impacts our staff, and our dealers love it as they're getting paid quickly. The invoices are getting paid much more quickly now.

We know that it's increased the speed of payment dramatically. I'm not sure of the numbers. However, we've processed about 40,000 invoices to date using the bot. We started in January and do about 5,000 invoices a month. That's saved a lot of hours. Our guys were doing this all day, every day, and we've cut back on it dramatically. It's a considerable amount of hours saved.

We enjoy using the AI functionality. The document understanding is the tool we're using to do the invoice automation, so it has an AI piece and machine learning built in. 

The invoices are probably our most complex as there's a lot of information that has to be scraped off the invoice that DU is doing. We started with the hard ones, and we're easing into the easy ones now. We worked backward a bit. We were a little concerned going in that this was a little bit complex; however, in a very short time, we got a lot done. Looking back, it was probably a good decision to start there. With AI, we're looking to do more. We'd like to bring on more invoices and continue to use this throughout the whole organization and in Latin America as well.

Just seeing all this manual work being automated, and seeing how the staff is thrilled that they're actually doing interesting jobs now has been great. They come in the morning, and they're actually excited about coming to work, not keying in invoices all day. That's the biggest benefit I've seen. The staff is really excited about the product, even though, in the beginning, they were a little nervous about bots doing their work.

The goal of the project was to get 75% of our invoices done with no human intervention. We actually hit 90%.

We use the UiPath community quite a bit. We find it very helpful. Most times, when we're having an issue, other people are having the same issue. We have gotten very good insights and have found other use cases. It has helped us a few times to fix an issue. It's a great feature.

The UiPath Academy courses are great. When we rolled out, we did a project with UiPath. We put a lot of their courses in our Academy so that our users could take them through us, and have actually had a very good response. A lot of people in the company took it, and the completion rate was very high.

The Academy teaches people what RPA is, and how to use it. It could be as basic or as complicated as you want. They have a wide range of classes. The fact that people can get in there and start learning for free is also very good.

Maybe we need to rely on our rep a little bit more to find out what's out there and start asking a lot more questions. We don't understand its full potential. However, that's a little bit of us not asking the right questions. What they've been terrific about is coming out with fixes. Every time we have an issue with something, they're quick to fix it immediately or in the next release. 

They're spending a lot of time and effort on unstructured documents or core quality documents. Sometimes things don't pick up right away, however, it is my understanding that they're working on it, and it has improved tremendously. Even since the beginning of the year, we've already seen some improvements.

I've been using the solution for two years. 

The stability is great. What they've done is pretty impressive. They're going to be here for the long haul.

We found it to be very, very stable. We have not had any issues since we went live, so that's also been very impressive for us that it's extremely stable.

From our perspective, there's really no issue with scaling. We're looking to expand, even by putting more invoices on it, and we don't anticipate it being an issue. We're not concerned in the least about how much it can handle. We're looking forward to expanding it a little bit.

Technical support has been terrific. 

They're very quick to react to us, and even if they aren't, our rep is always very quick to help us get a response. 

Positive

This was the first RPA solution I've used. 

I work in finance and accounting, and we were chosen to be the proof of concept to use UiPath. We were in very early, so we did a very early proof of concept, built five bots, and presented them to senior management. We gave feedback that we thought it was something that could be beneficial for the company.

The initial setup was very straightforward for us. UiPath worked with us. They were great in helping us out; the reps really helped us through the whole proof of concept. It was very new to us, and we had their full support - even when we were presenting to senior management.

We're looking at ROI on one project right now, and we estimate we will begin to see a return in year two, which is great.

The pricing has been fair. They've been very good to us with the pricing. They let us choose what we needed. They build packages that fit us, whereas maybe the competitors aren't doing that. Others don't give us the ability to buy what we need. We kind of would have had to buy in bulk, and we didn't like that either. UiPath gives us the ability to be flexible with what we need.

We looked at Automation Anywhere. We just had a better feeling about UiPath. Even from the proof of concept, we had a better feeling about UiPath.

The biggest thing we found with Automation Anywhere, for example, was we asked for a demo license so that we could do a proof of concept; we had a very difficult time even installing the demo licenses. In contrast, with UiPath, it took us a matter of minutes to get going. We were on and building bots within a matter of minutes. Therefore, very quickly, we realized UiPath was the right solution for us.

We're on the latest version, I believe.

While our company is very socially and environmentally aware, we're not yet leveraging UiPath on projects that work towards good causes. RPA is starting to get some acceptance into the organization now, and we'll do something in the future. 

I'd advise potential users to set expectations with users. Talk to users. With RPA, people always fear when they hear robots. Setting expectations for your user base. Also, if you're not sure, find a partner that you can trust. We found a very good partner. They were very good to work with, and we really felt like we could trust them. We wouldn't have been able to do this without them. They really brought in the expertise. 

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

The software's terrific. The support's terrific. All the people that are assigned to our account are very attentive to us. Our current rep is amazing. Every time I call him, he always helps. If he can't answer it, he always finds us an answer. They're quick to respond to us, even if they don't have the solution immediately. It's never gone more than two days without us resolving any issues. They've been very, very good.

We're very happy with the overall solution.

We use this solution for finance, HR, and for handling invoice reconciliation. We also make use of donation approvals.

I find that UiPath's user community was more helpful a few years ago. When I go to use the UiPath forum, a lot of the answers are copied and pasted from old answers and they don't make a lot of sense. That being said, I do still occasionally get some value from it. 

We also make use of the academy courses. We have put all contractors through the basic courses to make sure that they've got a basic level of competence. The academy courses are useful to test that people know what they should. The architecture courses have been most beneficial to us.  

We are saving approximately three and a half million annually based on the number of hours saved multiplied by a salary base rate. That ends up being approximately 60,000 hours a year that's being replaced by bots and this is a big deal for us.

The Orchestrator really stands out as the most valuable feature. We don't have to train anyone. They can usually pick it up really quickly. It is easy to use and intuitive.

A lot of the packages are very easy to work with. There are some challenges when updating a package that you've built or a library that you've built in UiPath. Overall, the extensibility is really nice. 

I would really like to see the package deployment updated. As it is right now, if you want to update something, you have to take down the latest code, sync the packages and re-upload everything back through the dev test to prod. It's a big hassle when we've tested the library ourselves. 

I have been using this solution for seven years. 

This solution is very stable. Any complaints I have come back down to package management and custom issues with custom libraries. Outside of that, upgrades are really quick and really easy. We have bots disconnect so frequently that it is easy for us to catch issues manually.

This is a scalable solution but UiPath could use some better visualization tools for bot utilization. They do have insights but they are a little bit rough to work with. I wouldn't want to put on a hundred bots at a time, but loading in a few here and there is really easy.

I used Automation Anywhere and Blue Prism for a while. The UiPath Orchestrator far exceeds the functionality of Blue Prism and Automation Anywhere. As far as the bot setup goes, UiPath is very easy to install, especially compared to Blue Prism. UiPath is more business user-friendly than Blue Prism. Sometimes it's nice to work with Blue Prism because it has such low-level code that it gives you a little bit more flexibility.

We keep it pretty agile by necessity. We use a lot of contractors to get a lot of different approaches. We have 168 processes on 27 machines. We have some restrictions based on the company requirements but internally we move as fast as we can because we have to.

It is really easy for us to set up a VM and get UiPath installed. It is a five or six-step process. UiPath is significantly bug-free compared to what I'm used to with other products. I haven't had to raise a support ticket yet for UiPath.

Initially, we had a customer success manager from UiPath who showed our admin how to run the installation. At this point, we take care of all of it ourselves. 

We've replaced the equivalent of 20 to 30 employees who have all been moved to more valuable positions. We've taken processes that were supposed to take months and reduced this to days which has improved our customer experience. 

I would like to see a few more options for developer licenses because we end up swapping them so often. We've tried going through floating robots and a few options that have been not exactly what we're looking for. Price-wise, the cloud offerings are good. 

I'd certainly say UiPath is worth it to save time and effort. The product is really stable compared to what I've worked with before. 

I would rate this solution a nine out of ten. 

Currently, we're doing digital transformation in finance. We expect to expand that out to operations based on our test case of five robotic implementations and to get those in the center of excellence and understanding, and then go further. In fact, in our naming conventions, we're trying to make sure that we leave room for HR, Operations, IT, et cetera. Right now, we're just in finance.

One of the best benefits is that it just gets people to think beyond what they're doing and how other things impact them. Instead of just their single task.

For instance, with PO distribution, we can ask larger questions, such as: Where are our suppliers lists? What do the people do out in the field? I've never been as exposed to that as I am now due to the fact that I’m trying to automate it. What you find is the challenges aren't just in the robot. It's what you do before you get to the robot that is critical. If it forces us to fix other exterior items, we've been a success. However, if you can add to the task, what the robot does and then pull it through, that's where things get interesting. My job is just going to expand and I foresee I’ll be so busy with so many ideas.

We do use the UI apps feature. We are working with consultants. They actually know more of the technical details and they're supposed to be transferring data. I'm more of a functional person that understands the design and the processes, not the programming, coding, or details. I'm learning that as I’m in training for the RPA. I'm about 70% through training. I've been taking that through UiPath

Getting up to speed with UiPath has been tougher due to the fact that the programming that I learned in school is very different from the programming done today. The younger people, I'm sure, pick it up much faster.

It is helping our onboarding process and is useful in getting me up to speed.

The biggest value I get from the UiPath Academy is the ability to connect the software to the processes that we’re trying to automate and being able to understand the functions in terms of where you would go to get an even better understanding. I do find that their online help is very beneficial as it offers solid examples. In fact, sometimes that's better than the training itself.

There's so much out there and there's so much to learn as it's not one software package. UiPath Academy provides us with the ability to use all software packages and interconnect with them. The opportunities are amazing and also intimidating.

The automation cloud offering helps to decrease the total cost of ownership of UiPath by taking care of things such as infrastructure. We have gone and moved many more things to the cloud. We have a Hyperion solution in the cloud that we use for consolidation.

The most valuable aspect of the solution is the ability to follow what the robots are doing. Currently, I've been working on the automation hub. That's the next step. You can use the orchestrator to see how they're doing, for example.

We’ve realized some efficiencies in our current processes due to UiPath. That said, I'm a novice. We've just begun with these five processes. That's why I want to do the reporting and figure out the analysis as I want it to basically sell itself.

In terms of the ease of building automation within UiPath, that's something that I need to discover with the IT team. What I do like is that once you do something, you store it in a library. And then you have plug-and-play automation that you can add to others. You don't have to keep redoing the same work over and over again. That's going to be a huge benefit.

In terms of reducing human error, inherently, it has to improve accuracy. Now that we’re focused on it, we’re testing it, and if it's not a hundred percent accurate, it's not going to production. We absolutely anticipate a great reduction in human error.

In terms of payroll processes, HR processes, onboarding, operations, filling in maintenance on equipment, and doing the routine things out in the field will require adoption and interest. You can't get the response that you want until the people in the field decide that they want to change and adopt it. That will be the challenge. Managing the change is huge for us. It's always an obstacle. It's not that, can you automate something, it's more of a question of, internally, will they let you automate something?

I'm looking for more of the analytics to make sure that we can properly report on how they're doing. That's what's going to make management invest further into this. I actually come from a reporting background. That's what I focus on in the other financial packages that we have.

I've been using UiPath since I started training in July of 2021.

I'm not worried about the stability of the product. If others are using it in the cloud with much more complicated processes than we are automating, it's not really a concern of mine.

In terms of scalability, right now, it's way too big for me to even understand it. It's like I'm in a county and you're asking me about the universe. I'm just trying to get directions. I still need time to absorb the entire scope.

Right now, just accounting and IT use the solution. Finance is learning it as well. They're taking the same training that I'm taking. They're probably 10% to 15% the way through that journey.

I have not really had to use the support. I will, due to my training. I've gone back and forth and I've lost some of my training. I have the diplomas and different things and the degrees that I kept, however, I've lost some of that initial training. It all has to do with version release. I'm a tenant I'm just in the training phase. What I'm trying to do is be the guinea pig and learn the systems and get comfortable with everything.

We didn't use any other RPA solution previously.

The reason we adopted UiPath was due to a move from our finance leader, the controller. We had automated many financial processes with planning and reporting, et cetera. However, the accounting group was continually skipped over. We had a controller that came in and they wanted to take many of our repeated processes and really took and created an agile group to create the digital finance vector. 

There's a team of five members that went and looked at the processes that we were doing and said, which ones can we change or do better? Between the controller and the consultants, there was an analysis performed. They wanted to lead in the digital finance transformation. They looked forward five to ten years and what they were projecting looked really nice.

I didn't directly handle the implementation. I will learn that more as we go. From what I saw, the workflow was nice. The implementations that we have are being done in baby steps, and so far, the steps are relatively easy. It is intimidating to see how much it takes to do some very small processes. It helps you understand more about the decision points and whether they're objective or subjective. That will help us with the reporting. We'll be better able to understand what things are best to automate and what is easiest. That's what I'm hoping to get from these five implementations.

Our consultant assisted us with the implementation process, and they really did a sprint on the implementations.

The sprints were such that it was really a six-week turnaround time. We actually had to go backward and do the assessments from those implementations. I wasn't in this role at that time. Therefore, I'm now doing the cost benefits backward to see if we can set them up correctly and then see what we can do ourselves going forward. The key will be not how quickly they were able to do it, but how quickly we can do it ourselves. 

Also, we'll have to assess how quickly the people in the field can adopt the product and have a robot actually be their assistant. We want to figure out how quickly we can deploy citizen developers. 

The solution is pricey at the beginning, however, we'll have to see going forward with what we get for the tools. It's always expensive to buy a really nice car and then not drive it very far, very much. It's all about the utilization. If we use it fully, the cost won't be as high.

The company did evaluate other solutions, however, they liked UiPath the best due to its differentiating reputation, experience, and level and quality of tools.

UiPath has not yet saved costs for our company. However, we're just in the investment phase. That's why I want to do that reporting so that we can see the savings if any. The decisions we make now affect the next 10 to 20 years. Everyone gets too short-term-focused. We need to instead think about where we want to be five years from now and go backward. We need to ask: what are we doing today that's going to make a difference in five years? It's an investment in the future right now.

I'd advise those considering the solution to give it a try. It can't hurt. Even if they didn't go forward, the basic principles that are revealed can probably fix other things. Some people just have bad processes. Once you get your processes aligned and make them to the point that they're standardized and understood across the different units using them, it will become easier to automate.

I'd rate the solution at an eight out of ten. In order to rate it higher, I need more experience. I've got to learn, got to understand it better. Then I've got to utilize it. Like many software that I've dealt with, there are always three ways to do it, however, there's the best way. I always wish we'd just teach the best way. That said, I understand that you want to make people agile and to understand fully by exploring different ways. When you learn, learning all the different ways is very cumbersome, and yet, better in the long run.

We use UiPath for OCR, for our subrogation department to analyze credit report organization letters that come into our company to identify whether they're identity theft, fraud, or any other type of keyword phrase within the document. It also extracts the information coming out of the CRO to properly assign it to accounts associated with our subrogation department. 

Another use case is navigating through one of our third-party clients in order for us to get documents out of their system and into our system so that we can analyze and package them.

We see benefits from the AI side of doing OCR and in order for us to do onscreen recognition of documents. It increases the efficiency of our agents in order for them to get back to working accounts, rather than reading through document after document every single day in order for them to pick out one or two words into the document and assign a smart code. The automation does all of that for them now.

UiPath has saved us costs. It's thousands of documents per day that we're OCRing and then that reduces it to around five to 10 minutes per document. It's around 50,000 minutes per agent, per day.

It has reduced human error because there would be some different document types. It's able to detect multiple types versus a user finding one document type when there could be multiple document types that are associated with a letter, while the user is browsing over it that can be missed in the second document type. But when you're looking at machine learning and at the text, it'll be able to easily pick out those keywords from a document that has multiple document types.

It has also freed up employee time. It frees up their time to do other work.

We are currently using the AI function in order for us to do Task Mining to be able to pull out of a couple of our key groups that we're trying to add additional automation to. That's what we're using AI Center for at the moment.

We have done UiPath Academy courses. I got certified in the advanced RPA Academy. I need to renew that because they expire every year. Another developer has his associates, so we use that every year where we can get some training. It helps keep people up to speed. It makes sure that you're doing the latest and recommended in the RE framework and what you have initially designed.

Building automations can be difficult at times with some of the activity packages and documentation being out of date, but we have a TAM that we work with that is very helpful in making sure that RRGs are known and that we get the results within the UiPath structure.

They need to deprecate their previous versions on their website or their documentation. It should just point to the newest version rather than when you go to Google if you're just trying to find UiPath and then it points you to a solution that was a couple of years ago. Or it points to a form that someone randomly has posted to their code. That needs to be cleaned up.

We've been using UiPath since 2013. The Orchestrator is on the cloud and the robots are on-prem.

It's pretty stable. We haven't run into any issues with operating totally different packages. There have been some things where I wish there were more restrictions in access groups that could be applied within Orchestrator, but other than that, it's pretty good.

We are still working through scalability. There are a couple of things that we've run into that were an issue with trying to use machine templates and getting them to connect properly with the robots. Another scalability issue that we have is that we have a non-static environment where some machines get deleted after they log off and get back on, they have to reconnect to it. We had issues with that, but those are for our attended robots.

We have unattended bots. We have four of them and it's a total of seven automations, but they run every 15 minutes.

We used to use OpenScan before I got hired and then eventually moved off of OpenScan because the product was too cumbersome and difficult to navigate. So we moved to UIPath.

They saw UIPath and they saw that it was going down a good road. So that's what they chose it. 

The initial setup was pretty easy for us. Getting into the Studio is pretty simple to get us set up and going. There are a couple of issues with mixed environments for DLLs. You do get packages for UFS that I've run into trying to use one of our older DLLs that hasn't been updated, but all in general, getting it working, and being able to figure it out was pretty simple.

We have seen ROI. 

The subscription models that they have out there need to be simplified.

I've talked to a couple of our partners and talked about the 49 pages of subscriptions. It needs to be more streamlined for what they offer and packages because we run into issues where we're signing up for Task Mining, but they didn't include AI Center, which is a requirement of Task Mining in one of the factories. If the subscriptions got simplified and got it down to a couple of pages, they would see tremendous growth. That way customers don't need to hire somebody to figure out what the licensing model was versus going for a third-party vendor.

My advice would be to start in the cloud. Cloud is the easiest way for us to get started versus trying to get our internal environment set up. We had on-prem orchestrator and on-prem servers, but it was easier to implement the cloud and get it up and running and scale versus our internal environment, as well as keeping the data secured within our robots on-prem. 

I would rate it an eight out of ten. 

We're the shared services divisions to contact centers and handle back-office work. Most of our use cases with UiPath so far have been automating back-office work, taking information from Excel files, and putting them into legacy systems or some mainframe integrations. All of our robots, as of right now, are unattended automation. We haven't really used the attended robots just yet.

The primary benefit so far has been bringing up and updating other processes so that I can move on to other more valuable processes. I no longer need to copy here and paste there. It's taken the robot part of the job out of my hands. 

I have not actually developed anything with it directly. I manage the people who do. The little bit of training that I did, was pretty straightforward. I was using the rapid development tools. If you truly want to build something that's stable and fast, you really have to get in there and at a much deeper level than I got. That said, from what I did, it looked easy.

UiPath has saved the company costs. With the automation we've had so far, we're probably in the 20 to 30 FTE savings range so far.

The solution has reduced human error. It helps in the sense that, if you take a process of humans doing it and give it to a robot that's always following a set of rules when it encounters a certain value, it's always going to handle it a certain way. It's the consistency that the automation provides that has been great.

I’m not sure if the solution has freed up employee time. That's tough to evaluate due to the fact that the FTE that would have been doing this manual process would just mostly get moved to perform more valuable work. It has freed up time by allowing us to allocate those resources to higher-value tasks.

We have used the UiPath Academy courses. They are all good. We've had developers go through the UiPath training. In fact, that's a requirement when developing. They have to at least complete the training. We have at least one developer that's gone through it completely. It's a fundamental starting point to training people on UiPath. We've taken internal people and they train them ourselves.

We also appreciate the fact that the Academy is free to use. Right off the bat, due to the fact the Academy was free, we were able to say, okay, complete the training. You have to complete the training in order to be able to develop. Right away, it became part of our standard. We see the value in it.

The speed could be improved. In some cases, when I have to ask analysts to estimate how much licensing we need, we have to figure out how long it's going to run, and right now we go with the worst-case scenario, that the robots are going to run no faster than the human. That's been our stereotype. We've used other platforms in the past, where I could perform a transaction to some websites in three seconds, however, for UiPath it was 10 seconds. That was even after we did some enhancements to make UiPath as fast as we could. I know it's the internals with the way that the platforms work, however, from our robot's perspective, speed seems to be a barrier.

We started using the solution in late 2019.

The solution is stable. 

I have not had any direct relationship with the support from UiPath. When I do have a technical issue, I'm to engage with an internal team and they are the ones that have the relationship with UiPath support.

We did use a cloud solution previously. We switched to UiPath on-premises as UiPath's on-prem deployment was more aligned with our security constraints. 

We've had multiple projects. Some have been very complex and others have been perfect. It's dependent on the projects that we're using it for. Some were a little bit more complex.

It's my understanding that, while the company likely did look at other options, I was not engaged in those meetings. While I recall some high-level conversations, they didn't say which ones we were actively evaluating.

I'm not sure which version of the solution we're using. 

I have not used the AI functionality in my automation program yet.

In terms of functionality, UiPath does quite well. The fact that it's not net-based gives it a lot of flexibility to use it in a non-standard way. For example, we were building a robot interface with an Oracle database, and we could either build a robot to open up an access database with blank tables and pull it down. Or we, due to the fact that it did not have access to the net, could grab an in-memory data set and cycle through that. I liked that flexibility and the fact that we had options.

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

I'm working for one project where we're trying to automate processes for a logistics company, specifically in their back-office accounting processes.

We're using Studio, Orchestrator and the bots. In other words, we're using the whole platform.

When we were implementing it, we were empowering people. In this company, everybody has their own work and they were really in their own area. Then we started this project and they got empowered to change the way they were working. UiPath is so open that everybody can take part in it.

That was one thing that changed right away. Another thing was the way they think about processes and where there are possibilities to automate has really changed. Before, they never thought about automating all these processes but we told them there is a possibility. Now, when they're having strategy meetings, they have dedicated time slots where they're just talking about processes that could be automated. The whole mindset is changing now.

We have a virtual environment that we use.

We haven't touched the processes where there would be human errors that much. We started with the really basic ones that are so easy that people don't make errors there. We will get to the more complex processes, but we haven't yet.

The solution has definitely saved time.

Orchestrator lets you start a credential stair, so you can get the credentials in a safe way. Before this, they were afraid that credentials would be stored somewhere and people could see them. I think it's really important for our customers that you can do that in Orchestrator. The scheduling feature is also valuable of course.

In terms of ease of use, I would rate this solution as four out of five. I think it's very easy, but our customers are sometimes not so technical. When they come from the business side, it's somehow hard for them to understand.

I would give the RPA Academy training program five out of five. Without it, I don't think I could have started implementing this solution. I did the developer program just for a general understanding of how everything works: how Orchestrator works and how it all works together. For me, it was really important to do the training then. It was very good, so I really liked it.

It's really hard for me to get all the machine learning and AI parts. I think maybe that's going to get a little bit easier for me to understand how to really use it in the company. I don't really know what to do with it at the moment. I think that is something that could be improved.

I tested the live sessions and we saw some parts of StudioX. There were some things that were so easy there. I think it would be good if they would put it also in Studio, for example. The carts they have are in color. We try to get people in the company, even if they're not technical, to implement the bots or processes by themselves. I think some parts they changed in StudioX could be really helpful in Studio skills.

I would rate their stability as three to four out of five, but I would say that's probably because we don't know how to use it best. That is why we sometimes have issues that something's not working.

We are a consultancy firm but the customer that we are working with has about five people in the core team that are working with this solution.

Both customer support and technical support are very good. I think the chief from my customer and the UiPath technical team had many phone calls because the virtual machine didn't work at first. They were in contact and I think two days later it was working.

I can only speak for my client, who is undergoing a huge digital transformation. They're a small German company and they just know if they don't change something other companies will get ahead. In Germany, there are many family-owned firms and the owner just saw the need to change. We told them about RPA and they got very excited. We showed them the first pilot bot and they were set.

We chose UiPath, for the same reasons you can read on the internet. If you look at the Gartner and Forrester reports, I think they all say UiPath. Also, it's just so easy to get started. You just download the community edition and you're starting. Then you do the Academy and you actually know how to do it. It's very easy and very fast. All the statistics say it's the best.

In terms of the setup, because we were using the community edition first, and then we licensed it afterward, we had the first bot running in about a month.

We have seen ROI and performance benefits. We are still at the beginning but we can definitely see it. I think we could see after about a week that we had processes that the company didn't have to do anymore and so they had more time. 

So far, our first customer started with just Orchestrator and an unattended bot, along with a couple of studio licenses. I don't know the cost. Maybe $25,000 for the year.

I would definitely say it's worth the money.

We did a little research obviously. We looked at Automation Anywhere and Blue Prism, but that's it. We didn't really look too deep. We just saw UiPath and said, "Okay, I think that's a fit for us." And then we went for it.

I would rate this solution as eight out of ten because of what I see from the stage we're in now. There are things that can improve and they are all working on improvement. I still think that at its current state, it's really beneficial for a lot of companies.

I would recommend UiPath. I like the company and I like their products.

Currently, we're using Studio and soon to be using Orchestrator. We have not actually deployed any bots yet, but we have looked into both Orchestrator and bots. We have just looked at the solution set of that on why do we need to deploy in the future.

Our primary use will vary from department to department. We have what we call 11 global practices. These range across different platforms, but the underlying theme of that is we want to automate different items which might be finance or accounting or HR or whatever. But where I think it will be most useful is in our core business where I'm looking to apply it to engineering project management.

The most valuable feature for us has been the ability to take data out of where we have it — Excel sheets or wherever it may be — and translate it into customer-owned Citrix environments. Our primary core is engineering. A lot of our business requires us to take data what we have developed as part of the design process and relay that into work orders or other process triggers, ordering triggers, or material ordering, or different things for our clients. Allowing us to interface local data with Citrix environments is going to be a big deal.

I'm not exactly sure what I want to see enhanced yet. I know that we do a lot of small processes. Depending on how good Studio X is and how easy that is to build and manage we could potentially do a lot of small little things inside of various design tools like Excel, Word, and Outlook and to be able to kick out the workflows from that.

We like to do a lot of the design side locally for Excel, whether that be in a BBA or an add-in type environment. Being able to manage and deploy or build those will be helpful. Maybe we won't call them bots, maybe we call them processes that are centrally managed. In addition to the Microsoft stack, we use many other vendors like AutoCAD, Bentley MicroStation, Revit Inventor, BIM 360 and Autodesk Forge. To us, the CAD world is where we can see a lot of time savings and benefit ROI on a solution. That would be our next horizon.

I think this solution has room for improvement in the area of ease-of-use. It does require a little bit of coding background to be able to get in and really build out the solution. After I get in and look at Studio X a little more, I may change my opinion on that.

We have six people working in the organization involved in our automation program. We are pretty confident that can scale easily.

Since we have not deployed to production yet, we are not sure which direction we'll be going in. We were looking on-premises but the software as a service cloud deployment will likely be a hit with our IT department. We plan to run our automation in virtual environments through a Citrix interface but not in Citrix.

On a scale from one to five where one is very difficult and five is very easy, I would rate the ease of the use of the platform as a three or four for now. I saw some things today I'd like to dig into a little farther, and I think that that Studio X would make it a whole lot easier for citizen developers to get in and do small tasks. Rebuilding tasks for accounting and finance where there are fairly rigid rules will be great. In the engineering world, our interfacing with the clients sometimes changes on a weekly basis. So having something that is very flexible like Studio X will make it possible to flex and change with those environments very quickly, very easily, very nimbly, and to deploy and redeploy. So if Studio X is what I hope it is, that rating may be closer to a five than not.

We use Studio, Orchestrator, attended and unattended robots.

We use this solution to solve the things that people don't want to do. They spend a lot of time and there is a high potential to make manual errors. Quality suffers because it takes too long and users can get fatigued. There are the things that we are targeting and we have already seen some of the benefits.

We do not run our automations in a virtual environment.

With respect to how easy it is to automate our company's processes, on a scale of one to five, I would rate this solution a four. It is easy, but there are some improvements that can be made.

On a scale of one to five, judging how beneficial it is, I would rate the training a five. It is my lifeline. 

From the point that we purchased our UiPath license until we had our first robot was approximately six to eight months. I felt that the process was complicated, in part because of UiPath but also partly because of internal things.

Internally, in order to get set up, the entire infrastructure needs to be in place. All of the servers have to be set up and you need the right permissions because the bots need their own security. You have to explain to people that this is going to be a service account, and you have to explain the need for it. These are all internal, but necessary issues.

This solution has saved our organization time. I would estimate that the bots save us four weeks every month.

In terms of eliminating human errors, this solution absolutely helps in that regard. The bots don't make any mistakes. Rather, they point out the mistakes that have been made by humans so far.

The ability that this solution has to work with Excel is really good.

The SAP feature looks helpful and we are going to explore that functionality in our next project. 

We don't like the attended bot experience, where it requires the user to be hands-off. We installed it on the user's machine, and the user should not touch the mouse or keyboard because the moment they do, it crashes. It takes over the machine and cannot work in the background. For this reason, it is difficult to work out scenarios that are purely attended. 

For example, we have a process that downloads two files and then does some massaging of the data. Now, the data needs to be looked at by the user. An email is sent and the files are deposited into a common folder, and the user will address the task when they have time. After the user manipulates some of the data or makes decisions, it can proceed to the next step.

They drop the modified files into the common folder, but the bot doesn't react because there is no feature in Orchestrator to trigger based on the arrival of a new file. Instead, we have to put in a call to check periodically, whether it be five minutes, fifteen minutes or some other interval. This is something that we don't find desirable.

Creating a trigger that is based on either the arrival of a file or the arrival of an email is a common scenario and it should be built into the platform so that I don't have to code for it every time. As it is now, there are only two ways to trigger a bot.

Orchestrator does not have a good filtering mechanism to look for jobs, and the table view needs to be improved.

From the UiPath side, one thing that irritates me is that you cannot find the downloads to upgrade to the new version. I'm a paid customer and I log in with my credentials, but I cannot download it. I need to create a ticket, tell them who I am, and I have to give them a long list of things that I don't remember. They will address the ticket maybe today or tomorrow, and then finally I get a response. When I use other tools like Microsoft and SAP, as a customer or subscriber of the tool, I just download the latest versions and install them on my servers. When I have a mandate to do work, I want to be able to do it. However, when I can't download the file and have to wait for a ticket to be answered, this wastes my time.

The integration with Elasticsearch and Kibana is a struggle. They are not UiPath products, but they are recommended by UiPath. Some documentation is provided, but it is an Orchestrator installer package the just installs itself. I had to do a lot of experimentation on Windows machines because the configuration is different for Linux machines, and this gave me some trouble. There is a lot of information about this in the UiPath forums and I spent a lot of time on it.

Right now, I have a set of configuration data that I put into an Excel file. The users can change the file and my app will run using the configuration variables. A problem occurs if the Excel file is not closed properly because there are locking issues. This is a pain because the bot crashes when opening a locked file. There is something in Orchestrator called Assets, but it is kind of limited. It only accepts text and a credential. It would be nice if it had a simple database table, say to be able to create a couple of columns that I want to set up for a bot-related task. Rather than a single piece of text, there is a whole table of information. My users will be able to edit it, based on the permission that I assign. Then the bot will look at it and work according to what is specified. This would be a great feature to have.

I would like to see the Studio web-based so that we don't have to install it on everybody's desktop. 

With respect to the stability, on a scale from one to five, I would rate this solution a five. I have never had any problems with the platform itself. I haven't had to restart the servers or anything like that.

We have three people in the organization who work with the bots.

We did not use another RPA solution prior to this one.

In deciding whether and RPA would benefit us, we followed the guidelines that UiPath provided, which is a twelve-step validation process. If processes are unchanging, there is a lot of manual work, there is the potential for errors, and it's simple to automate, etc, then RPA may be suitable. Based on this assessment, we made the investment in RPA.

Our own team was responsible for the implementation.

We have recognized ROI through savings in employee hours. For our PoC, with two projects, we saved one full-time employee.

It took us one year to see ROI, although I don't think that we have saved any money yet because of the development time. If we negate the development cost then it might be $60,000 USD, as a developer's salary, but we're not there yet. One of the things that I am trying to do is motivate people to look at more processes that we can automate because right now, my bots are sleeping and I want to put them to work.

Our licensing fees are approximately $140,000 USD annually, which includes all of the bots, Orchestrator, and the Studio.

In our company, there is another group that had already implemented UiPath, and they have had good success. We followed their lead, but in addition, we reviewed other sources such as the Gartner ranking. The features set was also considered during the evaluation.

I feel that the cost of the bot is worth it, provided that we make use of it. The unattended bot is cheaper, but it is useless for us right now because there is no use case. We think that Studio X might change that, and I've heard that the Studio X license includes the attended bot. So, if we swap the attended bot license that we currently have then we could take them away and then get the Studio X license, and that will motivate more people to make their own automations.

No organization has unlimited resources, but the business is changing around us and we are always tasked with new things to do. In that aspect, you have to make room for innovation, and you have to automate.

UiPath has shown tremendous gains with this solution. They're sitting on the shoulders of Microsoft .NET, and they've shown some initiative on what you can do with a generic platform. They offer free training and a Community Edition for people to experiment with, and it can do wonders for the world. We have seen that happening and I love that.

This is a company that is listening to customers' feedback and I think that they should keep doing that.

My advice for anybody who is considering this solution is to start by watching all of the videos. Go through the UiPath Academy and get a feel of what it can do. Read all of the case studies and see what other people have done. You will get a feeling for the ROI. Then download the Community Edition and play with it to see for yourself what gain you can get from this tool. Finally, start small and just keep adding to it.

I would rate this solution an eight out of ten.