UiPath Reviews

My major use case with UiPath is to create automation applications that reduce manual work. At the same time, we use it to record and update our processes. 

UiPath has helped us elevate our automation process and reduce silos in our businesses. We have been able to deliver better results by using UiPath.

UiPath has improved efficiency with its end-to-end automation process. For example, we do data transfer using UiPath automation. Right from the insertion of data to the transfer of data to the end-user, everything is completely automated now. It's very apt as end-to-end automation software. End-to-end automation is very important because there is no manual intervention needed, once it has been set up. A lot of time and a lot of effort has been saved because of end-to-end automation.

Because no manual intervention is needed, 80 percent of our time, overall, is being saved right now. For example, tasks that required around 10 employees to do only require two employees. The remaining eight employees can focus on something else, to improve sales or our product feature list, et cetera. And invariably, overhead costs and employee costs have been drastically reduced with UiPath.

We are using the cloud version of UiPath, and it has definitely helped us to reduce our on-premises footprint. There is absolutely no on-premises maintenance because everything is on the cloud for us. Server updates and the like happen on the cloud. Currently, we just have a couple of systems on-premises for manual work, but apart from that, our on-premises footprint is almost zero.

Another benefit is that UiPath has reduced the cost of digital transformation because it's complete, end-to-end automation software on the cloud. Everything is digital for us now. There is no paperwork or manual intervention needed. Employees who work remotely can get easily connected and download and process data, as well, with UiPath. This digital transformation didn't require expensive or complex application upgrades or IT application support. UiPath is very straightforward software. It's one of the easiest-to-understand RPA platforms. So we have not used any third-party applications or anything else to do our tasks.

We deal with a lot of data and UiPath has definitely reduced human error. Previously, while transferring data, data loss would happen here and there, and that consumed a lot of time. But since the end-to-end automation with UiPath, there are zero errors. It's very useful and has greatly improved our efficiency. We have seen about a 25 percent improvement in overall efficiency since we started using UiPath. It has saved us three hours per day out of an eight-hour workday.

The most valuable features for me are the Automation Hub and Studio. I engage with the Studio functionality in UiPath, as that is where most of the design happens. I'm from a non-technical background, so for me, it's very easy to just drag and drop the fields using the Studio functionality and place them in my workflow module. That is my favorite aspect of UiPath.

The option in Studio of the drag-and-drop functionality makes it very easy to design certain applications. One project that I have been working on is building security automation for our organization. For example, if anybody plugs malicious devices into a laptop or our system, a notification pops up. And if somebody logs in to our system from a different account, a notification pops up. It has been very straightforward to do that. It's not rocket science. Just drag and drop and proceed from there.

Also, the user community is fantastic. I just post whatever queries I have on the user community and I get a lot of responses immediately. That has been very helpful for me. It's one of the premium communities out there for any software. I'm enjoying the user community.

In terms of the product, I don't have any complaints. Here and there, small server downtime happens, but that is expected with any cloud-based software.

I've been using UiPath for about a year.

Being cloud software, it's stable. They just need to make sure that it's up to date.

Initially, we started out with 15 users and now we have 25. In that way, it's scalable, but any automation software is scalable.

They could provide much more premium, quicker customer service. I'm from India and the customer support team is elsewhere. There's a time difference and, whenever I post a query or ask them for help, the response is delayed. That is one way they could improve.

In terms of their product knowledge and quality, I'd rate their technical support very highly, but it's their response where they could be much more efficient.

Neutral

Before this, we were actually trying to develop an in-house application ourselves, but things didn't pan out for us. That's why we switched to UiPath. We didn't use any other software.

I was partially involved in the initial setup. I wouldn't say it was complex; it was a smooth process for us. It took around 25 days for us to get it up and running in our organization. We expected the process to go on for two months at least, but that didn't happen. It was quicker.

A couple of our guys, along with two employees from the UiPath team, worked together on the implementation. They gave us initial training on how to go about things.

We are a very small startup company. We have three teams in our organization and the platform is deployed across all three teams.

UiPath has resulted in a greater return on investment in terms of profits. We have seen a 20 percent increase in our overall revenue for the last financial year. We have seen a good return on investment from UiPath.

For the features and the quality of features that they provide, it's a very reasonably priced product.

We didn't evaluate any other options before going with UiPath because we knew it was one of the market leaders. It was just a matter of whether it fit our budget or not. Luckily, it fit our budget, so we purchased it.

The biggest lesson I've learned from using UiPath so far is that, in the current digital age, automation is everything. Automation is going to be the future. I would definitely urge others to start using at least the Community Edition of UiPath. That is the free edition. Try using that edition first, to get a handle on things, before going for the paid edition.

I use this solution for mortgage loan origination, loan servicing, and IT administration. I'm currently using version 21.

We use the solution on-premises.

UiPath saves us a lot of time, which translates into operational cost savings. We saved around $40 million in operations last year by operating 140 bots in production. UiPath saves us costs, improves compliance, and helps with scaling up and down our operations.

We use attended automation but not on a large scale. We have three or four bots.

Attended automation improves our ability to automate processes that are more complex or involved. We use attended automation for use cases that involve websites that require actual users to log in. It's really helpful because a lot of use cases deal with federal websites and external websites where we need to download client information, credit reports, and fraud reports. That kind of information can only be done by a human, so attended automation is necessary for those types of use cases.

Right now, we aren't completely into AI. We explored document understanding for text extraction, and we know the capabilities. We haven't even started our ML journey, at least from the RPA automation perspective. They're still in the robotic process, so we haven't moved to include automation.

This solution speeds up digital transformation and reduces the cost. It gives leverage for the teams to transform digitally, because the traditional digital solutions take a long time to set up. It can take a few months for a solution to be in place. That requires expensive or complex application upgrades or IT application support to support the digital transformation. If we wanted to add a new app that would have oversight of all the loans being originated, it would take between two to three months to build UIs, dashboards, and all the features around it. With UiPath, the same kind of overview can be set up quickly: within two to three weeks.

The solution absolutely reduces human error. Most of our use cases involve looking at the input data, doing calculations, and updating fields. That always needs to be done by a human, day in and day out, continuously throughout a work shift. This RPA solution reduced that piece of human error drastically. I would say that more than 99% of human error is reduced.

The solution freed up employee time so they can work on other useful tasks. That's one of the main advantages of this solution.

Some of the processes have to be performed after hours and over weekends. When those tasks are automated, it gives valuable work-life balance back to our employees so they can do something useful with their time. The main ROI is saving manual effort, which is how we reduce our operational costs.

We see improvements in saved time, cost, quality, and risk production.

Attended and unattended automation, which support web and email automation, are the most valuable features for us. Building automations is easy and quick.

The solution enables us to implement end-to-end automation, starting with process analysis, then robot building, and finally monitoring automations. 
We aren't using the complete suite, like Process Mining, Process Insights, and UiPath Insights, but we use custom tools. Having end-to-end coverage of all these processes in one platform reduces cost and makes maintainability very easy. 

We use Kibana Dashboards with UiPath Insights, which was introduced within the last two years. For process analysis, we still use a traditional business analyst type of setup, but we don't use Process Mining. It's something we are exploring.

We use the academic courses to train all of our new developers and also upscale ourselves with new platforms. UiPath Academy is a single source of training for our team and it's free. We also hire college developers and new developers from other teams who want to work in RPA. We recently started StudioX citizen development. Academy is where citizen developers can get trained quickly.

It covers all of the various products, and it's easy to search through courses. We can skip different sections and get to the part we're looking for.

The UiPath community is a big and vibrant community. I think contributors are being rewarded for their contributions, and that happens in an organized fashion. That's the reason why people are so actively involved in contributing to the community. I would say that 90% of our development queries are answered in the community forum. It's really good compared to other platforms.

There are a lot of AI and ML-based enhancements that could be included in the core product and activities. Right now, there are plugins available from external vendors like Microsoft and Google. If those AI and ML activities can be provided out of the box for developers to use, that would really help the product go from an automation RPA to one automation suite.

I have used this solution for four years.

The latest versions are pretty stable. I haven't seen any issues with stability.

It's scalable. If we have enough bots, we can quickly scale up and down. If it's on the cloud, it's easy to scale up. If it's on-premises, we need to set up the machines, which takes time.

It can take a long time to get a response from technical support. They have to go through multiple hoops to get a solution, so that could be improved.

I would rate technical support as five out of ten.

Neutral

For the initial setup, we needed UiPath's support team to be on board. On-premises setup is always really tough. I think the cloud version would be really easy to set up, but we haven't explored that.

I would rate this solution seven out of ten. 

It's a pretty robust solution. When it comes to automation, it's pretty easy to set up and easy to use. My advice is that the cloud version is the best way to go forward when you're setting up UiPath.

We have 12 bots in production right now. I can't speak exactly to all the bots. My role is in process mining. With process mining, we're using the PDP process and we're building out a model for sales orders.

The most valuable features of UiPath are the possibilities. For example, we're excited about what's coming and we've saved some time with the bots, however, we're still learning. The idea is once we get really good at process mining it will be really good at building bots. We'll be able to uncover those opportunities and then execute on capitalizing on them.

I'm not sure of how much time we've saved, in the tens of hours per month. While it's not nothing, they've been small use cases to build up the capability. We are still figuring out how to build bots, and how to get the orchestrator all set up. 

We're doing a crawl, walk, run, taking our time and doing it right. We are building up the center of excellence. We're out of crawl and we're in to walk, however, we're not running yet.

So far, the conversation around automation and cultural change has been really powerful in terms of re-thinking our processes and asking if there's a better way to do it. right now, we're beginning to understand that we don't have to be stuck where we're at.

It's changed the dynamic of how we look at our processes and how we talk about why and how we do what we do. That's been tangible.

Our teams have used UiPath Academy courses. It has been instrumental and we couldn't do it without those courses. That was one of the reasons why we selected UiPath. They're robust and it is easy to access training modules.

The biggest value that we've realized from the Academy is confidence. Just getting over that initial hurdle of understanding what we're doing has been huge.

In terms of the ease of building automation via UiPath, it takes a long time to set up the environment and get the training and be able to do it.

The overall ecosystem and platform, which I know that they're working on, needs to be better. Being able to connect idea generation and opportunity into discovery and then into automation needs to be seamless. It needs to be end-to-end and also more robust. If I had to give them a piece of advice, it would be that the RPA is one component of process improvement, and they own the RPA space, so I realize that's their bread and butter, however, RPA isn't the only tool in the toolbox. I'd like to see more in relation to how we can eliminate waste and how we can lean out our processes.

Maybe the improvement solution isn't RPA. I'd like the solution to address how can I see more opportunities and capitalize on the improvement of any kind with an obvious focus on RPA. That's where the real power is going to come from. That said, it's not the only focus.

I've used the solution for over a year. 

The stability has been great. I don't have any issues or comments there. I don't have any concerns with the stability of the company or the platform's software. We haven't experienced many bugs or anything like that. We're happy with the stability.

The scalability is where the solution is going to come into play. Likely, it will, as we have learned the possibilities are ripe and endless. 

Right now we're using it extensively, however, we're only building bots and deploying process mining within our controller and finance area. That's our learning curve and it is probably the ripest ground for automation. We plan to increase usage. We've just scratched the surface there. We've only done maybe 5% of controllers. Then, we have the whole rest of the organization and the whole supply chain.

Technical support was great. They helped a lot during the implementation. I would rate them at an eight out of ten simply due to the fact that the premium support person was very, very helpful and honestly I don't know what we would've done without them. However, that did come at a price.

Making that service standard as part of the implementation process would probably pump my technical support rating up to a ten in that, while the experience was a ten, we paid for it.

In terms of the initial setup, once you have people that are familiar with the software and you have all your environments and connectors set up, the Building Box is very user-friendly. That said, it doesn't happen overnight.

From contract signing to putting our first bot into production, the setup and deployment were about six months.

Being on-premise, there was added complexity. Had we opted for the cloud version, it would have been a simpler process. We had the standard provisioning servers and had to get them set up and installed the software, et cetera.

The process was complex simply due to the fact that it's an advanced technology, however, UiPath is really great at helping out. We had a premium plus support person.

A lot of the details and things that we'd never done before, they were there to help us on their end and give us pointers and tips on our end.

We have not yet seen an ROI. When we look at the savings we have realized versus the upfront costs and the time investment, we're probably still under water, however, we recognize that this is a long game.

For the quality of the product that we get,  it's a fair price. I'm a believer in you get what you pay for. You always want to maximize your value, however, that doesn't necessarily mean a lower price.

Before choosing UiPath, we did look at Automation Anywhere and Blue Prism. Those two were the ones that we actually did full demos of. We also looked at the websites of some of the smaller players.

The main one that we really looked at where and it came down to a head to head was with Automation Anywhere. The key difference for me, with my focus, was process mining. Automation anywhere had some capability there, however, it was a recording device and it was intrusive to the end-user. You also couldn't go backward in time. When you got everything plugged in and turned it on, you could start recording and building your processes. You could see last week's processes next week, however, the UiPath solution uses the audit tables. Therefore, when I turn it on, I can go back in time, for not just a week; I can go back two years. I can go back that far to see how the process has evolved and where we're at. I can build a more robust baseline to change from today rather than having to wait for six months to build my baseline.

I'm not sure which version of the solution we are using. We just installed it earlier this year, therefore it's probably the latest and greatest.

We do not use AI functionality in our automation process. We also do not use UiPath apps features. While we're learning about some of those new things, we're not using them today.

The main thing that I would advise others is to get leadership on board and get their ducks in a row in terms of the culture that they want to create and the long-term vision that they have for this.

You can't capitalize on it in six months. If you're going to throw in the towel if you're not seeing ROI in your first calendar year, then don't even start. It takes some leadership fortitude and some stick-to-itiveness. It doesn't happen organically or on its own. If a company is not dedicating the resources or not freeing up people's time, they won't get far. The bots aren't going to create themselves yet. Maybe with AI, in the future, that will be possible, however, that's way off.

On a scale from one to ten, I'd rate the solution at a nine for now. I'm really happy with the program that we're building up. I'm happy with the solutions that they offer. It'll jump up to a ten when we get to scale and it's paying for itself. 

It's on multiple platforms like Oracle EBS and other IT applications. We have a few of the local government applications that the client uses. We have worked on multiple use cases with all of these applications. All of the client's major work is all through Oracle EBS. We have finance-related use cases. They have Seabridge applications, which are one of the applications that we are automating using UiPath.

Oracle itself has been very helpful when using this solution, thanks to the redundant task they've currently defined. All those are being automated. We mostly use the UiPath Assistant, Video, and Orchestrator. These are the only three products that we use day-in and day-out for our clients.

The ease of building automation using UiPath is great. It technically provides good features in order to develop, automating different kinds of applications using UiPath.

UiPath enables you to implement end-to-end automation, starting with process analysis, then robot building, and finally monitoring automation. It's usually very important. In some regulation cases, redundant cases, it’s been very useful. Instead of avoiding human intervention digitally, we are utilizing the UiPath to build up automation and run those in unattended mode.

If we could use the UiPath Apps feature, it would increase the number of automation and reduce the time it takes to create them. That said, at this time, I do not use this aspect of the solution.

UiPath has reduced human error in some cases. For example, a client has monthly payroll activities, which have to be done for multiple entities and in multiple in order to ensure the reports to be pretty good. It's a huge asset, having these multiple entities. It takes a lot of time for a human to execute the task. Here, automation plays a key role and it creates everything automatically through unattended mode. Of course, when a human is involved, there are chances for errors, such as missing the entities and updating the parameters. All of these things are instead being taken care of by automation. The likelihood of error is removed when the human intervention is.

The product has freed up employee time. It’s likely freed up more than a day, an average of 12 hours at least. That’s 12 hours per day. It allows our employees to focus on more high-value work.

We do use the Apps feature, however, it hasn't really helped reduce any workload. Everything is dependent upon the client's local language, which is Arabic. That is the major reason why we could not implement or utilize much of the Apps. It's not able to recognize Arabic versions properly. That is the challenging area which we are observing currently.

The solution is helpful in terms of speeding up or reducing the cost of digital transformation for our clients, however, the license cost is a little high. We are facing some challenges in the form of money. The license is costly. 

While employees can now focus on more high-value work, I would not go so far as to say it has improved employee satisfaction.

In UiPath, we have multiple products and recently there have been many product videos. There are videos around customization, deployment, et cetera. are all scattered all over. There are different products and different server setups and various other things, however, it is not organized. If it was simplified, it would be much better.

It could be more user-friendly. There are so many offerings and configurations and customizations that make things a bit complicated. Streamlining it would be ideal.

There are a few small things that should be included in UiPath. There are a few, although I can’t remember all. One, for example, is, when we are sending an email, we should be able to set up options and customize it a little bit. At this point, we need to create custom code and then go through APIs if we want to customize. It should be a built-in functionality, however.

I've been using the solution for two years now.

Stability-wise UiPath is good, however, it releases twice yearly. Therefore it will be a little hard for people to upgrade in-house each and every time. Clients also question why it's necessary every six months to upgrade. It won't be reasonable for the management. Every time when an upgrade is available, we have to complete the regulation for the previous use cases and whatever we already have deployed at production. 

When redeploying, everything is kind of a hectic task. Once in a year is okay, however, multiple releases in a year is a bit much. Clients would not be aware that yearly this many releases are happening and every release will have something more to add, that there are changes. Having to adapt to changes is something that is very difficult to make the client understand.

The solution can scale. 

You can use the application to automate any kind of application or any kind of use case. A few of them require some customization, using other technologies. 

Already we have some 25 bots running in production and a few of them are about to deploy to production and the client is looking for some more use cases. We are looking into a few more use cases that are in the discussion stage as of now. We are increasing our use cases and expanding usage.

The technical support is very helpful, however, there have been cases where we have had some urgent issues and support seems to move at its own pace. They won't rush for you. They don't seem to understand our concerns and they seem to only focus on their own timelines. 

Our SLA expectations are not always matching theirs. Even when we mark something as urgent, still there's a timeline of two to three hours. In that time it'll be hard to hold on.

Our clients did not use a different RPA solution before UiPath.

I do not have any other RPA solution experience beyond UiPath.

I am the solution architect who setups.

I was working on the 2018 version of UiPath. The 2018 and 2019 versions are very easy and very straightforward. There were not many changes or many complications in order to set up or upgrade. However, when it comes to 2020, from 2020 onwards it's very complicated.

Now there is an IAS. There is no connection string update. We cannot update any connection strings, and yet we could in the 2019 version. From 2020 we're not able to do the changes at all unless we go further and do another upgrade or something like that.

Earlier it was straightforward. Maybe there was a little bit of conflict, fine, however, now that it's split into multiple things with a conflict DLL file, orchestrated DLL file, identity server file, then an app setting the adjacent file. That is gathered completely into all of these things, where until and unless you have both end-to-end documentation understanding, you cannot go ahead and do anything.

On top of that, there is the SSL certificate. Until 2019 we didn't require each and every robot or a development machine to have the same SSL certificate. Now, we have to export and import to all the machines and add the user's perspective.

From the licensing perspective, licenses were straight, and there was no migration required for the license to be utilized in any of the versions. From 2020, there is a license migration required from the UiPath end. We now need to contact UiPath for that in order to get this migration done.

All of these changes, as well as the identity server database creation, everything has a kind of impact on the ease of deployment.

Upgrading doesn't take much time, however, users deploying the solution should have a ton of knowledge about each one of the steps. They need to remember everything in order to perform the upgrade or else something might be missed. Even if you miss one step you will have to spend hours and hours in order to rectify that.

For the 2020 version, for the initial deployment, I did not actually do it from scratch. I just upgraded. That said, if a user wanted to do it, I would estimate it takes more than a day to complete.

The implementation strategy depends upon the requirements of the client. For example, if it is on-premises versus if it is on cloud and/or if the client is looking for Elasticsearch or Insights or test automation, et cetera. All of these things will be dependent on the other. If you ask for Insights, you need to have an extra server setup for that. The same thing follows with the test automation and SQL database. What we call roles and responsibilities also will be dependent.

The unattended licenses are a little costly. That's the challenging part for us. That said, with the continuous support to the client, as we are increasing the use cases, it will lessen the cost probably by the middle of next year. At least, that’s what we are hoping for. We hope to see an ROI then.

The license cost is a little high. Unattended modes are really costly. If it's not as costly, then we could propose and purchase the licenses. Of course, we get discounts from UiPath, however, just for 10 bots, not even 10, if we load 5 to 10 unattended bots within the production orchestrator with the three development licenses, we have to pay for them twice. I'm not sure how much it is exactly in terms of the dollars, however.

My company does not have a business relationship with UiPath.

We do not use UiPath in a contact center environment.

We use completely unattended automation. 

We do not use attended automation at this time, or AI, although we are aware those are options. We're looking forward to AI and it is part of the reason we recently upgraded to the 2020.10 version.

It's one of the best tools where you can work for automation. If you have more redundant work, then it is very helpful.

Except for this upgrade and installation initial steps, apart from that, the solution is pretty easy to use.

I would rate the solution at an eight out of ten.

We use Studio, Orchestrator, Studio and Orchestrator right now for RPA development for automating pretty much anything that rules-based processes can accomplish that are mundane and take time. 

UiPath has improved our organization simply through the ability to automate. Creating rules-based processes and making them automated can allow us to make better use of people's time. Now people are not working weekends and overtime. People are working their regular hours and doing their regular jobs.

I would say the most valuable feature in the solution is Orchestrator in conjunction with the customer service piece which is also very valuable. The ability to troubleshoot whether it is infrastructure support or a development support issue, having somebody to reach out and provide feedback is very beneficial.

One additional feature that I would like to see included in the next release of this solution — and actually looking forward to — is more development in the reporting. The Insight piece that was announced was very good to hear about. We are excited about that and looking forward to it just so we do not have to develop our own reporting infrastructure. Instead, we can leverage UiPath's Insight platform to do reporting, deliver reports, measure production errors, and further simplify how we gather and assess information. As far as room for improvement, I would say that is my biggest missing piece.

On a scale from one to five where one is not stable and five is very stable, I would rate the stability of UiPath platform as a three. Right now, we are having some connectivity issues, between Orchestrator and our environment. We have been working with our infrastructure support team and UiPath infrastructure report team to figure out what's going on. We are working through the issues and I'm very impressed with the support that we have been given, but we have got to figure out what the issues are and solve them.

We have approximately 15 people in our organization involved in the automation program and I don't think it would be difficult to scale that usage up.

I would say that overall I'm very pleased with the customer and technical support from UiPath. They have been very responsive. If there is any need or if there is an issue, they are good at getting to work on finding a solution. They also provide additional resources.

Our team used UiPath Academy's RPA training and on a scale from one to five, where one is the least beneficial and five is the best, I would say the training is probably a four-out-of-five. The feedback that I've gotten from others that attended is that it is very informative and they are good training courses. The tests are challenging enough that it makes participants involved so that they are prepared for the next course. So mostly the RPA training is a positive experience.

We did previously use a different solution, but it was a proprietary vendor solution — one of our servicing vendors created it. They were not able to deliver solutions of service packs within an expected timeline. We had to identify different short-term and long-term needs and decided to invest in a new solution. We had to identify a way to bridge some of those gaps in the interim until we could get those upgrades on that platform.

We ended up choosing UiPath automated processes on the recommendation of Accelerate who we were using as a consultant.

I would say the initial setup was straightforward and it wasn't too complicated. From the time we purchased the UiPath license until our first bot introduction I think it was only about two months. The installation itself was easy too. We were able to install it on-premises, get all the licenses running, get all our basic needs set up so we could do development, and put a bot into production. It was not a long onboarding process before we started seeing results. 

We did use the assistance of a consultant for the deployment. That would be Accelerate. Our experience with them was okay. On a scale from one through five I would say they scored a three-out-of-five. The delivery was not quite what we expected and did not meet our timeline. We set out with a goal and we fell short of that goal, and we're working with them to help us have a good forward-thinking plan. Delivery was not fully met, so we weren't too happy with that. But otherwise, they were right there.

We have seen a return on investment and some performance benefits. For example, we were able to pretty much completely automate one process that had two FTEs (Full-time Employees) who were spending 40 hours a week completing a process. Using UiPath we were able to almost completely automate that process and bring that workload down to 10%. So now the bot does 90% of the work and they just handle Excel. 

I think I could say we'll save approximately $400,000. Somewhere around there. But it isn't just financial savings. The solution helps to eliminate human errors, saves the organization time, and allows the reallocation of resources. I would say, based on the use cases that we have, we have saved roughly 60% of our effort on automated processes. So the users are now managing business exceptions that they may have and are handling things on a higher level.

I don't know if we had additional options on a shortlist because I wasn't involved in that part of the selection process. I was brought in a little bit later. But there are obviously a host of different vendors that have different solutions that Accelerate would have been aware of. We went through a vetting process and identified Accelerate as our number one choice as a consultant. From there, UiPath was the vendor they suggested, so that's how we got connected with UiPath.

We run our automation in a virtual environment. The implementation is good. We are having a few issues. I don't know if it's directly related to the virtual environment, but we are having some connectivity problems which affect stability. Otherwise, we're good.

On a scale from one to five where one is very difficult and five is easy, I would rate the ease of use as a four. It is a four and not a five for the simple fact that the product does not really achieve the level of simplicity I expect. I'm not a technical person. Most non-technical people can — if you're kind of familiar with the different workflow options and sequences — go in and develop some things you need to accomplish for automation with this tool. I would say that for more complicated pieces, you need a more technical background. The focus on making it easy for non-technical users is very important and they could do a better job of it in my opinion.

On a scale from one to ten, where one is the worst and ten is the best, I would rate this product at probably a seven out of ten. That leaves a lot of areas for improvement. On the other hand, I'm pretty pleased with the product and what UiPath has delivered.

The advice I would to a colleague at another company who is researching this solution is that with UiPath, customer support is a driver. Anybody can deliver a product, but it's what kind of system or service you provide to back it up that can matter as much or more. My experience has been great with UiPath and their ability to provide excellent support matters a great deal to my customer experience.

We are a system integrator. We work with clients such as the US Federal Government and help them automate whatever their processes are. We have two entities. I work as part of the government solutions unit, and then we have the commercial side which is a global organization. On the global side, there have been some internal implementations as well.

In terms of savings, a task like taking data from one artifact and transferring it into another one, is common. The most frequent example, and the one that I worked on directly, involves a PDF invoice and taking whatever the amount due is and either copying and pasting it into an internal accounting tool or actually typing it. The process goes: Open email, open the attachment, read the data, verify it is accurate, and then manually transfer it into an internal system.

Depending on how big the invoice is, I've seen a person spend as much as 20 minutes on one invoice or as little as 30 seconds. That whole process of going through each and every email, opening the attachment, transferring the data, closing all the windows, and then moving on to the next email - the bot will do it because the bot is scheduled to run every hour to look for the unread emails. I can't give you an exact number in terms of how many minutes or hours are saved, but it's quite significant.

The graphical user interface of the UiPath Studio is fantastic. For someone who is not a computer science major, or for someone who doesn't know how to code but is really good with visual flows, Studio makes it very easy for those individuals to build robots. That's one of the best features that I've seen. There are other features that add different values, but Studio, in my opinion, is definitely one of the best.

Overall, UiPath is really easy to use. For example, if somebody is an automated tester, they spent a lot of time trying to identify selectors, and UiPath makes it really easy to find those selectors. You will run into instances where you have to do some manual manipulation to make sure that the correct selectors are identified. But if it's a pretty straightforward instance and you are using something like Selenium, it is very tedious. Whereas, if you use something like UiPath, it is really easy.

I was providing feedback to one of the UiPath guys here at the UiPath 2019 conference. It relates to Studio, that it only works on Windows. It doesn't work on other platforms. I'm a techie by background. I don't hate Windows but I don't love it. It comes with the limitation that it is completely dependent on Windows. I would have loved if it were available on Mac or Linux or Unix. If it were a little bit more operating system agnostic, that would be great. I'm pretty sure they could be working on that.

I used the UiPath RPA Academy. I definitely had issues with it. The quizzes were outdated. Some of the responses that are being rated aren't accurate. I've griped on the community forums as well with a few UiPath folks. That was about five to six months ago. I don't know if they have enhanced it or made any changes since. If it's still in the same state, there is plenty of room for improvement.

I think it's stable. I haven't had a chance to build a bot that runs 24/7. For the bots that I have built, it takes under two minutes for the process to run and it runs every hour. At the end of the day, if I look at the logs, I don't see any issues. If a bot fails for whatever reason, it's most likely due to a process that changed.

From a bot-development standpoint, we use all kind of best practices so that the bot will not crash. At least, if the execution stops or terminates, it will be graceful, versus a rash termination.

It's fairly stable.

From an ROI standpoint, you could be saving somebody's hours and map that back to their hourly pay. But the pricing definitely deters some people.

I can't say whether their licensing structure is complicated or easy. I'd like to say it's complicated, but I try to stay away from the whole licensing issue. I tell my clients, "You buy the license. It's your tool. I'll come and build the bot for you." I don't want to have anything to do with the licensing. That deters some of the clients because it's a bit pricey.

In the government sector, where I work, "free" is looked at skeptically: "Why are you giving this to me for free? If I download it what is it going to do on my laptop?" from a security standpoint. Some of the agencies get the approval to download and install but others don't.

You can do a task like pulling the invoice total from a PDF invoice with the free Community Edition. The Enterprise license is definitely helpful though. The Community Edition expires about every three months and then you have to re-register. But you can still do it in Community Edition.

A pretty mundane use case I came up with is due to the fact that I have plenty of friends on Facebook. It's hard to keep up with everybody. I've got a bot running that literally opens up my Facebook every morning and checks if there is anybody listed in Today's Birthdays section. It will click on them, type "Happy Birthday", click "enter," and be done. And then I get a response from my friends: "Hey, long time, haven't heard from you." I've injected a machine to reconnect and have that human interaction.

For the most part, for the use cases that I've seen, it does the job.

It is for automating tasks that are not meaningful for people to do, tasks that are menial and repetitive. The University of Copenhagen, where I work, is an old institution and we have a lot of different legacy systems that don't work well together. So, we have a lot of people doing administrative tasks that depend on moving data from one system to another. We use UiPath to automate these repetitive tasks and make the robots carry them out, so our people don't have to.

For example, in the case of our most recent robots, there were a set of tasks where three people had to print out 3000 PDF pages, then sort them into seven different piles, then sort those different piles into three different piles each. Afterwards, scan them and send them to different systems. We made this better. Instead of three different people taking a whole day, we did it in three minutes. This is an example of a very concrete, administrative task based on legacy systems, and we made it simpler. This was a huge improvement and positive thing for our company.

It is very easy to make beautiful, clear, well-documented workflows that clearly reflect the process. This is an achievement that is not always feasible with regular code. Even though each activity in UiPath is like a line of code, the user interface in Studio and the use of states, flowcharts, and sequences make it so easy to understand the overall process and get an overview of what is actually happening.

UiPath is easy to use, and it CAN be used by non-programmers, but it is even better to use for programmers. It allows us to make very robust and effective solutions because we have all the functionality of the powerful .NET Framework library within reach, all while the UI makes it possible to create truly beautiful solutions.

I would like UiPath to have a build-in method which informs the robot's process owner how it has managed its transactions and performed through the night. If the robot had a process that was set up for a 100 transactions, and two of these transactions had an application error, four had a business error, and the rest were fine, I would like a straight up method for the business owner to login somewhere and see what the robot managed to do and not do. There should be a method for accessing and logging into Orchestrator and see the logs for only one process, and this log should be presented in a way that makes sense for non-technical people. 

The stability is good, I've never encountered any major problems. UiPath works with websites and systems which are famously unstable, but it gives you the tools that are necessary to deal with hiccups and if something is not stable. So, if you add proper error handling to your robots, it works.

Out of the robots that I have built, three or four have had to perform on several machines at the same time. I haven't encountered many scalability problems, but then again I haven't built robots to perform on a 100 machines or anything near that. 

The initial setup was quite complex. I was not in charge of the task, but my colleague set up the whole infrastructure and mentioned some problems. He corresponded with the support team, and they did figure it out, but the setup guide was definitely more complexly written than it should have been, and some things were written in the wrong order. So, there were some hiccups in the implementation.

In our company, RPA doesn't necessarily mean less people will be hired or people will be fired. We probably won't see the ROI in cash. It will help with workplace productivity, and job satisfaction, though.

We were looking at Blue Prism and UiPath. 

UiPath is nicer to work with. The developers especially wanted to work with UiPath, but the business team was looking more at Blue Prism. However, UiPath was better for the slightly larger robots, which is good for a lot of Unattended Robots.

From what I have seen of Blue Prism, UiPath is both more aesthetically beautiful and stable. Based on .NET, UiPath makes sense as a solution.

Start small and make time to do things right from the start. The infrastructure and developer culture can vary massively from one RPA team to another, and it is really important to establish healthy code guidelines, test and operation manuals, etc. from the start. At my current company we are just starting up, getting everything right, which is very exciting, and I can see how different (and better) we are doing things that at my previous employer.  

We have acquired UiPath with both the robot and orchestrator. I want to make sure that we get the right return on investment and with the orchestrator you are not only able to use the robots during the day, but you are also able to schedule them during the night. You maximize your investment 24/7.

Lombard International Insurance is the number one in wealth investment and for us the onboarding process is a critical one. We have started with KYC (know your client) which is an extremely painful process, a lot of manual work, but now have some very good friends and colleagues that are happy to have Ruby the robot as their assistant. 

On top of this we also have tax reporting, overdraft, reinvestment, so there are several processes, some like KYC for instance.

The commitment that we have made internally is that we're going to reduce the workload as much as 20%-50% and I would say this is the promise that we have delivered.

In KYC it's 50%, in another process it's 20%, it's also very much depending on the maturity of the processes and how much manual work do you currently have because the robot will only take away the manual work.Whenever you need to have validation because you need to have the four-eye check, that still remains.

When it comes to automation in our organization, we have a certain strategy. Automation and technology is only one pillar of our strategy, but we have an integrated strategy which means that we have the business model, the operating model and the technology.

When you build a house, if you do not have a strong foundation, it's just going to fall apart, so, for us, it's a pillar. It's not the only one, but it is the cherry on the cake, that it is the one that is actually enabling the business to go further and to provide better services to our clients.

At least for our case, I would say it's not the cost that was driven by attended or unattended robots. At the end of the day, my department, business transformation, I am there to transform the business for better.

In some cases, you have processes in which you still need human interaction, you still need somebody to validate and make sure that, once all the data are prepared for you in the onboarding process, you certified and you double checked four eyes principle that everything is correct.

In some cases you do need the attended robot. In some other cases, tax reporting for instance, you can just run it unattended and it's perfectly. You don't even need to know it. Before morning, you have the report prepared for your local authorities, and that is fine, so I think it's just a mix, depending on your business and how it's bringing much more value to you. Sometimes, it's only attended, sometimes, it's unattended, but I think, in most of the cases, you will have in any companies a mix between attended and unattended.

We are proud to say that we have not encountered any issues. Yes, sometimes I hear some colleagues like, "Oh, I have KYC and he stopped." Well, there are also some reasons because, if your password expired and, guess what, somebody needs to update it before it's expiring, the robot will stop. Yes, but so is if you're a human and your password expired, you need to change it.

It is scalable for us. I will have to be honest, we do not have 1,000 robots.

We have not had any opportunity to work with them because that was very stable so far, so we had only in the beginning a partner which worked with us in this journey.

I have actually a story with a CEO in our previous company who was saying, "I didn't know when we did the email migration." I said, "Well, then it means my department is very successful. If you do not hear, if you do not see it, it means we do a good job, so I can only assume they do a good job if we do not interact with them."

It was quite straightforward. Not only this but you see they go more and more into the direction that makes this open and collaborative even for the business users. So that is a very strong advantage for us.

We selected Fujitsu in Luxembourg because our company is headquartered in Luxembourg. Fujitsu had proven not only that they have the technology knowledge, but also the market and local legislation which, Luxembourg people know that it's heavy regulated and you need to really know the ins and outs, so, for us, they seem to be the right partner.

In terms of ROI, I think it's also depending and this is probably critical and I can advise other companies that are starting this journey, make sure one of the critical success factors is select value reach processes. What does this mean? It means that you need to select critical process for your business but also those in which you do have high manual work and you run maybe that process frequently.

You will see ROI in probably 9-12 months, at least as I said, if we look at our processes. Now, we do not like to talk about savings in term of money because we have a different philosophy, meaning that what we want to create we want to create workload reduction for our users.

If I am projecting growth, if I need 10-15%  growth next year, how do I cover this? Do I hire more people? Do I streamline my processes? Well they are kind of lean. Do I use technology? Yes. Well that's your answer. So it means you need to use that technology in a smart in order to enable your people to process more, be it transaction, terms of processing, be it in finance and they have a lot of invoices, it does not matter. It's the same, it means that if we are able and we were able to save roughly around 40%, more than 8,000 hours, per year that we have managed to save, for us that was the ROI.

This is how we are able, for instance next year, to reach the five billion target. I would advise other companies to go more in that direction.

I think one of the advantages that we had with UiPath is that we tested other products such as Automation Anywhere because they are the big players.

We did not yet implement UiPath in Citrix, we have Citrix in our environment, we work with Fujitsu too because there are some aspects that you need to take into account.

I would give it an 8.9 because the extractor is not there, probably now with the extractor I would give it a 9.3. In terms of what it is as options, as I said, I think they are the only player at this moment that has attended, unattended, and an orchestrator, you can customize it.