UiPath Reviews

Our primary use case is for RPA. We use it for checking invoices and sending out electronic letters. It is also going to check the absence entered by people when they are sick and see if those fill-outs are correct.

UiPath enables us to implement end-to-end automation. It is very important. It makes us more efficient. It does not require that much labor.

We find UiPath quite good in terms of ease of building automations. It does not require an enormous amount of knowledge. It is quite easy to use, but we need to do some scripting and programming in addition to the software.

We use UiPath's AI functionality in our automation program. It is necessary to interpret PDFs. We only use it in one process so far. It has only been six months, so it hasn't enabled us to automate more processes overall.

UiPath speeds up digital transformation and reduces the cost of digital transformation. This digital transformation does not require expensive or complex application upgrades or IT application support.

UiPath has reduced human error. In the use case for checking the invoices, it helps us to handle an invoice more correctly and send the invoice to the correct person internally so that it does not go in a loop somewhere.

UiPath has freed up employee time. By the end of this year, it would have saved us two whole man-years.

UiPath has saved us costs. In the six months of running it, it has saved us something like one and a half million.

The software does what it is supposed to do. I do not have any specific features that are valuable. We mainly use it for automation. We use the standard application screens. It meets our requirements.

We would like to use several modules of UiPath, but they are very costly. All the additional features that we need are there, but they are in the modules that we have not bought.

Its stability could have been better. 

It was installed around September of last year.

The stability could have been better. We started out with one developer license and then we had another developer license. When both developers are working in the cloud platform, it shuts down. I am not sure if it is solved yet.

I do not know about the scalability yet. I hope it is scalable.

We have not used their technical support. We used the UiPath community for some issues. We were trying to learn how to program, and we were stuck and trying to figure out how to do certain things. We posted a couple of questions to the community. There are always people there who are willing to help and come up with good ideas to solve the problems that you have been stuck with.

We did not use any solution previously.

It is in the cloud. Our cloud provider is Digital Workforce.

The deployment took four months. It was straightforward. There were no issues. The integration between the cloud platform and our internal networks with the firewalls was really smooth.

It does not require any maintenance from our side.

It was Digital Workforce that showed us that this is how we would want to do it. We based everything on their strategy.

With the rate at which we are going with automations, it should take us a year and a half or two years.

UiPath has several modules that we would like to use. They will enhance our installation, but they are very costly. 

We are quite happy with the solution as it is. If I were to go for UiPath again, I would not choose Digital Workforce as a supplier.

I do not have any experience with any other solution, but we have had some glitches, so I would rate UiPath an eight out of ten.

I create robots for clients of our company. We have an insurance client that asked us to help with sending letters by email and extracting documents related to insurance, between their insurance agencies.

We also do e-signatures using an API with a server to get digital signatures for all the customers of a bank. And with other banks, we have worked on onboarding clients. We have all the information about them and we do subscriptions for them.

We also have a lot of clients that ask for filters and updates in Excel files.

Employees who were doing the same tasks every day are happy to have time to do innovative things and stop doing tasks that a robot can do. They feel free from those unwanted tasks. These kinds of tasks are often boring, and employees can make mistakes. They spend a lot of time doing them without any benefit, because it's something they do every day. There is no innovation when they have to do those tasks. The most important part is that we can help employees in these situations.

The benefits include managing employees' time. A robot can work at night or even on the weekend, whenever you schedule it to run. It's helpful because employees can let it do their jobs when they are at home. There are also fewer errors because when you give a robot a formula, it does all the iterations in the same way. Even if there is a special situation or an exception, the robot can help itself get through it. So it helps with an employee's time and efficiency, and they are happy about that.

There are two kinds of robots that we deliver. One type of robot works independently, giving our client's employees time while the robot does its work. And there are other robots that do work but need a human to verify things. But even that type of robot reduces the work, leaving only the validation.

And when we start discussing RPA with a client, we can see the difference in the costs. We ask them how much they spend on a task or how much time it takes, because even hours have a cost. We then give them the difference. If a robot does that task, it will spend X amount of time on it and you will save this much money. It depends on the project, but sometimes we save them 30 or 40 percent of their time or even more.

The scraping for data extraction is very important. There is also a connection with all Microsoft tools, like Outlook, Excel, Word, et cetera. And OCR, the Document Understanding feature, is important because we have clients that ask us to read data from scanned documents.

UiPath Orchestrator is also important to help us schedule our bots.

In addition, UiPath is a low-code solution, which is very useful and helpful. Given the features and solutions it offers, it's quite easy. The ease is a seven out of 10, or even more. The challenge for us is connected to the demands of the client. Sometimes we work with banks, sometimes with insurance companies, and the challenge is to know what they really require before we start developing. We need to know the exceptions that we might face. But the development part is quite easy thanks to the UiPath Academy and the forum. It's not that hard.

We can even teach our clients a little bit about the use of the UiPath. It's easy and doesn't require an IT engineer. They get excited to use it.

I started my use of UiPath with the UiPath Academy and I'm still learning there because there are updates and new features to learn about. The Academy is very helpful with its videos and explanations, and with the questions at the end of the lessons. I like that it allows me to learn on my own time. It's very constructive because things are explained well and I like that I don't have to be at a school to learn it.

Also, the UiPath community is very good. Anytime I have a problem, or something blocks me, I post a question on the forum and people spend a lot of time helping me. Even if the first solution doesn't work, they come up with another one. When I started working with UiPath, there were only a few people who knew the platform and I had to wait days and days to get an answer, and sometimes I wouldn't get one. But over time, I feel the difference because there are more people in the community and they are more responsive and very helpful.

We have the new license, the Flex Plan with Automation Suite, but we don't have practical examples and we have found it a little bit difficult when dealing with it. We could use more specifications about it and practical examples. Sometimes clients ask us questions, but, even on the UiPath forums,  we don't have answers. We have to spend a lot of time trying to find them. Practical responses about installations and the differences between the kinds of installations would be helpful.

I have been working with UiPath for almost three years.

It's very stable. I haven't faced a problem with UiPath Studio. I would give it a 10 out of 10 for stability.

It's scalable. I would rate it a nine out of 10 on this aspect.

I have needed their help too many times but they have been so helpful. They respond with emails, and sometimes I even talk with them on Google Meet. They are responsive.

Positive

We have worked with UiPath on-premises, on Azure, and on a private cloud. That's where we use it the most. An on-premises setup is easy to do, and on a private cloud, it's not complicated. But with the Automation Suite, it is complicated and we asked UiPath to help us.

When we deploy it for our customers, we ask them to prepare the production environment for us so that it is already ready. For deployment, we have an architecture and an infrastructure engineer. Sometimes we need the infrastructure engineer if something is complicated about the infrastructure. We work with the IT department of the client and our infrastructure engineer.

For unassisted robots, we take the robot from the development machine or the test machine to the deployment machine. For clients using Orchestrator, we create the robot, the job, and we execute the robots from Orchestrator.

Maintaining UiPath is not difficult. One engineer can handle it, for now.

I did some research on Power Automate, but I haven't worked with it. I only saw the interface and some examples. We are planning to learn more about Power Automate and the differences between it and UiPath, but for now, we are only working with you UiPath.

My advice is to use the UiPath Academy and do some practical exercises. And when working with your client, ask all the questions that you have, including exceptions and real cases. Technically, everything is good. Just attend the Academy and use the forums and everything will be okay.

We use it mostly for our sales and for our clients, with relatively simple, stand-alone robotic solutions. Some are attended and some are unattended. We use it for reporting in our finance and HR departments. 

We have automated processes for our clients that, before, took somebody three days to do, and now they're done in minutes. That says everything. It's extremely useful for saving time and avoiding mistakes. Those are the two main efficiency factors that we have seen with our clients. Repetitive projects, where someone has to copy a lot of data from one place to another and then work with the data, are very prone to mistakes. We can completely eliminate mistakes and save people a lot of time so that they can do more interesting tasks. We have developed programs that reduce human error by 100 percent. There are no errors, once they are automated.

And it absolutely accelerates the process of digital transformation. There is no doubt that it is getting faster and faster. We are thinking about combining RPA solutions from UiPath with ChatGPT or whatever else comes along, to see if we can make them work together. This will be the future.

It enables us to implement end-to-end automation. We have projects where it automates the entire process from one end to the other. Very often we have "human-in-the-loop" within them, because some decisions have to be made, but they are almost end-to-end solutions.

End-to-end automation is extremely important. Usually, when we start with a new client, we start with a smaller process as a type of proof of concept, so that they can see what is possible. Then, we extend it up and down until we have an end-to-end solution. We have seen that it's better to develop a process step-by-step, and not try to do everything at once. But in the end, we have an end-to-end solution.

The UiPath community is used by our developers. They ask questions and receive responses. They are definitely active there.

We have had issues with Ingram Micro. It happened that we ordered licenses and we received something else. It takes a relatively long time, two and sometimes even three weeks, after the order until we receive licenses, and clients are sometimes a little bit impatient. This is something that should be accelerated.

I have been using UiPath for almost four years.

UiPath is a stable solution. One of the reasons we left the Foxtrot solution was that it was unstable. If we had the same process running 10 times, we could get three different results. But with UiPath, we have never had any issues regarding stability.

It's scalable.

We have discussions sometimes with people from UiPath about solutions and things that we have done already. That is working quite well. The support is very good.

We participate quite frequently in UiPath webinars, especially when they are presenting new versions or components or pricing models for the software, so that we keep everybody up to date on the latest developments. They develop things very quickly. It's difficult to keep up with the speed at which they are developing new solutions.

Positive

It is very straightforward to implement. The setting up of a license is something that is done within an hour. It's the development that takes more time. Most of our clients are large, multinational companies.

UiPath itself does not require any maintenance, but solution maintenance is required if something changes for one of our clients.

Everybody is afraid of the licensing fees in the beginning, and because we are in Romania where salaries are still significantly lower than in Western Europe, that means that licensing fees have a bigger impact on costs for the company. But we are also working more and more for companies outside of Romania, where that is less of an issue.

When we come up with an offer in which the licensing fees are getting a little bigger, clients are more reluctant. That is another reason that we prefer to start with something a bit smaller until they get acquainted with the solution and see the advantages.

We looked at other solutions. We started with something called Foxtrot RPA, which didn't work well at all. We also compared UiPath with Automation Anywhere. But UiPath offers a better variety of possibilities, it's more flexible, and it's very easy to program if you are a developer and know other programming languages. UiPath offers StudioX for people who do not have any experience with development, but it's still a little too complicated.

We are not using a lot of the abilities that UiPath offers. We have made some attempts to use Document Understanding and we would very much like to do project mining, but we haven't had a client that is interested in that yet.

I would recommend that you start by implementing a small, standalone process, something that is not part of a big process. Automate that small process first to get used to how it works and see what can be done with RPA in general. And only then start with more complex processes. The latter take more time to develop, and clients don't like to wait.

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.