UiPath Reviews

Our use cases have evolved over time. We have use cases for screening and onboarding candidates, feeding new hires into the payroll system, and timekeeping. Right now, we are working on a document understanding use case. It is going to help us read supplier insurance forms.  

UiPath has enabled us as an organization to perform an array of tasks with more proficiency and efficiency. Automation is very important to our organization now and UiPath has played an immense role.

UiPath makes building automations incredibly easy. The platform is very robust and it is scalable. UiPath also has a strong community, which has helped democratize RPA in a true sense. The community and expertise can be leveraged quickly to meet a common goal.

The UiPath Academy has helped us move forward more efficiently. It is a great source of information and knowledge for both new users and those taking the advanced courses. I see the UiPath Academy evolving in the future.

One of the features I've found valuable is UiPath Studio. We have a huge development team of about eight to ten people and they are currently working with it. We also have a citizen developer program that is leveraging StudioX. 

Orchestrator is important for us as well. 

These features are valuable because they allow different groups of people to complete their tasks. UiPath is a robust platform. It helps us cater to different audiences. 

The licensing model is sometimes very confusing and could be simplified for customers. That would help us understand, gauge the offer, and work it into our existing infrastructure. 

We started using UiPath in 2017. We have had a great journey with it. UiPath has helped us scale faster, especially with RPA implementations. It also helped us evolve through our automation journey. 

My impression of the stability is that it's like any other software. We have never had a problem with UiPath and the platform has been stable enough to enable us to scale a lot. 

We have been happy with UiPath's scalability so far. I would give it a nine out of 10. We are currently deploying about 95% of our automations through UiPath. We are very into it and plan to expand from there. 

Yes, we did use a different solution but I cannot disclose which. However, I can say this much: we decided to switch because of the community UiPath has built. Also, the platform and product are packaged correctly. Everything is laid out well and it seems like UiPath understands what businesses need. 

The initial setup was straightforward and easy. UiPath has an incredible team in place. They help us every now and then. It did not take us much time to go through the initial setup and get the solution deployed. 

We have realized savings in the millions of dollars overall.

The pricing structure is very complicated. Someone from the organization has to sit down and set aside some time to fully understand it. 

Yes, we did evaluate other options but I cannot disclose which. 

Start your journey with UiPath. Engage someone from UiPath and have them go through the journey with you. 

We work with TMS, a technology-management resolution division. We use UiPath to read the PDF documents that we get. We manage a business service for TMS and as part of that business contract, we read the PDFs and enter that information. We get that information out via documents from the templates where we have to enter information related to that particular case. 

These are the use cases that we are currently working on, but we are also looking to use this for quality assurance of all the steps because this is a highly visible, very critical process for TMS. We have to make sure that everything is done on time and that all of the information is relevant and responsive. Quality assurance is a big deal for us, and we are looking to use UiPath quality checks at different stages in the process.

We are in the initial stages, so I can't really say that we have achieved a whole lot of efficiencies using UiPath yet. We hope to achieve a whole lot of efficiency when it comes to the documents. Right now it takes about 45 minutes to do this process manually, to read that entire form. It is going to be reduced to two minutes. That is a huge efficiency gain, and that is the value that it will add.

When it comes to the ease of building automations, UiPath offers many libraries for developers to use. It's fairly easy to code it. 

We definitely expect that it will save us costs and human error. There is a lot of critical information in these forms and there is a human error because we process huge volumes. Obviously, when a robot is doing it, that human error will be reduced to a minimum.

The hope is that employees will be able to allocate their time to different work.

We use the Academy. We are enrolled in the partner program, and we have used a lot of courses from the Academy. It keeps us up to date and up to speed with the solution. Although, our needs right now are very focused and limited because we are just starting. I'm sure as we grow and as we advance in our RPA journey, there will be enough documentation and courses for our needs. 

Most of our PDFs are scanned PDFs and the OCR does not always capture all the information correctly. That's why the document understanding feature will be good for us. 

We have been using UiPath for about four months now. 

We haven't seen any issues with stability. It's definitely been good.

We have used technical support when I had some issues installing the system. 

I am looking for ways to get the technical support we need faster. 

I think that the pricing for the basic attended robot Studio is great. I think that all of the new features that they are rolling out if they are reasonably priced, they'll be useful because for people like the ones working on our projects who are funded by the government, they have a cap on how much they can spend.

Keeping the price in a reasonable range would be beneficial, and it'll be more usable and more in reach for people.

We considered Blue Prism, but through our research, we chose UiPath because of what they've already achieved with CMS. We thought it would be the best solution. 

The UiPath website has a lot of information and the Academy offers a lot of courses. I heard from different people in different industries and markets that this is the best solution. It's worth a try. There is more work in the beginning when you are getting it set up. But there are a lot of benefits, and you don't have to wait months and months to see them. You can start seeing the benefits early on.

I would rate UiPath a nine out of ten. 

Currently, we're doing the digital transformation in finance. I'm more of a functional person who understands the design and the processes but not the programming, coding, and details. 

I am using their automation cloud offering.

One of the best benefits is that instead of just doing their single task, it gets people to think beyond what they're doing and how other things impact them; for instance, for PO distribution, we had to think about where our suppliers' lists are and what do the people do out in the field? I've never been as exposed to that as much as now because we are trying to automate it. What you find is that the challenge isn't just in the robot. It is what you do before you get to the robot that is critical, and if it forces us to fix that, it has been a success. It helps you to realize some efficiencies in your current processes.

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

I anticipate that there would be a reduction in human errors and also time savings within these five processes. Inherently, it has to improve the accuracy. That's because now you're focused on a particular thing, and you're testing it. If it is not a hundred percent accurate, it is not going to production. 

The ability to follow and orchestrate what the robots are doing has been very valuable. I've been working on the automation hub because that's the next step after our test case of five robotic implementations. So, it is orchestrated to see how they're doing.

UiPath Academy is helpful in terms of the ability to connect the software to the processes that you're trying to automate. It has been helpful in understanding the functions, and it is where you would go to get a better understanding. I do find that their online help is very beneficial with examples. In fact, sometimes that's better than the training itself.

I'm learning it for the training for the RPA associate, and I'm about 70% through there. UiPath's academy courses have been helpful in onboarding or being up to speed with UiPath. However, it has been tougher because the programming that I learned in school is very different from the programming done today. I am sure the younger people will pick it up much faster. There is so much out there, and there is so much to learn because it is not one software package. It provides the ability to use all software packages and interconnect with them. So, the opportunities are amazing but also intimidating.

I started with UiPath training in July 2021.

I am not worried about the stability. I may be naive, but if others are using it in the cloud with much more complicated processes than what we are automating, it is not really a concern.

It is being used by accounting and IT. Finance is learning that, and they're taking the same training that I'm taking. They're probably 10% to 15% on that journey.

Currently, we're doing the digital transformation in finance. We expect to expand that out to operations based on our test case of five robotic implementations. In fact, in our naming conventions, we're trying to make sure that we leave room for HR, Operations, IT, etc, but right now, we're just in finance. Payroll processes, HR processes, onboarding, operations, filling in maintenance on equipment, and doing the routine things out in the field that they do every day will take adoption and interest. Raising four kids, I realize you can't get the response that you want until the people in the field decide that they want to change and adopt it. So, that will be the challenge. The challenge is not whether you can automate something. It is more like will they let you automate something.

I have not really had to use the support, but I will. I've gone back and forth, and I've lost some of my training. I'm a tenant who is just in the training phase. So, everyone has had issues with getting in, and it's more whether they're using Google or Explorer, and how they're accessing it. I am getting that standardized and having them do that. I am also a victim of the same thing that I'm teaching them, and what I'm trying to do is be the guinea pig.

Before UiPath, we didn't use any other RPA solution. We went for UiPath because it was really a move from our finance leader, the controller. We had automated many financial processes with planning, reporting, etc, but the accounting group was continually skipped over. We had a controller that came in, and they wanted to take many of our repeated processes. They took Rally and created an agile group to create the digital finance vector. There is a team of five members who went and looked at processes that we were doing and then told us about which ones we can change and do better with. By using his experience in other companies and having discussions with other people, along with the KPMG group, they did an analysis. They wanted to lead in the digital finance transformation. They're doing that by looking forward to five or 10 years and then coming back, which is really nice.

I will learn more about that. The workflow was nice, and the implementations that we have are relatively easy, but it is intimidating to see how much it takes to do some very small processes. It helps you understand more about the decision points and whether they're objective or subjective. With reporting, it will be helpful for us to understand which things are best to automate and which ones are the easiest. That's what I'm hoping to get from five implementations.

We are doing consulting with a collaborative effort with KPMG. So, they actually know more of the technical details, and they're supposed to be transferring data. 

KPMG did a sprint on the implementations. The sprints were such that it was really six week turnaround time, and that involved actually going backward and doing the assessments from those. By doing the cost benefits backward, we can set things upright and see what we do going forward. The key is not how quickly they were able to do it, but how quickly we can do it, and how quickly the people in the field can adopt that and have a robot actually be their assistant. I believe you call that the citizen developers.

Right now, it is way too big for me to even understand it. I feel like it's a universe. I'm just trying to get directions. The area that I'm looking at right now is analytics to make sure that we can properly report on how they're doing, and that's what is going to make management invest further into our idea. I come from a reporting background, and that's what I focus on in other financial packages that we have with PeopleSoft, Hyperion planning, and the FCCS cloud. In many of these automations, the need part of it is that you're not stuck within the software that you had; for example, a macro within Excel can only help you with what you're doing in Excel. It can't help you with an email. It can't help you with a PDF form, but you can bring these together, so the automation opportunities are endless.

So, at this time, it hasn't saved us money because we're just in the investment phase. That's why I want to do reporting so we can see. The decisions you make now affect the next 10 to 20 years. Everyone gets too short-term-focused. You should go to where you want to be five years from now and go backward. What you are doing today is going to make that five years strike. So, it is an investment.

It is pricey at the beginning, but we'll have to see going forward what we get for the tools. It is always expensive to buy a really nice car and not drive it very far and very much. So, it is about utilization.

I believe my company did evaluate other solutions, and they definitely liked UiPath best. The primary differentials were reputation, experience, and the level and quality of the tool.

I would advise others to give it a try. It can't hurt. Even if you didn't use it going forward, with the basic principles, you'll probably fix things and then come back to it. Some people just have bad processes, and it would be very frustrating to use them because they haven't fixed their processes. You have to get your processes aligned first and then take them to the point that they're standardized and understood by different people using them, and then you can automate across different software packages.

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

I would rate it an eight out of 10. I'm learning it, but have to inject experience. I have to learn and understand, and then I have to utilize t. Like many solutions that I've dealt with, there are always three ways to do it, but there is the best way. I always wish you'd just teach the best way, but I understand that you want to make people agile and have an understanding of using it in different ways. However, learning all three ways is very cumbersome. You really want to learn the way you're going to use it.

Most of our use cases come in finance functions, however, we certainly have use cases spread across all sorts of other functions. For example, in HR. We've had a lot recently in IT operations and then also in broader operations. Obviously, that depends on the company we're working with. We're getting more and more customer-facing automation that is running all the way through the organization, from front office through middle office and back, across all different verticals within a company.

UiPath has improved our clients' companies and the way they function. For example, overall, automating the mundane and the repetitive allows people to do people things. Things like invoice processing and using Document Understanding to do that, enable your accounts payable team to look at the exceptions and do exception-based processing, which requires human judgment. Keying an invoice and working out who to send it to for approval should be rules-based. If it's not rules-based, it's probably an error or a miscommunication between the vendor who's sending it. Maybe it's a mismatch to the PO, and that requires human judgment. Therefore, just getting it out to a human to do that at the right time is critically important. If you're giving your people more time to do the exception-based management, you also give them the time and capacity to stop that from being an exception next time. Whether that's expanding the automation to be able to handle that use case, or whether it's educating your vendors when they're sending you invoices.

We work prominently with unattended solutions and larger end-to-end automation. What we're really loving about UiPath is the number of ways we can now inject human intervention at different parts of those larger workflows instead of looking at a big workflow and working out what parts of it we can automate, aiming to automate end-to-end and only working out the bits that we really need the human intervention in.

UiPath is constantly coming up with ways, whether it's through Teams or it's through apps, there are all sorts of different ways to get the human in the loop and get the automation throughput as high as we can.

Our clients use the UI apps feature. We use that for quite a few different functions. It helped to reduce the workload of IT departments by enabling end-users to create apps. That said, we generally work closer to the business than the IT side. We'd like to see it as taking the work away from the backlog that IT is looking to implement. You don't need an IT department that is quiet and doesn't have a big long queue of work. Allowing the business to be able to build their own solutions based on their business process is very powerful.

The UI apps feature has increased the number of automation. It’s certainly increasing the number of things you can automate and also the amount of a given process you can automate.

It has also reduced the time of creation. Certainly with the app creation, having a single platform reduces the time. You no longer need to integrate it with other different web forms or things you create on the front end, which we did a number of years ago. Now, it's one solution. UiPath can do it all.

For clients that use automation cloud offering, it has helped to decrease UiPath's total cost of ownership. It goes a little bit back to the IT side. You don't need to involve them nearly as much. Having a platform that is always on the latest version really, really helps. It also closes down the handoff between business and IT within the COE.

UiPath has saved costs for our client's organizations. The IT costs are different for each organization. We have clients who have an outsourced IT set up where they pay quite large costs to spin up machines and to maintain and upgrade those machines and services. Having the one solution as UiPath and offering the cloud is critically important for that.

In terms of on-prem instances, clients have saved costs there as well. We're very, very excited about the automation speed and the one-button deployment to the whole environment. That's certainly a step in that direction with on-prem. That will certainly save our client and us a lot of time. That way, everyone can spend more time building automation rather than building a platform to put them into.

The product has reduced human errors. On the same note, it also allows humans to spend a little bit more time on those exceptional cases. When the pressure may be on to get an invoice keyed it allows them to spend the right amount of time getting that exception handled. Then, of course, everything that's going through the bot is pretty much zero-error. The way the bots work, if there is an error it's going to let someone know. It's not going to guess and it's not going to fat finger.

We increasingly use UiPath's AI functionality. We certainly do on custom models with Document Understanding. We're just starting a project now to look at pulling entities out of emails. This is an exciting use case and I’m excited to learn about the capabilities that are being expanded.

The ability to automate processes is twofold. One of them is, it allows us to start to create human decisions. The human decision is the bit that you really need to automate around and starting to build that human decision-making into an AI model is critically important. The other side of that is that, when you're running automation, you have the ability to create a huge dataset. Everything that's being done is rules-based and it's data-driven so you can map everything every bot does, every button press if you want. That's a huge amount of data and a huge amount of input to AI models. Having it all in the UiPath platform is critically important for our customers. It's great that UiPath has lots of partners and we use partners, technology partners, to do that when required. However, the more that comes into the UiPath platform, the better.

We’ve utilized Academy courses from UiPath. UiPath's academy is amazing. It's unparalleled in the industry. We traditionally have done a lot of training for our clients over the years. However, we find with UiPath, we just point them in the direction of the Academy. We're always there to support, of course, and supplement any training that's specific to maybe a client environment or a client business system. That said, it's a fantastic resource for partners and for clients of UiPath.

The quality of the training Academy is great. It's also a tool to evangelize UiPath in our customer base. If someone hears about UiPath or they come to one of our demos through our delivery life cycle, and they really want to know something about UiPath, or want to get involved, or want to become a part of the COE or become a developer, it’s very, very easy to send them in the right direction. They can do the training they want to do, and they can get as deep as they want. It’s great and offers a low-effort way to evangelize UiPath.

The time to competency has been lowered with those that go through the Academy. It's not only learning. Learning things off slides. It's getting in there, it's whether it's a community edition or a training install, it's building things. Through the certifications, users can submit those things to get reviewed. This makes sure that people who are certified through the academy really do know their stuff. They've got hands-on experience. There's nothing quite like doing it in a real process. With the UiPath Academy, new users get as close as they can to that.

There should be extra ways for humans to interact with automation.

From what I've seen, and it's very early, however, there's certainly the direction they are headed, which is really, really great to see. It's my belief that Document Understanding will continue to improve. I'd like to see more predictive-type stuff, which again, we are beginning to see.  We'd love to get Document Understanding continually improving and having it more improved by the SMEEs who are performing the processes rather than the data analysts.

We've been implementing UiPath for just over four years.

The stability is amazing. Years have gone by and obviously, the product has changed a lot, however, of late, the last couple of years have been great stability-wise.

The object repository and modern folders have been great for the scalability of the solution. From the platform side, it's certainly easy to scale. We're very, very impressed on the automation suite side. You can deploy everything very quickly and you can scale everything up. 

The focus on reuse from a developer level is great to see. That's really improved in the last little while. On the other side of it, the actual scale through the organization, in terms of evangelizing automation, and making our customers an enterprise that automates first, there are numerous tools that do that really well. Whether it's the workshops that UiPath will come and do, or that we facilitate or it's through the pipeline itself, the scalability has obviously been a focus for the last little while. It's really, truly great.

We very rarely need to reach out to UiPath support. If we do, we know we're going to get a prompt response, and we're going to get a good answer. That said, we rarely need it. It's very, very good in general when we do use it.

We've got a few clients that run multiple solutions. They've been legacy users of another solution for a very long time. Citizen Development through StudioX is unparalleled in UiPath. Attended automation is obviously a strong point and has been for years. There are also things like Document Understanding. Document Understanding is much stronger than any of the solutions on other providers. There are those value adds that come in for that full lifecycle.

The solution is relatively straightforward. We have a dedicated platform team whose role is to implement UiPath for our customers, whether it's integrating them into the cloud or getting their business applications on the cloud. Or, whether it's an on-prem solution where we'll interact with their systems and integrate with their CyberArk or AD groups or whatever they need.

Each deployment is very dependent on the customer. We've had them deployed in a few days and we've had some that have gone on a few months, unfortunately. We find that talking to the risk group, the security group, and the infrastructure group all at the same time on day one of the project will make sure everyone's aligned - and that is the best way to mitigate the risks. 

The last thing you want is someone from the security organization putting their hand up in week four and saying, "Hold on, hold on, start again. This doesn't comply with one of the controls in our organization." It's about educating and keeping everyone, all stakeholders from the IT side involved at all stages.

The ROI that our clients have seen is very process-dependent. We've seen some huge 300 to 600% on particular use cases. Some of them are very easy to calculate due to the fact that we're taking work away from manual users. We've also seen some really good ones recently that are actually increasing revenue. Whether that's giving the capacity to sales-type items or whether it's tasks such as processing refunds and all those sorts of things that shouldn't be taking time away from salespeople, it’s been helpful.

The licensing can get a little confusing. There's been a move recently to create personas around licensing. My feedback from customers is that it hasn't necessarily helped. Some of the new enterprise-type agreements, the per-seat arrangements, are interesting. That's likely the way it'll go. Even then, it's still a little on the confusing side at times. We do a lot of work with clients to get them to understand the licensing model.

We've been aware of other solutions, and in comparison, with UiPath, it's the breadth of the lifecycle that sets it apart. UiPath as a platform, from the moment the first person at an organization thinks about automating, to reaping the benefits of that and improving the day-to-day work of the business, there's a solution for all of that. Whether it's process mining and finding automation candidates, it's the way UiPath brings different users into the automation. Apps and insights make sure we're pulling the right data out to keep generating the business case to grow the UiPath account itself. Also, along with that, is the ability to provide the extra benefit and knowing what benefit we're providing.

We have clients across both on-prem and cloud deployments. We have about 25% cloud, 75% on-prem solutions. We use various versions of the on-premises model. We probably average about 12-month-old versions, however, we do have clients on the most recent as well. We also have a couple of clients who are lagging a little bit.

I'd advise potential new users to get in there and get started. You don't know until you've tried. You don't have to look very hard to get started, however, it's important once you get going to start to think about how you scale and how you build an operating model around it. Maybe start small, and think big, and make sure you plan accordingly.

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

Our primary use case is to document image processing. We're six months in, so our first case was sorting and filtering the data, extracting the image, and determining if it's a certain type of document. If it is, it starts putting it into different buckets, which ultimately we'll run something to extract and put those into our data source. 

Our second use case is for the healthcare industry. We're looking at catalog data and a customer might want to know about a product. Is this product safe? Who provides this product? Is it on a contract somewhere? We go out to multiple different web sources to look up information about that document, put it back in our database, save it for that customer, then save it for any future customer that asks the same question.

We're looking at other things like taking snapshots of the image of the product. We also want to automate other basic automation, low-hanging fruit type functions, like automating uploads of data to sites, spreadsheets, contact-center, and Salesforce.

Longer-term, we want to take what we're doing in the document image and apply it to other areas of our business. We have purchase orders, invoicing, shipping documents, compliance documents, credential documents, a lot of images in this particular space. We'll go as deep as we can in the data processing side of things.

We're going through a culture shift to get to an automation-thinking platform as opposed to a lot of our business relying on BPO humans to do the work. Making that paradigm shift is taking time because we're only a week-plus live. If we prove the value, they'll give us more opportunities to make those big changes. But it's good that the business is thinking that they need this. Now it's just getting the community aspects of it.

The automation cloud offering helps to decrease the solution's total cost of ownership by taking care of things such as infrastructure, maintenance, and updates. 

Although we don't use it, document understanding for our use cases is very compelling, but it was a little cost prohibitive just out the gate. We are looking at it long-term now that we have the data filtered if we can more strategically apply it to the best data to fit it. But overall, the platform is very innovative. I don't think I can call out one particular feature. The ease of use of integrating to and from Amazon components, being a cloud-native application ourselves, has been really helpful in the development and the ease of transferring documents between our internal systems and platform.

The ease of building automations using UiPath depends on the use cases. Overall, the development is really easy. Where you run into challenges is in workloads that are highly rule-based. So we abandoned one use case where it had 50,000 different decision points. It wasn't worth the time. It wasn't a product thing. It was just too time-consuming of a process, something like that.

There have been some limitations as far as how do we execute our bots, when? This new release that they just mentioned today actually addresses a lot of our concerns around the integrations component that they recently released. If we could find an email instead of waking up and checking the email inbox. That's a big improvement we're looking to, but it wasn't a limiting factor.

I have used the Academy. It was really just myself and as well the one IT guy who's supporting the platform. Our office partner came in with the knowledge, but the course was really good. We came in with no RPA experience, and it covered everything from the basics of RPAs to the processes of identifying.

They recently addressed a major problem of kick-off processes for the integration function. That addressed a lot of the community concerns around that. If you are using queues, their queue system isn't as reliable as I would like it to be. 

One of our concerns is that we were not a Microsoft shop at all before bringing this in. That was actually my limiting factor in bringing in the software. We lost it below the party lines. The ability to address other workloads, Mac, Linux, etc., is going to be a game-changer.

From a new customer, new investment perspective, there are a lot of cost-prohibitive aspects that we decided not to add to our initial investment. We weren't sure if or when we'll figure things out for use cases.

I have been using UiPath for six months.

We want to triple our capacity and triple our workflows. 

I've only had to use support once, and it was more of a documentation problem. I didn't understand what I was seeing, and they worked it out within an hour. So far, they've been good. 

The cloud was up two days after we signed. Then to get our bot infrastructure up because it's Windows and we're in a Windows environment, it took us about a month to run through that and get the IT people and security.

Cloud solutions will save you a lot of headaches and time. We broke halfway through and decided we're going to cloud, not on-prem.

Reputation was a big reason we went with UiPath, as well as the growth and the ability to integrate specifically to the cloud which was missing in other solutions. That was a big plus. The ability to use something like document understanding and the ability to interact with internal APIs were also key features. It's not just web scraping and doing things in Excel or other things like that. We wanted it to work with our internal native applications.

UiPath has not yet saved costs for my organization. We're still going live and we're anticipating about a two-year ROI.

Make sure to understand your use cases before you sign your agreement. That way you're not idle for six to nine months trying to figure out what it is you're trying to automate.

I would rate UiPath an eight out of ten. 

We use UiPath for cases where we have to do a workflow-related mechanism. Most of these use cases are small, Excel-based solutions and desktop-solution-related workflows, where one or two applications have to be connected, along with the Excel operation, for the end-to-end workflow creation.

We use both attended and unattended automation.

We have created 10-plus solutions using UiPath, and the savings that have been generated from these solutions are around $1 million. They are very cost-effective solutions: finance, order-to-cash, and protocol-to-pay processes. It has created value on the higher end, because the processes were quite cumbersome. We re-engineered the processes and started using UiPath for workflow automation.

We have saved roughly 50 FTEs on a yearly basis. It also enables us to use a lower skillset workforce, which is a cost-effective measure.

Quality, no doubt, is one of the key parameters of automation. UiPath has resulted in quality improvement for the overall processes where it's deployed.

It's on the OCR side and the workflow side where UiPath creates value to us.

The most important and valuable feature of UiPath is the ease of creating automations. It's a workflow-based model. End-to-end coverage is, no doubt, very important, because when you use a fragmented solution, the overall process flow becomes shaky. UiPath has the required capabilities to create an end-to-end solution for a business case. For our scenario, the business cases are quite small. That way, the turnaround time to create a solution is short and it becomes very easy to deploy, which is quite helpful for us.

Another important feature is the OCR capability, which integrates quite easily with other kinds of tools. We have integrated with ABBYY and we have even used the Amazon OCR engine. From an integration perspective, it is scalable enough to integrate with third-party solutions, whereas that kind of thing becomes a bit of challenge when we use Automation Anywhere.

We are able to use Python scripting and Python libraries for data extraction.

We also use the solution in creating attended automations. They are very much division-specific and are currently used by the procurement and the finance teams. These are on-demand, data reconciliation activities that are performed once a week. The bot is clicked by the person who is attending, which is generally a procurement or a finance guy. These are tedious activities so that's why we have the dedicated license for the attended format.

It is quite user-friendly with the drag-and-drop functionality. It has connectors which are quite suitable and industry-standard for basic applications that we use on the desktop, like for the Microsoft suite. From an integration perspective, it has done well.

We have also used its selector technology to automate processes with dynamic interfaces for one of the finance applications, where the UI screen is changing.

The cognitive area is one where there is room for improvement. Automation Anywhere has grown in that area, whereas UiPath still is more dependent on third-party integration. That is something which they should be focusing on more. They should acquire a product and get it integrated.

I have been using UiPath for around two and a half years. I have used both Automation Anywhere and UiPath. We have both tools.

UiPath Robots are quite robust, and from a maintenance perspective it has become easy, if you create logs. It's pretty good.

In terms of scalability, as I mentioned, it has certain challenges, but with the minimal capacity which we are running, it becomes easy to maintain the bots.

We have 10 to 12 automations already in place, and there are around five to six more in the pipeline, which are still being rolled out. The RPA tool we used is determined on a case-by-case basis.

UiPath technical support is pretty good. Most of the answers are provided by the community forum. If you raise a ticket, they are proactive in getting back to you and addressing the point. It's good.

The initial setup was okay. I was involved in the setup of Automation Anywhere four years ago, and with UiPath. Compared to Automation Anywhere, it was much smoother because the community side is quite good with UiPath. In the early days when we were facing issues, we had the UiPath community support to find answers. We did not have to raise a ticket with UiPath because we were able to get our answers in the community forums.

The first case took us around seven to eight months to put in place. The first one is, obviously, always a tricky one. We also picked a use case of medium complexity and it took a bit of time. Later on, we started building more of a workflow solution using our low-cost workforce and, after that, the journey was quite smooth. Initially there were some hiccups, but once the team understood the tool itself it became easy.

We deploy developers who require a lower level of skill sets, developers who do not have that much training. They are normal .NET developers whom we train for one and a half months on UiPath and they start developing UiPath solutions. We have a center of excellence with our developers who work on UiPath. We recently hired two more, so we now have around 11 developers who are working on UiPath.

Taking UiPath courses to get up to speed has been very helpful. I am certified for the tool because of the courses. The curriculum is at least on par with that of Automation Anywhere, although I would say it is much better. The only issue is that the courses are very limited. The AA University has increased to a vast number of courses, and most of them have become free for the end-user. The UiPath course material is good, but there are notably fewer courses and less certification available for people like us, who are more on the business side. AA has a business analyst program and a program manager certification, but I was not able to find anything specific like that in the UiPath Academy.

Our strategy with UiPath is that we generally go for unattended automation because that doesn't lock up our licenses for the bots. We prefer solutions which require unattended automation, because of a lack of budget and other constraints. From the deployment perspective, we have a dedicated server and we're following the minimum guidelines which are required to conform to the deployment standards.

The ROI generated is quite high because of the cost factor.

It is much much cheaper than the Automation Anywhere. That is a key differentiator. It is targeted at mid-level enterprises. It is cost-effective.

There are no additional costs beyond the standard licensing fees. We have taken few of the training-related services from them. Once we move to the cloud version we may require some consulting services to move from on-prem to cloud. That would be the only other cost associated with UiPath.

When it comes to the main differences between UiPath and Automation Anywhere, UiPath is cost-effective. It is quite a lot cheaper than Automation Anywhere. It is also drag-and-drop, a fact which makes basic automation very easy compared to Automation Anywhere. It's quite user-friendly. In addition, the OCR functionality is quite robust in UiPath because it also provides a third-party integration. Python scripting becomes easy and that means our OCR solutions are quite good. These are the pros of UiPath. 

Regarding the cons of UiPath when compared to AA, the first one is the level of scripting details. Custom scripting is quite lacking in UiPath. It's more a drag-and-drop functionality which doesn't allow that higher level of customized scripting when compared to AA. Secondly, the scalability is quite robust in AA as compared to UiPath. Even though we are not pushing the limit, the general opinion out there is that UiPath fails quite visibly when you try to scale solutions that involve operations plus a new product rollout. That's a challenge with UiPath. And, as I mentioned, AA has improved a lot in the cognitive area and UiPath has not reached that level. It relies more on the third parties.

Even if you are a large enterprise and you're trying to start your RPA journey, UiPath is the answer. It sits in the top one or two solutions, along with Automation Anywhere. It's one of the leaders in RPA, and with the low cost model of the license structure, it is very easy to start with UiPath rather than with Automation Anywhere.

If you are looking for a strategic approach, where you have projected that within five to six years you will roll out 250 to 300 bots, scalability is something you have to factor in when starting your journey.

We haven't used the solution's artificial intelligence. We tried to run a PoC using a chat bot, but it didn't do well. I don't think UiPath has its own AI engine. They provide an API-level integration with other AI tools. We had a challenge there because most of the AI functionalities had to work on the cloud. We had to integrate with the Google Cloud and Amazon cloud, but both are in the public domain and transferring data from our office to the cloud was a challenge. We hit a wall. For that scenario, we moved on to Automation Anywhere, which provides us an on-prem solution.

We primarily use it to reduce manual effort and to increase accuracy and on-time implementation. We perform end-to-end automation, since we are a company where SAP is used very widely. We use UiPath for SAP automation.

We develop both attended and unattended solutions. We're using the platform as a service and it's hosted on-premises.

So far, we have 15 bots in production. As a result, we are saving a lot of time, although I don't have a figure right now, as well as a lot of effort. We are also able to provide timely delivery to our customers, so the automations have been generating a lot of buzz here.

Attended automation has helped to scale RPA in our organization by automating processes that require human-robot collaboration. An example is our invoices that have data that needs to be scanned. The scans we were receiving did not have the accuracy that we were looking for. We also had a hard time getting the results through OCR. With the help of attended automation, we are able to have users verify data when the bot is running. Once the verification is done, the bot will perform the rest of the actions.

UiPath also definitely helps us with process analysis.

Although I have not used it yet, they have recently introduced a feature which brings more accuracy to the selectors, using the image and the selectors themselves. I feel that will be good. When we are creating selectors, there are elements that it's hard to get at, or there are times when the selectors get changed for some reason. The new feature should make it easier to work with in these situations.

They have also recently added a feature for attended automation, Picture in Picture, which is also nice to have. It's helpful because you don't want to just sit back and let the bot run and not work during that attended automation. Using the PiP feature, you can have it running on your desktop without having to interrupt it to your work.

I would also compliment them on the UiPath Academy, the learning platform that they have built. It contains everything that a developer or architect or tester or, anyone who is looking to benefit from an RPA, would need. It's all there on their platform. It helps speed up onboarding employees to UiPath. When I joined this company, I had prior experience with the RPA and UiPath. But two of my colleagues, who were working on test automation, didn't have that kind of experience. The Academy helped them to get started. We aligned quickly, once their fundamental developer training was done through the Academy. The Academy helped them align with the current practices of UiPath and RPA.

One area that needs improvement is monitoring. I know there are tools that let us see what a bot is actually doing on the virtual machines. If we could get that kind of offering from UiPath that would be great, because when a bot is running on the machine, we don't know what it's doing. Although we have programmed it, there are times when something causes a bot to fail. During such instances, the bot behaves differently when we run it in attended mode than it does in unattended mode. It would be great to have a feature where we could see, on a screen, what the bot is currently doing.

We started this UiPath journey two years back. 

I act as a UiPath lead because I joined early and I have some prior experience with it. There are three other people in India, and one more in the U.S, who use it in our company. The one in the U.S. does the managerial stuff and it's the developers who are in India. Then we have the business users for each of the bots and they also use UiPath. And we have a set of about 20 users who use the attended solution that we have provided to them.

Robots on the SAP system seem stable, but on the web they sometimes lack stability. Still, it's not a very common occurrence and I have overcome any issues with the help of the Trilogic. For example, we had an issue while getting an email from Outlook. A UiPath robot is not able to do that. It will time out. With the help of the Trilogic, we were able to overcome that.

Initially you have to put some effort in to obtain stability and then it is mostly stable. Some maintenance is required, but that's most probably when requirements change, or to add to the stability, but it's not a lot overhead right now for us.

It's highly scalable, in both development terms as well as business terms. We have the capability to add on robots. We can add to the VDI or machine anytime we want. They have put some serious thought into the scalability, when it comes to giving support to developers as well as the business.

We plan to increase our usage of UiPath. We have a lot of things in the pipeline. We have almost finalized on providing RPA as a service, something that we will offer internally. Right now, we are giving this free of cost to our customers who are the business people. We did so to get some attention and to create some interest in the tool. Now that we have almost finalized this as a service, we are going to involve business analysts who will be helping us to find more RPA use cases and finalize more RPA solutions. That means our usage will increase. We're still in an early phase.

I haven't had the chance to interact much with the technical support because the forum has so much information. If I browse through the forum, I will most probably get an answer. So I haven't needed to go to the technical support for any answers.

We have both test automation and UiPath working in parallel. Test automation has been here for the long-term, something like 10 or 15 years. The two guys who work with me, who didn't have prior UIPath experience, are working on that. That part mostly requires maintenance, and they now mostly work on UiPath development. So although we had a test automation solution, we didn't have a business automation solution. That is why we went with UiPath. It gives us an edge in business automation.

The initial setup of UiPath was pretty straightforward. I didn't find anything unusual or complex.

We went through an upgrade recently. We have dedicated cloud architects who helped us do it. We got instructions how to do it from UiPath support and we conveyed those instructions to our cloud architects and they performed it at their end to get UiPath cloud upgraded. Upgrading didn't take much time. It was done within half an hour.

One more feature that is useful is that earlier, we didn't have the option for a concurrent-user license. With the help of the concurrent-user license, we can save on licensing costs while running multiple bots under the same license.

If you are going to implement UiPath, my advice would be to look at how you are going to gather the requirements and how you're going to manage the requests for UiPath. 

Also, get some low-hanging fruit first, before going into the complex automations. That way, if you are new, the low-hanging fruits will generate confidence in the solution. Once that kind of confidence is generated, you can move ahead with the complex automations and complex solutions.

Go through the UiPath Academy extensively. They provide good training materials that I don't believe are available elsewhere. So I really recommend that. I recently attended a dev conference and I learned a lot about this stuff. I work in a closed environment where I don't have much of an idea of what's going on in RPA. This conference helped me keep in touch with the current trends in RPA and UiPath.

I rate UiPath at eight out of 10. For me, that's a very good mark. The two missing points are because there is scope for improvement. Overall, I'm pretty happy with UiPath.

We use UiPath to automate business processes such as certain types of reporting that have to be repeated on a month-to-month basis. Another example is invoicing processes, which can be automated. Generally, it applies to different business cases for enterprise automation.

An example of how UiPath has improved the organization stems from a cyberattack in 2018. We already had an RPA team and during that cyber attack, all of our systems went down. Our SAP provider cut our access to it, leaving us with a limited number of users. It was not a big enough team to deliver on to our clients all of the orders that were being received.

What we did with UiPath in that crisis scenario in a couple of weeks was that we created a process for order automation. We already had a proof of concept, and we were able to scale it quickly. It was not perfect but rather, done in an emergency situation.

With that couple of users and limited access to SAP, a couple of robot users were capable of working 24 hours, seven days a week, and we started to process all of the orders that were coming from the rest of the company. This is probably something that you could not have done with more classical solutions.

This was, of course, an emergency order automation and it was a topic that we were already working with. Prior to this, it was already a benefit for the company, but the fact that we had this flexibility showcases how powerful this tool is, or what its potential is.

Having the cloud-based version allows us to be at the latest version of UiPath Orchestrator and different products without having to take care of the upgrade process.

UiPath's portal for enabling business users to trigger and monitor jobs is a big deal for me because it's something that we have been trying to do for a long time. We have been asking for it. With the previous solution, which was the orchestration platform alone, it was not a good approach because the business users would have a lot of information on their hands and you have to either split your licenses so that they could not access everything, or create your own web portals for them to access specific parts.

The fact that they now have an intermediate portal where they see only their processes, which they can monitor for themselves without getting too much information that is not relevant for them, is a big deal. Something as simple as triggering your own process, which in the past would require dedicating a full license to, can now be done through the portal. It might be a task like checking emails for customers or creating your own application with their API. It's a huge increment in quality.

The portal can also be used for administrators and although we have the Action Center, we don't use it that often. From the point of view of administrators, I can say that the recent improvements make our life much easier. It also enables us to think of more complex setups. In the past, I would never allow certain configurations because they would either be a security risk or it would just create more problems than solutions. Now with the current interface, especially with what they will be adding in the future in terms of more governance from the platform, they just enable you to do more complex things. It allows you to go a little bit beyond what the normal scope would be.

That applies to the platform as well as the orchestrator in the new modern setup. They have the option to split within the same tenant and different companies, or different company departments. Also, the fact that you can dynamically allocate the licenses so that you don't have to worry or have to split them, brings us to another level.

It offers more granular and role-based access control and management. We now have more complex scenarios that in the past we would not even consider because it would be a problem if someone were able to see something that they should not see.

The fact that this is a SaaS solution is important to us and it is clear to me that they want to push a SaaS solution, more than the on-premises deployment. It means that we have the latest version without having to upgrade the systems. We always have the latest version of the studio, for example, and there's no disruption to our services. Furthermore, we are able to follow all of the previews that they come out with. We can try all of their new products, which is something that in the past, we would not have been able to do. It would have required, for example, upgrading our system twice a year. Certainly, we wouldn't be able to do it at the speed we can now.

Being able to minimize our on-premises deployment is really important. It was almost a given for us because we lost some of our interfaces during the cyberattack. From that point on, the company has had a clear policy of cloud and SaaS as a priority. The fact that we have the opportunity to access all of our services without any requirements from our side suits us very well.

The vendor continues to add services to the portal and we are connected through their insider program. This is something that we are really happy with.

It is helpful for us that new services being added to the portal are all managed from the same place because it simplifies our work, makes it cohesive, and makes sense from a philosophical point of view. Definitely, if they had it on different platforms, it would take away from the ease of management. The fact that they have it in a single place makes everything a little bit more interconnected. What they are doing seems to make sense and for me, it is good because we only have to take care of one single platform. This also speeds up our processes, which is a plus.

On the topic of security, especially coming from a cyber attack, having SOC 2 certification is important because it is a requirement for us. We probably would have tried to find an intermediate or an agreement, but the fact that UiPath is now SOC 2 certified means that we have complied with requirements.

The licensing system is something that needs to be improved. I think that if they are trying to push for a SaaS solution, with respect to the way they license their individual products. The robot licenses and the Studio licenses should be something closer to a pay-per-use, rather than a year-to-year license. Right now, the licensing model and the pricing are the only stoppers for us, in terms of escalating our use. The bottom line is that the licensing system is not as modern as the tool that we're trying to implement.

We have been using the UiPath Automation Cloud since January 2020, and prior to that, we had an on-premises solution from UiPath.

Four to six months ago, this was not the most stable solution. We had a lot of issues, especially during the summer and early autumn. The system would fail, or would not be accessible, or we had lost some of our logs.

Right now, the tool is working and is much more stable. It shows that they have put an effort into making it more robust.

With respect to scalability, the licensing system is the limitation.

The platform itself is scalable, although not infinitely, but to a couple of orders of magnitude of what we have now. However, you still have to go through the procurement processes, which always makes it a little bit more limiting. Ultimately, it means that we cannot utilize the full power of what this tool offers in escalation.

Currently, we have five people who are working on UiPath. There are three developers, I am the technical lead, and we have a manager that operates as a product owner for the projects. The three developers are also responsible for maintenance. We also have a business analyst who works through the documentation and is the point of contact for some of our business.

We have other non-official roles, who are people that know and use the tool or perform business analyst functions, but there are only five people in dedicated roles.

At this point, we are using the tool to the full extent of what our licenses allow us to do. We could scale it to be much bigger but in the current situation, I don't think that we will do so. We negotiated the last contract to be a five-year deal and I hope we can move beyond that, but for now, there's no plan to a scale.

We have mixed reviews for the technical support and depending on the topic, they will answer faster or slower, more personalized or not.

They have a ticketing system and the webpage is normally broken, depending on the browser. The response time may vary from topic to topic, so I don't have a consistent impression of the support system. They do answer our questions, but it is not always within the proper time or with the solution that we were hoping for.

What we are using now is the same thing as the previous product from UiPath, without the cost of having to host it yourself.

I have some experience with other products, but not at the professional level. My impression is that with UiPath, you can get started more quickly when compared to other RPA products. Also, the licensing costs are not as high.

Migrating from our on-premises solution to the cloud was not a typical case because we lost our on-premises deployment during the cyberattack. We had at least a few months without the Orchestration solution. When it comes to execution runtimes, where we run our processes, we used the same machines.

Basically, we had to set things up from scratch on the cloud. The process was pretty straightforward, and the fact that we didn't have to set up the Orchestration tool saved us from a lot of the complexity in the setup process. Normally, this is the complex part, including setting it up with the databases. We just had to connect our runtime with the Orchestration platform, which made it much easier.

With respect to the setup costs, the cloud setup balanced out because you don't pay for the orchestration platform, but you pay a little more for the individual licenses. 

Having this product has reduced the amount of maintenance work related to our automation operations because it is a managed solution. The fact that we don't have to host it ourselves is very important.

With respect to maintenance costs, we are a relatively small project, so I wouldn't say that we had a huge overhead. It would certainly be higher if we tried to do what we are doing now, which is being at the latest version all of the time. To do that, we would have needed somebody in a role who was taking care of it. As it is now, from a development or project management point of view, we can take care of these things without needing an architect involved all of the time.

We chose Automation Cloud because it was, at that point, the most flexible option.

UiPath is known for a certain number of products, and the role of our team is to use all of them. On the topic of the UiPath Cloud, the new products that they have come out with, like the possibility to create your own applications for your internal customers, or host certain data services from the same platform, were things that were not available in the past. These capabilities are useful. In general, all of their products are pretty important for us.

For UiPath as a company, we like the availability that they have and the fact that we can try and test all of their products beforehand, without paying. For a relatively small project such as ours, or even for a big company, it's pretty useful to be able to access this type of information and not be burdened with extra budget requirements.

This is a product that I recommend because the starting point is completely free. That's one of the great points of UiPath. My advice is that when it comes to scaling the project, it's really important to clearly set up goals and expectations. Otherwise, there will be an eternal loop of PoCs and non-viable products.

I would rate this solution an eight out of ten.