Currently, we're doing the digital transformation in finance. I'm more of a functional person who understands the design and the processes but not the programming, coding, and details.
I am using their automation cloud offering.
Currently, we're doing the digital transformation in finance. I'm more of a functional person who understands the design and the processes but not the programming, coding, and details.
I am using their automation cloud offering.
One of the best benefits is that instead of just doing their single task, it gets people to think beyond what they're doing and how other things impact them; for instance, for PO distribution, we had to think about where our suppliers' lists are and what do the people do out in the field? I've never been as exposed to that as much as now because we are trying to automate it. What you find is that the challenge isn't just in the robot. It is what you do before you get to the robot that is critical, and if it forces us to fix that, it has been a success. It helps you to realize some efficiencies in your current processes.
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. We have FCCS cloud from Hyperion.
I anticipate that there would be a reduction in human errors and also time savings within these five processes. Inherently, it has to improve the accuracy. That's because now you're focused on a particular thing, and you're testing it. If it is not a hundred percent accurate, it is not going to production.
The ability to follow and orchestrate what the robots are doing has been very valuable. I've been working on the automation hub because that's the next step after our test case of five robotic implementations. So, it is orchestrated to see how they're doing.
UiPath Academy is helpful in terms of the ability to connect the software to the processes that you're trying to automate. It has been helpful in understanding the functions, and it is where you would go to get a better understanding. I do find that their online help is very beneficial with examples. In fact, sometimes that's better than the training itself.
I'm learning it for the training for the RPA associate, and I'm about 70% through there. UiPath's academy courses have been helpful in onboarding or being up to speed with UiPath. However, it has been tougher because the programming that I learned in school is very different from the programming done today. I am sure the younger people will pick it up much faster. There is so much out there, and there is so much to learn because it is not one software package. It provides the ability to use all software packages and interconnect with them. So, the opportunities are amazing but also intimidating.
I started with UiPath training in July 2021.
I am not worried about the stability. I may be naive, but if others are using it in the cloud with much more complicated processes than what we are automating, it is not really a concern.
It is being used by accounting and IT. Finance is learning that, and they're taking the same training that I'm taking. They're probably 10% to 15% on that journey.
Currently, we're doing the digital transformation in finance. We expect to expand that out to operations based on our test case of five robotic implementations. In fact, in our naming conventions, we're trying to make sure that we leave room for HR, Operations, IT, etc, but right now, we're just in finance. Payroll processes, HR processes, onboarding, operations, filling in maintenance on equipment, and doing the routine things out in the field that they do every day will take adoption and interest. Raising four kids, I realize you can't get the response that you want until the people in the field decide that they want to change and adopt it. So, that will be the challenge. The challenge is not whether you can automate something. It is more like will they let you automate something.
I have not really had to use the support, but I will. I've gone back and forth, and I've lost some of my training. I'm a tenant who is just in the training phase. So, everyone has had issues with getting in, and it's more whether they're using Google or Explorer, and how they're accessing it. I am getting that standardized and having them do that. I am also a victim of the same thing that I'm teaching them, and what I'm trying to do is be the guinea pig.
Before UiPath, we didn't use any other RPA solution. We went for UiPath because it was really a move from our finance leader, the controller. We had automated many financial processes with planning, reporting, etc, but the accounting group was continually skipped over. We had a controller that came in, and they wanted to take many of our repeated processes. They took Rally and created an agile group to create the digital finance vector. There is a team of five members who went and looked at processes that we were doing and then told us about which ones we can change and do better with. By using his experience in other companies and having discussions with other people, along with the KPMG group, they did an analysis. They wanted to lead in the digital finance transformation. They're doing that by looking forward to five or 10 years and then coming back, which is really nice.
I will learn more about that. The workflow was nice, and the implementations that we have are relatively easy, but 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. With reporting, it will be helpful for us to understand which things are best to automate and which ones are the easiest. That's what I'm hoping to get from five implementations.
We are doing consulting with a collaborative effort with KPMG. So, they actually know more of the technical details, and they're supposed to be transferring data.
KPMG did a sprint on the implementations. The sprints were such that it was really six week turnaround time, and that involved actually going backward and doing the assessments from those. By doing the cost benefits backward, we can set things upright and see what we do going forward. The key is not how quickly they were able to do it, but how quickly we can do it, and how quickly the people in the field can adopt that and have a robot actually be their assistant. I believe you call that the citizen developers.
Right now, it is way too big for me to even understand it. I feel like it's a universe. I'm just trying to get directions. The area that I'm looking at right now is analytics to make sure that we can properly report on how they're doing, and that's what is going to make management invest further into our idea. I come from a reporting background, and that's what I focus on in other financial packages that we have with PeopleSoft, Hyperion planning, and the FCCS cloud. In many of these automations, the need part of it is that you're not stuck within the software that you had; for example, a macro within Excel can only help you with what you're doing in Excel. It can't help you with an email. It can't help you with a PDF form, but you can bring these together, so the automation opportunities are endless.
So, at this time, it hasn't saved us money because we're just in the investment phase. That's why I want to do reporting so we can see. The decisions you make now affect the next 10 to 20 years. Everyone gets too short-term-focused. You should go to where you want to be five years from now and go backward. What you are doing today is going to make that five years strike. So, it is an investment.
It is pricey at the beginning, but we'll have to see going forward what we get for the tools. It is always expensive to buy a really nice car and not drive it very far and very much. So, it is about utilization.
I believe my company did evaluate other solutions, and they definitely liked UiPath best. The primary differentials were reputation, experience, and the level and quality of the tool.
I would advise others to give it a try. It can't hurt. Even if you didn't use it going forward, with the basic principles, you'll probably fix things and then come back to it. Some people just have bad processes, and it would be very frustrating to use them because they haven't fixed their processes. You have to get your processes aligned first and then take them to the point that they're standardized and understood by different people using them, and then you can automate across different software packages.
In terms of the ease of building automation within UiPath, that's something that I need to discover with the IT team, but what I do like is once you do something, you store it in a library, and then you have plug and play automation that you can add to others. So, you don't have to keep redoing the same work over and over again, and that's going to be a huge benefit.
I would rate it an eight out of 10. I'm learning it, but have to inject experience. I have to learn and understand, and then I have to utilize t. Like many solutions that I've dealt with, there are always three ways to do it, but there is the best way. I always wish you'd just teach the best way, but I understand that you want to make people agile and have an understanding of using it in different ways. However, learning all three ways is very cumbersome. You really want to learn the way you're going to use it.
Most of our use cases come in finance functions, however, we certainly have use cases spread across all sorts of other functions. For example, in HR. We've had a lot recently in IT operations and then also in broader operations. Obviously, that depends on the company we're working with. We're getting more and more customer-facing automation that is running all the way through the organization, from front office through middle office and back, across all different verticals within a company.
UiPath has improved our clients' companies and the way they function. For example, overall, automating the mundane and the repetitive allows people to do people things. Things like invoice processing and using Document Understanding to do that, enable your accounts payable team to look at the exceptions and do exception-based processing, which requires human judgment. Keying an invoice and working out who to send it to for approval should be rules-based. If it's not rules-based, it's probably an error or a miscommunication between the vendor who's sending it. Maybe it's a mismatch to the PO, and that requires human judgment. Therefore, just getting it out to a human to do that at the right time is critically important. If you're giving your people more time to do the exception-based management, you also give them the time and capacity to stop that from being an exception next time. Whether that's expanding the automation to be able to handle that use case, or whether it's educating your vendors when they're sending you invoices.
We work prominently with unattended solutions and larger end-to-end automation. What we're really loving about UiPath is the number of ways we can now inject human intervention at different parts of those larger workflows instead of looking at a big workflow and working out what parts of it we can automate, aiming to automate end-to-end and only working out the bits that we really need the human intervention in.
UiPath is constantly coming up with ways, whether it's through Teams or it's through apps, there are all sorts of different ways to get the human in the loop and get the automation throughput as high as we can.
Our clients use the UI apps feature. We use that for quite a few different functions. It helped to reduce the workload of IT departments by enabling end-users to create apps. That said, we generally work closer to the business than the IT side. We'd like to see it as taking the work away from the backlog that IT is looking to implement. You don't need an IT department that is quiet and doesn't have a big long queue of work. Allowing the business to be able to build their own solutions based on their business process is very powerful.
The UI apps feature has increased the number of automation. It’s certainly increasing the number of things you can automate and also the amount of a given process you can automate.
It has also reduced the time of creation. Certainly with the app creation, having a single platform reduces the time. You no longer need to integrate it with other different web forms or things you create on the front end, which we did a number of years ago. Now, it's one solution. UiPath can do it all.
For clients that use automation cloud offering, it has helped to decrease UiPath's total cost of ownership. It goes a little bit back to the IT side. You don't need to involve them nearly as much. Having a platform that is always on the latest version really, really helps. It also closes down the handoff between business and IT within the COE.
UiPath has saved costs for our client's organizations. The IT costs are different for each organization. We have clients who have an outsourced IT set up where they pay quite large costs to spin up machines and to maintain and upgrade those machines and services. Having the one solution as UiPath and offering the cloud is critically important for that.
In terms of on-prem instances, clients have saved costs there as well. We're very, very excited about the automation speed and the one-button deployment to the whole environment. That's certainly a step in that direction with on-prem. That will certainly save our client and us a lot of time. That way, everyone can spend more time building automation rather than building a platform to put them into.
The product has reduced human errors. On the same note, it also allows humans to spend a little bit more time on those exceptional cases. When the pressure may be on to get an invoice keyed it allows them to spend the right amount of time getting that exception handled. Then, of course, everything that's going through the bot is pretty much zero-error. The way the bots work, if there is an error it's going to let someone know. It's not going to guess and it's not going to fat finger.
We increasingly use UiPath's AI functionality. We certainly do on custom models with Document Understanding. We're just starting a project now to look at pulling entities out of emails. This is an exciting use case and I’m excited to learn about the capabilities that are being expanded.
The ability to automate processes is twofold. One of them is, it allows us to start to create human decisions. The human decision is the bit that you really need to automate around and starting to build that human decision-making into an AI model is critically important. The other side of that is that, when you're running automation, you have the ability to create a huge dataset. Everything that's being done is rules-based and it's data-driven so you can map everything every bot does, every button press if you want. That's a huge amount of data and a huge amount of input to AI models. Having it all in the UiPath platform is critically important for our customers. It's great that UiPath has lots of partners and we use partners, technology partners, to do that when required. However, the more that comes into the UiPath platform, the better.
We’ve utilized Academy courses from UiPath. UiPath's academy is amazing. It's unparalleled in the industry. We traditionally have done a lot of training for our clients over the years. However, we find with UiPath, we just point them in the direction of the Academy. We're always there to support, of course, and supplement any training that's specific to maybe a client environment or a client business system. That said, it's a fantastic resource for partners and for clients of UiPath.
The quality of the training Academy is great. It's also a tool to evangelize UiPath in our customer base. If someone hears about UiPath or they come to one of our demos through our delivery life cycle, and they really want to know something about UiPath, or want to get involved, or want to become a part of the COE or become a developer, it’s very, very easy to send them in the right direction. They can do the training they want to do, and they can get as deep as they want. It’s great and offers a low-effort way to evangelize UiPath.
The time to competency has been lowered with those that go through the Academy. It's not only learning. Learning things off slides. It's getting in there, it's whether it's a community edition or a training install, it's building things. Through the certifications, users can submit those things to get reviewed. This makes sure that people who are certified through the academy really do know their stuff. They've got hands-on experience. There's nothing quite like doing it in a real process. With the UiPath Academy, new users get as close as they can to that.
There should be extra ways for humans to interact with automation.
From what I've seen, and it's very early, however, there's certainly the direction they are headed, which is really, really great to see. It's my belief that Document Understanding will continue to improve. I'd like to see more predictive-type stuff, which again, we are beginning to see. We'd love to get Document Understanding continually improving and having it more improved by the SMEEs who are performing the processes rather than the data analysts.
We've been implementing UiPath for just over four years.
The stability is amazing. Years have gone by and obviously, the product has changed a lot, however, of late, the last couple of years have been great stability-wise.
The object repository and modern folders have been great for the scalability of the solution. From the platform side, it's certainly easy to scale. We're very, very impressed on the automation suite side. You can deploy everything very quickly and you can scale everything up.
The focus on reuse from a developer level is great to see. That's really improved in the last little while. On the other side of it, the actual scale through the organization, in terms of evangelizing automation, and making our customers an enterprise that automates first, there are numerous tools that do that really well. Whether it's the workshops that UiPath will come and do, or that we facilitate or it's through the pipeline itself, the scalability has obviously been a focus for the last little while. It's really, truly great.
We very rarely need to reach out to UiPath support. If we do, we know we're going to get a prompt response, and we're going to get a good answer. That said, we rarely need it. It's very, very good in general when we do use it.
We've got a few clients that run multiple solutions. They've been legacy users of another solution for a very long time. Citizen Development through StudioX is unparalleled in UiPath. Attended automation is obviously a strong point and has been for years. There are also things like Document Understanding. Document Understanding is much stronger than any of the solutions on other providers. There are those value adds that come in for that full lifecycle.
The solution is relatively straightforward. We have a dedicated platform team whose role is to implement UiPath for our customers, whether it's integrating them into the cloud or getting their business applications on the cloud. Or, whether it's an on-prem solution where we'll interact with their systems and integrate with their CyberArk or AD groups or whatever they need.
Each deployment is very dependent on the customer. We've had them deployed in a few days and we've had some that have gone on a few months, unfortunately. We find that talking to the risk group, the security group, and the infrastructure group all at the same time on day one of the project will make sure everyone's aligned - and that is the best way to mitigate the risks.
The last thing you want is someone from the security organization putting their hand up in week four and saying, "Hold on, hold on, start again. This doesn't comply with one of the controls in our organization." It's about educating and keeping everyone, all stakeholders from the IT side involved at all stages.
The ROI that our clients have seen is very process-dependent. We've seen some huge 300 to 600% on particular use cases. Some of them are very easy to calculate due to the fact that we're taking work away from manual users. We've also seen some really good ones recently that are actually increasing revenue. Whether that's giving the capacity to sales-type items or whether it's tasks such as processing refunds and all those sorts of things that shouldn't be taking time away from salespeople, it’s been helpful.
The licensing can get a little confusing. There's been a move recently to create personas around licensing. My feedback from customers is that it hasn't necessarily helped. Some of the new enterprise-type agreements, the per-seat arrangements, are interesting. That's likely the way it'll go. Even then, it's still a little on the confusing side at times. We do a lot of work with clients to get them to understand the licensing model.
We've been aware of other solutions, and in comparison, with UiPath, it's the breadth of the lifecycle that sets it apart. UiPath as a platform, from the moment the first person at an organization thinks about automating, to reaping the benefits of that and improving the day-to-day work of the business, there's a solution for all of that. Whether it's process mining and finding automation candidates, it's the way UiPath brings different users into the automation. Apps and insights make sure we're pulling the right data out to keep generating the business case to grow the UiPath account itself. Also, along with that, is the ability to provide the extra benefit and knowing what benefit we're providing.
We have clients across both on-prem and cloud deployments. We have about 25% cloud, 75% on-prem solutions. We use various versions of the on-premises model. We probably average about 12-month-old versions, however, we do have clients on the most recent as well. We also have a couple of clients who are lagging a little bit.
I'd advise potential new users to get in there and get started. You don't know until you've tried. You don't have to look very hard to get started, however, it's important once you get going to start to think about how you scale and how you build an operating model around it. Maybe start small, and think big, and make sure you plan accordingly.
I'd rate the solution at a nine out of ten.
Our primary use case is to document image processing. We're six months in, so our first case was sorting and filtering the data, extracting the image, and determining if it's a certain type of document. If it is, it starts putting it into different buckets, which ultimately we'll run something to extract and put those into our data source.
Our second use case is for the healthcare industry. We're looking at catalog data and a customer might want to know about a product. Is this product safe? Who provides this product? Is it on a contract somewhere? We go out to multiple different web sources to look up information about that document, put it back in our database, save it for that customer, then save it for any future customer that asks the same question.
We're looking at other things like taking snapshots of the image of the product. We also want to automate other basic automation, low-hanging fruit type functions, like automating uploads of data to sites, spreadsheets, contact-center, and Salesforce.
Longer-term, we want to take what we're doing in the document image and apply it to other areas of our business. We have purchase orders, invoicing, shipping documents, compliance documents, credential documents, a lot of images in this particular space. We'll go as deep as we can in the data processing side of things.
We're going through a culture shift to get to an automation-thinking platform as opposed to a lot of our business relying on BPO humans to do the work. Making that paradigm shift is taking time because we're only a week-plus live. If we prove the value, they'll give us more opportunities to make those big changes. But it's good that the business is thinking that they need this. Now it's just getting the community aspects of it.
The automation cloud offering helps to decrease the solution's total cost of ownership by taking care of things such as infrastructure, maintenance, and updates.
Although we don't use it, document understanding for our use cases is very compelling, but it was a little cost prohibitive just out the gate. We are looking at it long-term now that we have the data filtered if we can more strategically apply it to the best data to fit it. But overall, the platform is very innovative. I don't think I can call out one particular feature. The ease of use of integrating to and from Amazon components, being a cloud-native application ourselves, has been really helpful in the development and the ease of transferring documents between our internal systems and platform.
The ease of building automations using UiPath depends on the use cases. Overall, the development is really easy. Where you run into challenges is in workloads that are highly rule-based. So we abandoned one use case where it had 50,000 different decision points. It wasn't worth the time. It wasn't a product thing. It was just too time-consuming of a process, something like that.
There have been some limitations as far as how do we execute our bots, when? This new release that they just mentioned today actually addresses a lot of our concerns around the integrations component that they recently released. If we could find an email instead of waking up and checking the email inbox. That's a big improvement we're looking to, but it wasn't a limiting factor.
I have used the Academy. It was really just myself and as well the one IT guy who's supporting the platform. Our office partner came in with the knowledge, but the course was really good. We came in with no RPA experience, and it covered everything from the basics of RPAs to the processes of identifying.
They recently addressed a major problem of kick-off processes for the integration function. That addressed a lot of the community concerns around that. If you are using queues, their queue system isn't as reliable as I would like it to be.
One of our concerns is that we were not a Microsoft shop at all before bringing this in. That was actually my limiting factor in bringing in the software. We lost it below the party lines. The ability to address other workloads, Mac, Linux, etc., is going to be a game-changer.
From a new customer, new investment perspective, there are a lot of cost-prohibitive aspects that we decided not to add to our initial investment. We weren't sure if or when we'll figure things out for use cases.
I have been using UiPath for six months.
We want to triple our capacity and triple our workflows.
I've only had to use support once, and it was more of a documentation problem. I didn't understand what I was seeing, and they worked it out within an hour. So far, they've been good.
The cloud was up two days after we signed. Then to get our bot infrastructure up because it's Windows and we're in a Windows environment, it took us about a month to run through that and get the IT people and security.
Cloud solutions will save you a lot of headaches and time. We broke halfway through and decided we're going to cloud, not on-prem.
Reputation was a big reason we went with UiPath, as well as the growth and the ability to integrate specifically to the cloud which was missing in other solutions. That was a big plus. The ability to use something like document understanding and the ability to interact with internal APIs were also key features. It's not just web scraping and doing things in Excel or other things like that. We wanted it to work with our internal native applications.
UiPath has not yet saved costs for my organization. We're still going live and we're anticipating about a two-year ROI.
Make sure to understand your use cases before you sign your agreement. That way you're not idle for six to nine months trying to figure out what it is you're trying to automate.
I would rate UiPath an eight out of ten.
We have worked on multiple use cases, but most recently, we have worked on a payroll system. Previously, every month, we had to manually get certain details from HR, and we used to do the pay run for all employees in the organization. Now, we automatically extract the required information from the current system by using UiPath. We then prepare a sheet by using Excel, and the entire Excel sheet is processed by a bot. The final sheet is sent for the payslips for the entire organization, and the entire pay report is sent to the bank for payment details.
Automation reduces dependencies. When I have a process that is done by humans, there are dependencies. For example, I need to make sure that the required number of people are available in different shifts. Any process that is done by a human has to be split into eight to nine hours of work. After every eight hours, I have a replacement happening for the same work. So, multiple people are working in different shifts. In addition, any work through humans can only be done from Monday to Friday, or I have to get the team over the weekend. Making our team work over the weekend requires special permissions or approvals. With automation, I am at ease. I'm not dependent on anybody. UiPath is easily accessible from mobiles for the orchestration part. So, if I have a critical process that I need to execute and get the results, I can do it from my mobile. Even when I'm traveling, I can get real-time statistics.
Previously, I used to get a request at any time to do the pay run for an employee. If the employee was on a leave on that particular day or was not available, I used to miss my target or deadline. Now, we are not dependent on anybody. We are completely independent. If I get a request, the robot is automatically going to process it automatically. I don't even have to tell the robot to run a process after getting a request. All my rules and validations are taken care of by automation before the deadline. If I'm away from the office, my robot can automatically trigger a process on receiving a request. So, we are able to meet all the deadlines, targets, and standards set by the company within the given timeframe.
It has helped in minimizing our on-premises footprint. We work for multiple zones and across the globe. If I have a UiPath architecture, I can deploy it anywhere. Irrespective of the country or continent or zone, I'm able to use the same deployment or the same architecture at multiple locations. It has reduced my cost of infrastructure and maintenance. The cost of everything has come down. Previously, we used to have servers country-wise and continent-wise, but now, we don't need multiple servers and multiple teams to maintain them. I can do things from a single location with a limited set of resources.
The majority of our processes are in the unattended mode, but we do have certain processes in the attended mode where certain end-users provide me the real-time information. We have designed a process where we give a specific form to the user. When the form is filled by the user, a process is automatically triggered, and the robot starts processing. It gives real-time statuses and information to the end-user in terms of what we are doing, how are we doing the calculations, and how are they going to get the benefit by opting for certain features within our organization. I can run my processes in the attended and unattended mode. So, I'm able to trigger both modes of automation very easily.
I am able to keep my customer data integrated. With humans, a data leak can happen, but in the case of robotics, my data is very secure.
The way the processing happens is also very smooth. For example, if I'm on leave or on a break, and a customer calls at my help desk, I won't be able to respond. Now, we have chatbots or robots running throughout the day. When the executives are not there and anyone calls the customer support team, customers are able to get a resolution. They don't have to keep calling or wait. Automatically, the bot is able to respond to their queries and concerns. We have been able to reduce the response time. My customers are pretty much satisfied with it, and they don't have any complaints. Previously, the satisfaction level of the customers was not that great.
The best part of automation is that we can easily integrate multiple technologies within a single tool. I can do it at ease with all of my data flow. Automation is happening across the globe, not only in my organization. Every time we do automation, we feel that there is something overlapping in every process. If I automate a process for my organization and your organization, 50% of the things would be the same. I can very easily maintain common things in automation tools through common libraries or common components. For the remaining 50% of things, we use different technologies. We are integrating optical character recognition (OCR) technologies for document processing. We are also using multiple machine learning methodologies to do pattern matching. We are using artificial intelligence to give a response that is comparable to a human response.
We use its AI functionality in our automation program. We get multiple requests, and they can be through telephone, emails, or documents. When a request comes through the telephone, the robot or automation is designed to convert that to text. When a request comes through a document, we are using AI features. The document might not have a proper structure, and a customer can give any set of data in any format. So, we have built a special template or format, and this AI is helping us to extract the document with the most accurate results possible. We are getting an accuracy of 95%. With this, dependency is also gone. A human has to properly go through a document. Then, we have to convert the data to the file and process it. With AI, irrespective of the size of the document, which can be 100 pages or 500 pages, we are able to exactly locate the data that we're looking for, and we are able to extract and then process it through automation. We are able to smoothly integrate multiple things within a single process.
Its AI functionality has enabled us to automate more processes. It takes a human 23 minutes to process a 500-page document. With AI features, it hardly takes 7 minutes to process the same document. There is a great reduction in the time taken to do the same task, which is a huge benefit. With AI, I can look for, find, and extract specific information in a particular document, and then I'm able to process the information at ease. I can have documents in different formats. For example, each insurance customer or service provider can have different formats. A human would have to scan through multiple pages to reach the conclusion that this is the right data. AI can easily process different formats, whereas a human being has to be trained for different formats. Humans might also understand something and forget something, but that's not the case with AI or automation tools. They always remember the instructions given to them, which has drastically helped us in making our processes more accurate.
It has contributed to end-to-end automation in our organization. End-to-end automation helps us in completing things in a shorter span of time and utilizing resources in a better way. Previously, for every step of a process, we used to have a different team. We had a separate team for the following:
Now, all these things are done by robotics. I only need a few people to maintain my infrastructure.
We use the UiPath Apps feature, and it has definitely helped us. If there is something that is not available within our team, we can directly use all the apps and features given by UiPath. We don't have to dedicatedly set up a team to design that app. If I have to design a new app or a chatbot for my customers, I can easily integrate the UiPath Apps feature instead of recruiting people, training them, and expecting them to give me the output. UiPath provides help and documentation, and if I require any licenses or support, UiPath's team is always available to assist us.
The UiPath Apps feature has increased the number of automations that we can create. It reduces the time to create automations. We can easily create automation. For a small process, we're able to roll out one automated process every 21 days. We are able to roll out an automated and complex end-to-end process every three or five months to our customers. Previously, it used to take us at least six months to one year to roll out the new features or new functionality to customers, but now, the time has drastically come down.
It speeds up or reduces the cost of digital transformation. Every time we automate, we are able to speed up automation. We are able to do more things, and more people are working on automation. By using new features that UiPath is bringing and the learnings from my past experience, we are able to automate very quickly. Four and a half years ago, a process used to take four months. Now, it only takes 25 days for me. They have added many features, and I don't have to sit and design those features. They are constantly providing new features in their quarterly releases, and I can simply make the best use of them and implement them in my process.
Previously, I needed people in different shifts, and every human being might not have the same speed or enthusiasm. Humans also need breaks. A robot works throughout the day, and it has a consistent processing speed, so we are able to process more and more. I can plan a target with my robot, and I am able to achieve that. If I'm adding new customers, I just have to integrate one or two more licenses, which is very easy. I can easily create or configure a new robot and start processing. With humans, I have to train them again and again, whereas with automation, once a process is ready, I can use it in multiple robots. I can use it for 25, 50, or 100 robots very easily. I can scale my process rate very fast.
Previously, we were able to process 5,000 customer requests in a month. By using automation, we are able to do the same amount of work within 10 days or even within a week. If we add more human resources, it increases the cost for my organization, whereas, with robotics, I can configure 10 robots or 100 robots. It doesn't increase the cost a lot for my organization, and I can process everything that I want. I don't have any backlog.
It has freed up the time of our employees. This additional time has enabled employees to focus on higher-value work. I am utilizing resources in a much better way, and I am able to give them the work that is interesting for them or is relevant to their growth. When people in my team started working, they found the job interesting. After working for more than two to three years on the same thing, they don't feel that they're doing something new or learning something new. By using automation for a lot of things, I am able to train my team on the new things or technology that they are interested in or want to work with. I am also able to give the work that they're looking for. It is bringing more satisfaction, not only from the customers' perspective but also from my team's perspective. I am able to keep the same resources in my organization for a longer period of time because they're very happy. They are not dissatisfied with the organization.
It has definitely reduced human error. Our accuracy is 99.2%. With humans, our accuracy was 96%, and by using robotics, we have brought the accuracy to 99.2%.
It has also reduced the costs of our automation operations. In the initial year, we saved 10% of the day-to-day operational cost that we had when we were doing things manually. In the second year, it was 30%, and it has increased in the subsequent years. So far, almost 60% turnaround in the business profit has been reported.
It has saved costs for our organization. Previously, for a process, I had to train, for example, 100 people and keep them in multiple shifts. I also had to give them multiple facilities to be a part of the organization, whereas with robotics, I only have to design the process once, and I can use it in any number of bots, such as 10, 25, or 50. It also helps in scaling at no extra cost.
By using automation, we need fewer people for support operations. If the customer queries are taken care of by chatbots, my data and patterns are being analyzed by using AI and ML, and the scanning of the documents is taken care of by OCR, I need very few people for support operations. I need only 10% of people for providing support around the clock.
We are using the entire automation process most commonly. We are also doing scheduling. Our processes are running on a fixed date, so we are also using schedulers or timers.
We are also using AI technology. We have AI Fabric, and we are doing the entire extraction part of the document through UiPath, which is very helpful. We're able to do everything within this single tool, and we are not dependent on other tools. We don't have to license more tools from the market and go to multiple tools to do the same work. Within this single tool, we have every feature that we need for our organization.
It is a very simple tool to work with for anybody. Simplicity is the best in UiPath. It also has the best community support. If we are looking for any solution, we can directly reach out to UiPath at any point in time.
The new features or functionalities that come with UiPath upgrades don't work perfectly in the initial days. Their new releases are not stable. We always find some set of issues. I have to work with the UiPath team for a week or so to resolve the issues, and then I'm able to use it. The stabilization should be there. We expect UiPath to reduce the number of errors before rolling out new features to end-users or customers.
In addition, many times, the apps or activities that we use within UiPath for designing are no longer compatible when a new upgrade happens or the version is changed. We want UiPath to look into it.
I have been using UiPath for almost four and a half years.
It is one of the very stable tools. We don't see any breakdowns happening within the tool.
We only have to design the process once, and we can use it in any number of bots. It helps in scaling at no extra cost. After we design a process, we can reuse it in subsequent designs. I just have to work on the things that are not already designed. So, there is a 10% to 30% reduction in the new processes that we design. Scalability improves with each and every design.
There is a user base of 100,000 users who are benefiting from automation at the moment. With manual processing, if I had a team of 1,000 people, then with automation, I would need 50 people to automate all processes. I would have four to five solution consultants or solution architects and around 15 to 20 developers and testers. There would also be people who are doing the business implementation, giving guidance to the customers, and doing the production rollout and handover preparation for the customers.
Our usage is increasing. With every new process that we design, we are able to integrate more and more. Previously, we only used to integrate with OCR, and now, we are also using chatbots, AI, and ML. So, our processes are increasing, and we are definitely expanding.
The support that we get from UiPath is one of the best. We are a direct channel partner for the product. Every time UiPath comes up with new features or functionalities, they come and demonstrate that feature and help us to understand them so that we can help our customers with their implementations. We get direct support and the licensing, pricing, and certification benefits from UiPath.
It was pretty straightforward for us. We were able to build the entire infrastructure within a week. This includes getting licenses, doing the installation, and configuring the robots. We found the UiPath documentation very helpful while doing the installation and configuration.
If I design a process today, I can deploy a process to production within 30 minutes of time. It is very quick. In terms of the implementation strategy, we go to the customer and understand their pain points. We then identify the processes that can be automated and tell them about the benefits and the timeframe for implementing a particular process to their server. We also tell them when will they start seeing the result and how they can achieve what they need by using multiple integrations of the tool. They don't have to spend multiple licenses on different tools. Everything can be done within a single tool.
We use a tool called TFS. With a single click, I can deploy my process from development to QA. In the same way, I can move my process from QA to UAT, and then with one more click, I can move it from UAT to production.
As solution architects, our role is to help the design team understand the design that has to be built. They take care of the design and testing. For the production rollout, we have an infrastructure team. We also sit with the business team to make them understand the process, how robotics works on a day-to-day basis, and what are the things that they have to monitor. Whenever we design a process, we make sure that all the complexities are handled. We are also handling all the compliance, and the integration is done smoothly. After a process is designed and approved by our business team, our accuracy stands at 99%.
In terms of maintenance, it doesn't require expensive or complex application upgrades or IT application support. UiPath is pretty simple. The basic infrastructure works in most of the servers, and we don't need frequent upgrades and maintenance. It is very easy to maintain.
We have seen an ROI. In the initial year, we saved 10% of the day-to-day operational cost. In the second year, it was 30%, and it has increased in the subsequent years. So far, almost 60% increase in the business profit has been reported.
There is no additional cost apart from the standard licensing. There is a one-time cost for the infrastructure setup.
We did evaluate multiple RPA tools such as Automation Anywhere and Blue Prism. In terms of the ease of designing, the ease of use, and from the cost perspective, we found UiPath to be the best tool for our customers.
Anyone who wants to automate processes should understand the process, its complexity, and the volume of the processing or the number of transactions to be processed. You should do proper analysis before you select the tool and licenses.
UiPath provides a lot of benefits and reduces the cost for an organization. It is one of the best tools in the market. The support that we get from UiPath is one of the best, and most of the features provided by UiPath are simply amazing.
Initially, people are hesitant to use automation because they don't know what automation can do. Anybody who uses the technology in the right way will get lots of benefits from any technology. Your implementation strategy has to be proper. You should check the feasibility of using a particular technology with existing processes in the organization and the benefits you can get.
It helps us in reducing the time, and we are also able to bring more business to the company. By making my processes digital, I'm bringing more revenue to my company. We visit a customer's site and try to find out the processes and pain points. After that, we analyze the entire solution within UiPath and tell the customer about the best solution and what would be the reduction in time as compared to the normal process.
I would rate UiPath a nine out of 10.
I have been using it for a couple of different things, mainly insurance-related. As of now, we are using it mainly in insurance platforms, insurance portals, and doing some admin support in terms of the backend insurance tasks.
I've used it before in payroll where it was processing the payroll, generating the payslips, creating the payments for our outsourced invoices, processing invoices, making payments, sending reports to banks, and more.
In terms of improving the functions, we had to have a lot of time-critical tasks, which we have seen improvement on. In insurance, it is mainly around the claim processing and then paying the invoice to the third parties or doing the payments to the end customer. Most of the time it is missed, and then there are SLA penalties involved. This solution offers good savings for us in all those areas. On top of that, there are fewer errors now. Previously, there were many manual errors due to the time-critical aspect of the tasks. People were trying to put in their best efforts while working quickly against time, which caused them to work too fast and make mistakes. We get savings on two fronts now. One is mistakes. There are no mistakes anymore. The second thing is we are doing tasks faster and can run 24/7.
The orchestrator is one of the good features they have.
Internally, internal queue management is another feature that is really helpful when it comes to managing the work and checking the workload.
The latest thing that they added is reports that show the handling times and all those things.
The ease of use of building automation using UiPath is good and I would rate it and an eight out of ten with the version I am using. If we move to the latest version, there may be a couple of new features, such as modern variable management, that would bump it to nine out of ten.
UiPath enables us to implement end-to-end automation, starting with process analysis, then robot building, and finally monitoring automation. With the new versions, it does, at least. We are not using those features in my current organization, as we have some other tools in place.
End-to-end coverage is important to us. We use the older version. We started using it three years ago, which is why we build a lot of items ourselves. If the features were released two years ago, we'd likely use UiPath for everything.
It is important that we can scale automation without having to pay attention to the infrastructure of the automation. We're very interested in the cloud. It offers many benefits. Even though we are on-prem now, in terms of managing the infrastructure, it will likely be really helpful to move to the cloud, so that we don't have to bother about all this infrastructure stuff in the future.
It reduced the cost of digital transformation and it is allowing us to actually move to digital items, as, most of the time, when we were trying to present things and things were not digital, it helped us to advance very much into a digital space easily.
It does not require any expensive or complex application upgrades or IT support. For some applications, it requires some modifications. Even if it's 10% or 20% digitized, we are trying to use UiPath to do the stuff for us instead of doing the application, upgrading, all those things. In most cases, it's not very costly for us.
UiPath has reduced human error. It does all the time. In claims, there used to be a lot of human error. Especially in payments, sometimes it would pay more or less or the wrong person, and now, it's all automated and errors have stopped.
The solution has freed up employee time. It depends on the process, however, if I had to take an average, it is probably freeing up one full-time person, which is eight hours. On a monthly basis, around 150 hours are saved for a medium process.
This additional time has enabled employees to focus on more important work. Employees are happier, and, depending on the process and what they were doing, what kind of involvement it requires, the solution is motivating employees.
The product is reducing the cost for other operations, as it's an automation tool. While we are paying for automation, it is reducing the overall operational cost. Not specifically automation operational costs, but other operational costs. We are seeing an average savings of around 30%.
UiPath hasn't really helped us minimize our on-prem footprint. We are still using the on-premises deployment and everything is on-premises for us. We have, however, used some machines on the cloud. Still, the on-premises footprint in terms of UiPath is not lower.
There are a couple of minor items that could use improvement. Overall the tool roadmap looks fine. They have improved a lot from 2019 to 2021. In two years, there have been lots of additions. It seems like there's no particular improvement which they need to make. They have already improved a lot in the 2021 version, which is adding a modern framework and then modern folder structures.
They can probably focus more on attended stuff or creating a UI around that. We are not using the attended bot a lot, however, I have seen some use cases in other organizations, as I'm working in consulting. I've seen in some other areas where an organization wants to use attended automation, however, the feature is not very well designed which makes it difficult to use.
I have been in automation for almost four years. I'm using all of these different tools, not only UiPath, and moving around within tools. For example, I'll use UiPath for six months, and then do three months on another tool, and then eight months again on UiPath.
However, overall, in terms of automation, I've been familiar with various solutions for three to four years.
It is very stable. It can perform very well for small to medium complex processes. It takes a little bit of time to adjust for very complex processes, however. It takes some time to build and to develop and deploy for very complex processes. That said, it is very stable overall, with the caveat that, for very complex processes, it's difficult to build or manage.
Scalability-wise, it is good in terms of connecting the bots and the Orchestrator can support thousands.
In our case, we have around 137 to 140 registered users on the Orchestrator. Most of them are developers. I would say it's around 20 odd VAs or other staff, however, most of them are developers. Around 100+ developers, with the remaining users being process analysts.
We are always trying to find new work in the pipeline, and, as of now, it is not used across the entire organization. It is currently used by 50% of the teams and the plan is to take it to 100%.
I would rate technical support at an eight out of ten as of now. They're not always right on the first try, however, most of the time we get what we need on the first or second try.
I'm constantly jumping back and forth between various automation tools.
I previously used Automation Anywhere. I'm working in consulting, so I switch between tools, and for one of the clients, it could be Automation Anywhere, for another it could be UiPath.
Each tool has its own pros and cons. An ideal tool could be probably a mixture of all of the tools on the market as some have some great features. UiPath is great for its ease of use. Anyone can quickly jump in and start learning it. Some of the tools take a little bit more time to understand and probably need more time to deploy or build code. Some others have better debugging. I would say UiPath debugging can be better. This is one of the things which can be improved. It is improved in the latest version, however, if it can be compared with others, such as Pega robotics, it can be improved. That said, Pega robotics is not an automation or RPA tool. It's basically RD. It's a front-end tool.
I have set UiPath up from scratch for one of the companies I worked with in Sydney, Australia. It was in 2017 or 2018 when I was comparing the tools, and deciding which one is better based on the roadmaps. At that point, I set it up from scratch.
The time when I did a setup, it was very complex.
When I started doing it in 2017 or 2018, there were a couple of issues with installing the SQL server and configuring everything for the Orchestrator machine, et cetera and it was very complex.
Now, they have simplified it. It's a one-time installation, and the cloud makes things really easy. With the new versions, it is better. For me, the support was not very good at that time.
The deployment took us a couple of days. It was complex. The documentation was not really very great, and the support was also not very good. It took us a couple of days, maybe five to ten days, to implement it end-to-end and then set up multiple instances.
In terms of the strategy, we have followed the guidelines, whatever the document said, and then took help from UiPath support. Other than that, it was a standard installation.
For deployment and maintenance, it depends on process counts. Usually, when processes are stable and running for a long time, one person can support four to five processes in general. In our case, we have a mix and match model for supporting production. Overall, I would say that there is a different team for each different support platform. A platform team is just supporting the infrastructure, and overall there are around 20 people, which offer support.
I did not use an integrator. I work with a consulting company, and we help with the installation. However, at the time, UiPath didn't have a very good presence in Australia, which made it difficult.
I'm not very involved in pricing or licensing.
We are mostly using developer licenses and they have unattended, attended pro and developer licensing. We also have development and production licensing as well as licensing for the orchestrator. Different licenses have different costs.
We pay our licensing fees on a yearly basis.
I'm not using the latest version. We're a little behind. We need to update it.
We do use a bit of attended automation, however, it isn't very much. It is helpful, however, we are getting better benefits with the backend automation. For us, the level of importance in terms of having attended automation is five out of ten.
We have done a couple of POCs with AI. We don't have anything which is in production. It's all POCs and a couple of minor display things. We aren't using AI very much at all. Therefore, we don't have proper use cases. We haven't solved other processes. The first priority is to solve everything practical instead of moving to experimental tasks.
At this time, we do not use the UiPath apps feature. I haven't seen it and I'm not aware of it.
The support is really good now compared to what it was a couple of years back. Support teams are really helpful when it comes to upgrading or installing the new versions, and it is very straightforward compared to what it was. I would say planning is important however, UiPath support is always there when they are required to be.
The biggest lesson we have learned is it's important to have a roadmap. We've connected a lot of tools and built a lot of things. We invested a lot. However, it's important to be flexible enough to adjust so that you can change if you need to, as it's hard to predict the future.
I'd rate the solution at a ten out of ten.
We are using the on-premises UiPath solution for both attended and unattended bots. At this time, we use unattended bots primarily to facilitate integration between applications, and we are not using the attended bot capabilities.
Generally speaking, we develop integrations for our core banking system, which was written in-house and running on a mainframe. It is a highly-developed system that we started using more than 30 years ago. When it was created, we didn't have the integration capabilities that exist in other applications or core systems, today. This means that in order to have external applications communicate with the core system, we need to develop integrations. Examples of this might be web services or other APIs, and that's why it takes time to do.
We have teams to do the integration, but considering that the core banking system is in Turkey and all of our teams are busy, we don't have enough resources to implement all of our integration projects. Now, for the past three years, we have been implementing bots to handle integration by moving data from the applications to the core system, and from the core system to the applications.
The biggest benefit for us is time savings in terms of developing satellite applications for the core banking system. We are developing the robotic API, and we are integrating our internal front-end applications with the core system.
Using this approach, we can easily get and set data from the core system, and we can see the results for each transition. We can learn about what happens in the core system with the help of the bots.
The amount of time that we save depends on the use case. For example, if we implement integration between core banking and the applications instead of native integration through development, it saves a lot of time. I prefer native integration versus using the bots but sometimes, you don't have this opportunity because it will take too long to put into production. Other times, you can't justify undergoing a large development process for just a small integration, so it's enough to solve the problem using the bots.
There is another use case where our operations teams perform repetitive tasks using the bots. For example, when performing the task manually, users have to take the data from one screen and enter it on another screen. We have never tried to calculate how much time we are saving in cases like this, although I'm sure that we are saving a lot of time.
People in the organization have been asking for more projects to be automated because it is easier for them. When their tasks are automated, they are more relaxed and can focus on other more important tasks, as opposed to the repetitive ones. Getting away from repetitive tasks puts you in a position where you can make more decisions and be part of the smart part of the business. This leaves the easier, repetitive tasks for the robots.
There are a lot of really useful features in UiPath including the Orchestrator and the Studio.
The Orchestrator is one of the main tools that I use because I like to help orchestrate the bots. It is the heart of the tool and it gives me a lot of flexibility to automate or manage bots that are in the field. The Orchestration Server is one of the most important features and when you perform a deep dive, you see that it has a lot of functionality. It's great.
The Orchestrator has other features such as computer vision, AI, and machine learning, and it complements the bots and the Studio.
UiPath integrates well with Elasticsearch, which is a great search engine. ElasticSearch is more capable than UiPath for searching logs. I'm filling the gap in log reporting using ElasticSearch, where I'm feeding the logs into it and then creating dashboards, or using the analytics parts of ElasticSearch and Kibana.
The UiPath Academy is a very valuable component of this solution. Many of our employees have used the courses. With it, a person who has a little bit of an analytical mindset can easily learn to do many things. If somebody is willing to develop themselves in RPA, the UiPath academy is more than enough to do so. They will understand the components that make up the ecosystem. The academy is very good, well constructed, and has a lot of labs and exercises to help one learn the system by themself without any help, and very easily.
The logging capability that comes with Orchestrator does not allow you to create smart reports. You have the logs from the bots and what's happening on the machines because you get all of this information from the logs. However, UiPath is more capable when it comes to collecting information about your processes, time saved, or process execution. They have some smart report dashboards.
The installation and initial setup is difficult for non-technical organizations.
We have been using UiPath for more than three years.
Stability is something that we should consider in two parts. The first concerns the bots and how they are running the tasks on the machines. This comes down to what kind of developers we have because if you are developing properly, and implementing all of the exceptional cases that may occur during the execution of the process, it's very good. I haven't had any issues in cases like this.
The second part is the Orchestrator, and I haven't had issues with this either. In the more than three years that we have been using this environment, including the time in production and our test environments, we have never had an issue.
We have had two or three incidents because we didn't have enough space left on the database storage, but that was not related to UiPath. Rather, it is related to the infrastructure. Another time, the SSL certification expired so we had to renew it. Otherwise, stability-wise, we haven't had any problems.
Scalability is very good, although we have not reached a point where we needed to scale the infrastructure. The high availability and scalability are two of the main features in the UiPath environment but we have not needed to go in that direction yet. At this time, we only have five bots in the organization and that is enough.
We are not planning to increase the numbers at this point because the number of bots that we have can be managed on a single node. We don't have clusters or multiple bots because of the criticality of our processes, but these are things that you can add and set up to share the workloads. Although we don't use it, I think that it looks really promising.
In our team, we have a business analyst and developers. Some of the roles for the developers are varied. At most, we have three people on a project who are working with UiPath.
The technical support for UiPath is good. When we first started contacting them between two and three years ago, the support for everybody was the same. However, they're now offering different tiers of support that require a different license and cost. There is one basic technical support, where all customers have the right to open tickets and try to solve the problems. Then, there are different support levels where you can pay extra and you can get more assistance for solving your problems.
Up to this point, all of the problems that I have had are mostly related to upgrades and installations, and they have only been from time to time. So far, I have been able to solve problems with basic technical support. Some of the problems I have solved on my own, whereas with others, I have needed a small bit of help from technical support.
I can say at this point that the support is good, although really, I haven't had any major problems that necessitated a lot of support.
We have used other RPA solutions in the past, but not to the same scale as UiPath.
The initial setup is not very complex, but it depends on the profile and experience of the person who is using it. Considering we had a great deal of deep experience in the project implementation and also the technologies, we are familiar with everything. This includes tasks like installation of the infrastructure, configuring the databases, configuring the virtual machines, and installing the robots' features.
For less technical organizations or people, it will be difficult to implement the UiPath infrastructure. In that case, they will need the help of partners.
It's not so easy, but it's well documented. In fact, one of the good things about UiPath is that everything is very well documented. The deployment takes no more than two or three weeks.
Our implementation strategy started with developing bots using the trial license. We found the bot implementation was very easy. The trial includes everything that you need to develop workflows and the bots that run on the machines. When you get to the point where you need to run multiple bots in production, you need the Orchestration server.
We did not install Orchestrator until between four and six months after we started with the trial. In the beginning, we were testing UiPath and creating some small projects. These were very easy to implement. After that is when we decided to buy the license and move the bots to production.
In terms of maintenance, it is not critical for the bots. It's the Orchestrator that has to be maintained and kept up to date. Every year, you need to upgrade your infrastructure with the latest release, so there is some annual maintenance. If it is on-premises then you also have to maintain the hardware that everything is running on.
Of course, there should be somebody responsible for taking care of the databases and general system maintenance. The operating system, for example, should be maintained by someone. All of these things are layers and sublayers on top of the solution.
If instead, you implement the cloud version of UiPath, then you can get rid of all of the maintenance. In that case, you have only the bots and the Orchestrator, which are hosted on the UiPath cloud, and you don't have to worry about anything. UiPath does the upgrades and performs all of the maintenance, which is nice. In the future, we may go in this direction. However, at this time, maintaining the infrastructure in our organization is easy and not a burden for us.
I can't say that UiPath is expensive but I can't say that it's cheap. The cost that we are allocating for RPA doesn't burden us too heavily, so what we are paying is acceptable compared to the gains that we have in the organization. That said, it is relative because it depends on the size of the organization, the budget, and other factors. From our point of view, considering our budget, it is okay but for another organization, it might be expensive.
There are some features, such as UiPath Insights, that require you to purchase an additional license. The logging capabilities are also a feature that you need to pay extra for.
While we were searching for solutions, we read the documentation for UiPath. We found out that UiPath was originally started as a Romanian company, where we are, so we figured that we would try it since this is where it was first implemented. Our tests showed that UiPath was very promising but we kept investigating other solutions.
We tried Blue Prism and we tried Automation Anywhere, which are both RPA tools. We also did some studying, looked at the Gartner report, and did some further analysis. Ultimately, we decided to buy the licenses from UiPath because it was solving all of our problems.
When you use this system, you are using features from several different modules. It's something like an ecosystem where you have the bots, Studio, and the Orchestrator. If you are not using all of them at the same time then something is missing. They complete each other. If, for example, you don't have the Orchestrator and are only running the bots then it is a different kind of automation.
In the past, as I was using UiPath, I found that there were additional features that I wanted, but regularly and with each product update, they were bringing in new functionalities. At this time, I don't have a project that is waiting and cannot be implemented due to missing features. All of the tools that they deliver, for the time being, together are enough to implement any type of project.
We are not yet using the AI functionality because to this point, although that is because we don't yet have a proper project for it. At the same time, the AI and machine learning functionality are very important to us because we are planning to use them.
We have not used the UiPath Apps feature because it is one of the new features that has come out lately, and we haven't had the time to gain a deep understanding of these technologies. We have some rough ideas about how we can use this feature, but for the time being, we do not have a project that needs to be solved with UiPath Apps.
My advice for anybody who is implementing UiPath is to start with studying the processes and trying to determine whether they are good candidates for RPA. In order to automate a process, you need structured data such that the inputs and outputs are somewhat predictable. Once you know what it is that you want to automate, you have to understand the capacity, and then if you have any candidate processes, you can begin developing.
UiPath is the RPA solution that I recommend. However, it is important to know, before purchasing a solution, which of the processes are good candidates for automation.
I would rate this solution a nine out of ten.
We have a use case that involves an invoice billing process, where vendors from an external organization submit their details for the invoice. This automation works as expected, independently of anything else. It is also a good example of how we were able to scale RPA benefits in the company with the automation of a specific process that requires human-robot collaboration.
Our internal tools include the database where all of this information is stored, and we have a second automation that is used by the billers in our organization to tally the data that includes details such as what each vendor has submitted to get their payments.
We built a third automation in UiPath, which basically compares these first two. But, due to the complexity and the nature of the tally that has to occur, we require some human input in between certain steps.
For these particular steps, we have developed a four-bot configuration. These are four separate bots that run and a couple of them have an attended automation part, where a human can intervene. It's a verification step, where the human can decide whether or not something is okay. Specifically, the bot compares two fields and if they match, then it's great, but if not, it triggers a request to a human user for manual verification. If they approve then it is marked as a successful verification.
Because we use technologies like OCR, there are details that cannot always be interpreted properly. This is where we need an additional check, which is the reason that we have humans in the loop as part of the process.
We have saved a lot of time by using UiPath. We have also improved a lot in terms of accuracy and reducing errors in a lot of projects. In fact, in one of the projects, we automated the entire job, which involves coaching people on what has to be done end-to-end, by the robots. It was built on UiPath and on this project, we had a savings of more than €100,000 euros. That was a big saving for us, and it's continuing right now.
More importantly, a lot of the clients had complained about the end-user, which is outside of the organization, with respect to the accuracy of the data. There were errors. When we deployed robots based on UiPath, the accuracy has vastly improved and the clients are very happy with the results. They no longer have to keep coming back to our billers and telling them that things were not done properly. The robot functions like it has been programmed every single time. So, it's been perfect for that purpose as well. The customer trusts us more because of our deployments in robots.
UiPath definitely allows employees to delegate mundane tasks to their personal automations, saving them time. A major reason for a lot of our automation cases is because most people are not 100% involved in certain tasks. For example, if you spend two hours on a particular process, and then over the next four or five hours, you're supposed to be working on more complicated processes, but what happens during the first two hours is that things get complicated and the day is ruined dealing with small tasks. Now, suppose that the two-hour allotment for the smaller process is automated using UiPath, the person is free to dedicatedly perform more important functions. In the entirety of our automation effort, this has been a primary driver for all of the new use cases. It's a huge plus for us.
With respect to employee satisfaction, it has been a mixed result for us. In certain cases, it's been a huge boon because there was a heavy workload on the employees and UiPath really helped them cope with it. This was especially true during COVID when the workload increased exponentially, and people could not go into the office. However, there were times in the past when people were no longer required because UiPath was doing their jobs perfectly, making them redundant. As they were no longer required, they left the company.
So, we have had both scenarios, but moving forward, instead of telling people that they're no longer required, we have retasked them to other projects. Essentially, we have reabsorbed them and in turn, have simplified the hiring process. In this regard, we have adjusted.
The new UiPath assistant is very good.
The customizable forms that UiPath has recently launched allow us to give the user an exact input that they can provide. Being able to customize this is extremely helpful for us because we have other attended automation processes, and they can each be tailored to the needs of the business.
We use the selector technology for automating processes with dynamic interfaces on a daily basis in almost all of our projects. Our extensive use of this feature includes all of the different kinds of selectors that UiPath allows. We have the flexibility to modify these selectors as per our need. This functionality gives UiPath a big edge over its competitors and I know this because I've personally used products by other vendors. The selection-making process is much simpler with UiPath, with improved accuracy and reliability.
This feature is important because a lot of the processes are Citrix-based or remote desktop applications. Because the robot would not have a direct connection to the application, we have to use Citrix technology. All of the applications are different in nature, so having the flexibility to switch between different kinds of selectors and select our activities allows us to build the perfect solution for remote applications. Even the performance, in my experience, has been the best, especially for Citrix-based automations or remote desktop-based automations.
There are a few features that could be improved, and one of them is good integration with the Microsoft ecosystem. For example, Microsoft launched Power Apps as its platform, and even though its capabilities are not as good as UiPath, it has the advantage of being so well-integrated with Excel Online, Word, and everything else. We don't have to perform a lot of development work, and it's pre-approved in our organization. Applications like SharePoint are another example of pre-approved solutions. But with UiPath, we have to prove that it's a secure process. Simply put, a stronger collaboration between Microsoft and UiPath in a lot of areas would be helpful because it would ease the development process for us.
Another example is with the Automation Hub. At this time, Automation Hub does not allow you a direct login process or single sign-on option using Azure Active Directory. This means that you're limited to going through either Gmail or something else. This is true for the on-premises solution, not the cloud one. Although we had decided to purchase the Automation Hub license, this lack of functionality held things up because we did not want to manually go in to update all of the new users again and again. We wanted the information to be picked directly from Active Directory whenever a user wanted to sign up for it.
I have been using UiPath Attended Automation for approximately three and a half years.
In the past, stability has been great. However, more recently I have been facing some issues, and I'm hoping for some resolution. For example, we recently upgraded to the new orchestrator in Studio, and we had to upgrade a few packages also, In particular, the UiPath automation packages.
Some of our GUI activities, which are not fully backward compatible, have been facing some issues. Consequently, some of our bots have been impacted. We have already raised the issue and we are in discussion to find a resolution. This was the first time we actually faced an issue in terms of reliability with UiPath.
Our past experience has been very good, and I cannot say that we have any complaints regarding the reliability of UiPath solutions.
Scalability-wise, it is very good. It is easily scalable and we have a lot of options for expanding and configuring as per our requirements. It is also customizable.
We have a team of between 20 and 30 people, which includes approximately 10 developers, 5 team leads, two architects, two production managers, and one overall manager. We have some contractual workers, as well.
We have approximately 35 automations that are in production right now. From a process perspective, we have pretty much worked on all verticals including finance, healthcare, internal IT processes that needed automation, and more. An example is ServiceNow, where jobs like creating user accounts, deploying new machines, and other administrative tasks have also been automated. HR processes, including onboarding, have been automated.
It is a very large organization, and there are lots of processes, so I expect that our usage will grow.
The technical support is excellent in our experience. Whenever we have had a problem, they've always been there to support us and help us with the problem. I don't have any complaints, as they've always made the effort. Even if things have taken longer than we had hoped or expected, they've always come back with the best resolution they can offer.
I have worked with Blue Prism and in my experience, UiPath does a much better job, both in terms of dev and listening to the community. For example, Blue Prism is a very closed community and very limited. They have improved, I would say, based on the success of UiPath, but it's not very open-source or open-natured.
The biggest advantage that I have noticed is with Citrix-based automations or remote desktop automations. There are cases where Blue Prism did not work, but UiPath was very good. I did not have to spend too much time with UiPath before it worked perfectly. The reliability was also great.
More importantly, UiPath listens to the customers as well as the developer community, and in turn, they implement features that make their lives easier. They constantly reach out for feedback and it's a good process because it helps to know that the customer is happy. If I am speaking about myself, I'm happy that if I have a need, or I'm facing some challenges, I put it in the pipeline for UiPath and within six months, I will see that feature live in production.
We started with a disaster recovery scenario, where we have one live production orchestrator, as well as one backup orchestrator and a load balancer installed. This is a high availability disaster recovery (HADR) configuration, where all of our live bots are on the main orchestrator. In the case that the live orchestrator goes down, we have the backup orchestrator kick in.
The overall deployment and installation process was simple. However, we did face some issues with the Redis part. Configuring Redis was one of our pain points, and we reached out to UiPath about it.
Although it was resolved, it took a lot of time and effort, from our end as well. That was the only experience that stood out as a problem for us. But overall, it was a smooth process.
It took about a week to set everything up, although we had constraints from our own internal infrastructure team. The delay was not related to UiPath issues.
The licensing is close to optimum; however, there is room for improvement in both the cost and flexibility of the licenses. It isn't the best pricing in the market but it's pretty close.
For developing our attended automation, we began by coding the bot to our requirements, and then made modifications to it for attended automation.
My advice for anybody who is considering UiPath is to be sure of what your needs are regarding an RPA product. If you're looking for something very small-scale, very easy, then there are a lot of options. But if you're looking for a long-term, feature-rich solution, which has access to third-party integrations, then choose UiPath.
You will require a development team, at least to some level. UiPath is now simpler with the Studio X products, but in the past, it was a bit more challenging to dive deep into UiPath directly. It required some training but now, things have definitely improved.
One of the major lessons that I have learned from using UiPath is to make sure that everything is documented well. There is a lot that needs to be tested before bots are put into production because a lot of things that work on your local machine may not work on another. It can vary from machine to machine and where something works on one, a change in environment for another may cause it to fail. This means that you should change from machine to machine during the testing phase.
Overall, I feel as if now UiPath is on the right path with its competitors. It is a very good long-term solution.
I would rate UiPath a nine out of ten.
We use all of the UiPath products: UiPath Studio, Orchestrator, attended robots, and unattended. Primarily, we use them for financial liquidation. Our customers frequently use it for different cases. Some use it with chatbots.
Sometimes, our customers run automations in a virtual environment. In terms of implementing UiPath within a virtual environment, UiPath staff are working on the cost. Currently we have UiPath with a Citrix client and you need to go to the Citrix virtual station to activate. It's more difficult to implement as a user.
Our customers' organizations have involved about 15 to 20 people in their automation programs.
I would rate its ease of use as about four out of five. It's not so easy, but it's also not difficult. We have a great UiPath Academy and it's really useful and helpful. Sometimes we need to do difficult operations and use other frameworks, through activities in UiPath. I think this mechanism is very nice, but in implementation, the customers are pretty close. Sometimes we must do it.
This solution helps to eliminate human errors. The amount depends on the process and the customer. Even unattended robots don't provide 100% automation. Sometimes a robot interrupts and waits for a human to make a decision. There is a process when unattended robots do fewer steps and after ten interruptions are waiting for a human to go on. I would say there is about a 70% reduction in human errors when using an unattended robot.
UiPath also helps save time. One unattended robot works 24 hours a day because a robot doesn't get ill or need to sleep.
All of the features are valuable. I think the best feature for Russian government customers is security. Security in Orchestration for requiring credentials. Our customers are usually serious about security.
I would like to see more AI features with data classification and computer reason. I think it would be great to have more features in full monitoring robots.
I would rate their stability as four out of five.
In cases of high scalability when we have one process and many of us use that process, we sometimes have problems. When one process uses about 24 robots for 24 hours, we have problems with it. I think when many robots work at the same time, something goes wrong in orchestrating tasks between robots.
I am happy with the support. For me, it's okay.
The initial setup can sometimes be complicated, depending first of all on the environment, as well as the implementation strategy of the company. Too many processes or only one PoC could lead to a more difficult implementation. Sometimes, customers try to automate a lot of the big processes. When we try to automate the complete process, we understand with the customers how many FTEs you can get from it. Everything depends on the customer's requirements.
It takes about six months from the purchase of a UiPath license until our customers have their first robot in production.
UiPath is a data mining solution. Our company tries to explain why RPAs are useful.
I don't know which other solutions our customers evaluate. Kofax might be one. Sometimes we work with a customer to make a decision about which platform to choose. Sometimes we do a PoC for Blue Prism. In the Russian market, there are two major vendors that are competing against each other: Blue Prism and UiPath. Usually, customers go through a PoC to choose the best vendor. UiPath wins because you can automate more processes with it.
I would rate UiPath as nine out of ten.