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Senior RPA Architect/Developer at CED
Real User
Easy to build automations with great accuracy and good cost savings
Pros and Cons
  • "We’ve improved our efficiency. Even just our cost analysis has been great. As we do new contracts, we know what it's going to cost exactly."
  • "I don't know if it's UiPath as much as just what we do which is really complicated. Even the consultants that we've used with UiPath had said, "wow, this is very difficult what you guys do." There are a lot of moving parts. It's not as much of a UiPath issue. It's just our own processes."

What is our primary use case?

We're a revenue cycle management company for medical billing. What we've done is we've replaced or reallocated our charge entry employees. We're using bots now to do the charge entry on medical claims and then also payment posting along with eligibility and AR. So we've been able to reallocate just within this last year, probably about eight employees. They've been reassigned to more valuable work, for example, things that the bot can't do and actually requires a human to do. We've been understaffed, therefore, it's actually worked out great.

What is most valuable?

The ease of building automation using UiPath isn't a problem; it seems to be very easy to do to a point. Our challenge is we work in a live environment. Therefore, we’re not able to use a test environment when we build things out. That’s why we have to go very slowly.

I'm not that familiar with the product, with the solution, however, the UiPath apps feature is great, although we're not using any of the apps currently.

The biggest benefit we've seen would be the accuracy. Even just with employees calling in sick, not having enough staff, we’ve been able to fill those roles.

The robotics piece has been a huge thing. We're doing medical claims. We're always worried about claims not getting paid. This solution has allowed us to been able to capture those claims so that we get paid the first time.

We also now can track how many times we touch a claim. For example, how many clicks. We couldn't do that before. That's been very valuable to us.

We’ve improved our efficiency. Even just our cost analysis has been great. As we do new contracts, we know what it's going to cost exactly.

UiPath has saved costs for our organization. We’ve re-allocated six employees and, for what they do, they're somewhere around $40,000 a year. We've implemented six bots to do those same functions and they're about $8,000 a year. We've almost tripled our ROI.

What needs improvement?

I don't know if it's UiPath as much as just what we do which is really complicated. Even the consultants that we've used with UiPath had said, "wow, this is very difficult what you guys do." There are a lot of moving parts. It's not as much of a UiPath issue. It's just our own processes.

I cannot recall the solution missing any features. 

For how long have I used the solution?

We've been using UiPath for about maybe a year and a half tops.

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UiPath
August 2024
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What do I think about the stability of the solution?

I don't have any problems or concerns about the stability right now. The biggest concern I did have at the time was the fact that we've already invested six people in this in terms of the robotic piece and we're going to have a lot more. Since we've re-allocated these resources, and I have potentially 100 people where I could also reallocate resources, I worry about if something does happen or it doesn't work or there's no backup. If something goes wrong, I don't have employees to backfill as they won't exist. That's my concern. That hasn't happened yet, and I hope it doesn't.

What do I think about the scalability of the solution?

The scalability has been great. It hasn't been a problem at all. We will just continue to add bots every time we need them. So far, it's been easy. We started with two. Three months later, we added another two. Another three months went by and we added another two. From our standpoint, it's great. My UiPath rep was shocked that I keep adding more.

How are customer service and support?

I have not used technical support. 

We have a partner and they take care of it if something comes up. 

We had one issue with UiPath where something didn't work. We talked to them and it was taken care of within a couple of days.

We're working on something that may be called UiPath Insights. It's still not functional and there are some sources that we need. My vendor's working on that. I'm not quite sure what he means by it, however, he's working on it.

Which solution did I use previously and why did I switch?

We did not use a different solution previous to UiPath.

How was the initial setup?

The initial setup was pretty easy. Yeah. We didn't face any challenges with it.

I contacted one of the vendors and they ran with it. As far as I'm concerned, we didn't have issues at all.

The deployment took us about 30 days. After that, in terms of implementing the bots, the first bot took us about three months. As soon as we did the first one, it just went really quick after that. That's due to the fact that it was a lot of reuse. It was just us internally understanding what information was needed and how it works. In terms of requirements, it was all new to us. Even with the acronyms they use, I'm still learning as we're not IT-based at all.

What about the implementation team?

We had a vendor that helped us implement it. We didn't have any challenges as far as that goes.

It was good. They didn't realize how challenging it was going to be or the person who integrated the solution for us, at last, didn't. At the same time, they know almost everything about my business now, however, I'm a little concerned about having to bring on more people as they're not in this industry. We're going to have to start them over from the kind of the ground up, which takes time.

What's my experience with pricing, setup cost, and licensing?

We had a problem before with the pricing, however, for the most part, it's fine where it is now. My ROI is fine and it works great. I have no complaints.

The issue is you have to do a package at a time. That's my only challenge. Sometimes I don't need that much. I don't need that many licenses. The first time you sign up, it's a package of five every year. I don't necessarily need that.

Which other solutions did I evaluate?

We chose UiPath based on a referral. Somebody we heard speaking at a neurological healthcare conference about four years ago, who was not from  UiPath suggested that we needed to talk with UiPath.

I actually didn't know of any other company until after we were on UiPath.

This person was in our same space and he said it's fantastic. He had actually used two other solutions, however, he told us to go with UiPath and I trusted him. I've talked to other people since and they have said the same thing. We've made the right choice.

What other advice do I have?

We started using the on-premise deployment for the first six months and then we actually moved to the cloud.

We're mostly using unattended bots. 

We haven't really reduced human error for sure. We haven't calculated that. We're just moving on to our Insights app. We're just getting ready to launch that. Therefore, we’re not there yet. We don't know what that turnaround is going to look like.

We do not yet use UiPath's AI functionality in our automation program.

We have not yet used any UiPath Academy courses.

When we first got involved, we just wanted to know if it would work. We just decided on a certain budget and decided to try it. Once it worked, we realized we actually had to step back. We started really looking at where we could implement it. We should have done that earlier. That's what I would tell people. It's an automation hub. You need to go through and find your best scenarios, your best ROI. I would definitely tell people to look at that first.

I'd rate the solution at an eight out of ten.

Which deployment model are you using for this solution?

On-premises
Disclosure: I am a real user, and this review is based on my own experience and opinions.
PeerSpot user
Senior Software Engineer at a tech services company with 10,001+ employees
Real User
Reduced the cost of our automation operations and is compatible with other solutions
Pros and Cons
  • "The product has reduced the cost of our automation operations."
  • "When the Orchestrator got upgraded and UiPath didn't get upgraded, we started getting errors regarding the managed packages; the packages were not getting upgraded."

What is our primary use case?

Our use case is mainly for PDF automation for invoicing. Specific data from the invoice needs to be gathered, entered into, and compared within the SAP application we use. We face challenges as the formats of the invoices change and can range in length from a single page to up to 100 pages. 

We've integrated a tool called ABBYY FlexiCapture and ABBYY will help format and be used as the source of input for the UiPath bot. This bot in turn will process each and every necessary customer detail to the SAP application. If everything is correct, and the data meets the parameters, an email will be sent to the customer, attaching the necessary invoice. If there's an exception, we'll be able to look at that too.

There are some other sets of use cases as well, which include SAP or Hyperautomation. However, we also do generic workflows where we have data from multiple domains and will need to build our XML output. The XML output will contain a lot of data (such as the date, time or name of the customer) which will keep changing and is not fixed. I built a bot using UiPath that I host on Orchestrator which can monitor this data.

Another use case is placing job descriptions into an analyzing tool to search for keywords. Depending on the sort of description which we have pasted in, it will throw out a certain set of outputs, such as if the word is feminine, masculine, how many details it contains, how long it's going to take to complete the description, et cetera. This part has been done using an API key, and therefore it's not a normal cut and paste job. 

How has it helped my organization?

There are a lot of processes that are, even today, done manually. I can take a simple process in, for example, ServiceNow, where issues are made into tickets and put into queues. Previously, a person would have to pick up the ticket and then assign it to a variety of people, but first, before even doing that, they would have to check in on those team members and figure out who had the most or least workload to be able to address the ticket.

This process is automated now. There's no human intervention in assigning tickets. The bot will monitor the queue and when a person raises a ticket and can monitor which person is working on which ticket number, and who should get the next ticket. The turnaround tie has been reduced by a lot and is also saving us costs when you look at it in relation to the entire project as a whole. 

What is most valuable?

The most valuable feature is the API.

It's really compatible with other solutions and it got integrated when I was working with ABBYY. There is no dependency. I just need to trigger my bot and that's it. I didn't need to go and separately trigger to work on every part of it. It is really good when we talk about the integration of UiPath with any other tools.

I am currently working through the documentation to help with understanding the solution and it is really great.

From a studio perspective, I really like the feature of debugging.

It’s making automation really feasible and ensures that it takes less time.

The ease of building automation using UiPathis great, even if a person doesn’t have a development background. Just by going to the UiPath Academy and doing the basic certification, any user can start to understand the process and begin automating.

In my first organization, there were two or three developers including me, and our challenge was that we had a lot of projects. We had certain process analysts that would run on different sets of processes. We were able to train them and make sure that they understood the processes and could start developing. We saw a lot of progress in them, and, due to the fact that the tool was really easy to use and didn’t require a lot of coding, they were able to do a lot just by drag and drop functionality.

UiPath enabled us to implement end-to-end automation, starting with process analysis, then robot building, and finally monitoring automation. It really supports the end-to-end deployment of any project or any task and makes it very easy.

The Automation Cloud has helped decrease time to value. If there was no Automation Cloud, we would need to run the bot from the studio all of the time, or we would need to create an upgraded file and trigger it via a third-party application, like VBScript or something like that. It has reduced a lot of time. It also makes deployment really easy. For example, if I am working in a development environment, I publish to the cloud, it will start reflecting in the Orchestrator and I just need to push the package. From the Orchestrator itself, I can trigger that particular package to any other machine. That makes life a lot easier - just publishing the package and testing in any other system and understanding how the UAT is going.

The deployment in production is really easy. I have tested Orchestrator and production Orchestrator and I just need to copy the package from the studio and download the package and push it back to the Studio or Orchestrator production, and the work is done. I don't need to manually copy and paste the packages again and again.

Automation Cloud, in a way, helps decrease UiPath's total cost of ownership by taking care of things such as infrastructure, maintenance, and updates. There’s no need, for example, to host on different servers or a defined cloud. It has definitely reduced a lot of costs due to the fact that, instead of going for a different set of applications for a different set of projects, now we are relying on UiPath for most of our work. Whether it’s invoicing, finance, or an HR process, we can rely on UiPath to automate a particular process instead of going back and forth across multiple tools.

Automation Cloud allows us to also effectively scale up automation. It is very easy to monitor any process which is running correctly, and, with automation, you don't need to have any separate application downloaded into your system. It is just an URL. You just need to have a URL and you just need to enter the URL and you can monitor from any system and easily understand how the process is performing.

On top of that, with Automation Cloud, suppose you have 10 licenses. You can see how many licenses have been consumed by how many processes and what the outcome of the processes was.

Moreover, you can integrate your cloud with other tools and create a dashboard. With a UiPath dashboard you can see, for example, the percentage of success rates, the failure rate, and how many processes have been successfully done or what quality. From the management side, we don't need to go to the logs and check what has run. We can directly look into a dashboard and we'll come to understand how many processes are running successfully and what are the outcomes, and how many licenses have been consumed.

It is important that we can scale automation without having to pay attention to infrastructure. I’d rate the level of importance at an 8.5 out of ten. It is helping a lot.

When we talk about automating a web application or we need to work on a different set of applications, we used to get integrations and we needed to have, for example, a PowerShell scripting application license. Now everything is being replaced by UiPath, or most of it is. It does not require you to have a license for a different set of tools all the time. If you have UiPath it is easy to integrate with any third-party tool and it is easy to automate a web application or desktop application or even code. If I know the coding, I can just do coding right in UiPath itself. Instead of going for multiple tools, for multiple projects, it's just a single tool for multiple projects.

We can use the infrastructure and we can also host it. Suppose there are two users who are accessing the same VM over a different time zone. They can rely on the same VM and they can use the same UiPath tool and do not necessarily need to have a separate licensing for it.

UiPath has helped minimize our on-premise footprint. Mostly now, everything is on the cloud instead of on-premise and it is making life easy. For example, suppose a person who is working on-premise, if he logs out, then the other person can log in and cross-verify the work he has done. With the cloud, now the transfer of files is easy. If a person falls sick or something happens that he's unable to make it then the other person who has a login or credentials with him can just directly go in and start working. If a code is being published in the cloud, we can just copy or download the code and cross-verify how it's working.

We do use attended automation. We use it relatively less compared to unattended. However, in certain cases, where the project is too critical and we do need to run all the time, it’s nice to have that option. Attended automation helps scale RPA and benefits our organization by automating specific processes that require human, robot collaboration. There are certain processes where you can't automate end-to-end. We have to rely on a human being occasionally, and it’s nice to have automation we can collaborate on. At the same time, we do largely take advantage of automatons where no human intervention is required.

We use UiPath AI functionality, although not much is being used in any of the projects which I have worked on. I’m just looking forward to it, as I am currently working on documentation understanding before diving in.

UiPath speeds up the cost of digital transformation and has also reduced costs. I started with Blue Prism and then I got my hands on UiPath. Now, I can see the transformation which is happening and I can see the comfort which we have with the tool. I can also see how it’s a lot easier to deploy the tools.

The solution has helped our company reduce human error by a significant amount. For example, when I automated the complete process and I put everything in GPL step by step and automated using UiPath, the best thing that happened is that there was one invoice that got stuck and I could see that the bot didn't process it. The bot has sworn an exception stating that there is a certain set of values that a bot should not process, if it is not matching, the quality is not matching, then the bot cannot process it. When the customer logged into the particular invoice and they saw that, okay, the value which is being mentioned in the invoice is below the threshold critical value. For the first time in over a period of 13 or 14 years, they came across a particular invoice that got stuck with this particular amount, which was below the threshold level. The bot captured something that needed to be dealt with, and the client was so happy it was caught as it saved the company a lot of money - around $1 billion. After catching that threshold, they have monitored all the invoices for the past 13 or 14 years and they came across a lot of differences. It has played a major role in saving a lot of money.

UiPath has freed up employee time. The faster you deploy, the better. We look at months instead of weeks when calculating time. If a ticket, end-to-end, takes 24 hours to resolve, for example, with automation, we’ve managed to reduce that time down to seven to ten hours. It will keep following up and sending emails until there is a resolution, and those reminders are quite helpful in moving the process forward. It’s definitely allowed employees to focus on more important tasks and there’s less time spent on follow-up.

In terms of employee satisfaction, when we are developing something and we have a proper outcome, it makes life easier.

The product has reduced the cost of our automation operations. Not for all the processes, however. If the process is really simple, just like 10 pages or 20 sequences or 10 activities, then the cost is high for a particular license, for a particular process. That said, when you talk about the complex process, where the process takes 48 hours or 90 hours to process a particular activity manually versus what the bot can do in just five to ten minutes, it impacts the cost. Now, a single bot is taking care of that and there is only one person instead of many who monitor the process. Likely, it has reduced costs a lot, roughly 50 or up to 70%. Overall UiPath has saved costs for our organization. Processes that needed five people can now run with just one or two running things with a bot.

What needs improvement?

When the Orchestrator got upgraded and UiPath didn't get upgraded, we started getting errors regarding the managed packages, the packages were not getting upgraded. There are little things like that where we’ve had trouble. We have just made sure that if the company is upgrading and they have a license to upgrade Orchestrator and the Studio, they do it simultaneously instead of waiting for a week or two weeks or one month. If they have upgraded the Orchestrator, and they have not upgraded the studio, it will impact the developers.

In terms of the upgrading of the on-premise orchestrator, there are organizations that are upgrading their developing environment but they're not upgrading the production environment. Therefore, now, when the bot or the particular package will move from a higher-end environment to lower activities, it is not working well and it needs to get downgraded.

While delivering or providing the license, we need to explain to clients that this particular product, if you are working on a development and production environment, they have to keep them on the same packages or they have to keep your production higher, so that if they move the packages, it won't impact anything.

For how long have I used the solution?

I've been using the solution for the past five years.

What do I think about the stability of the solution?

The solution is very stable. I have not faced any difficulties at all. 

What do I think about the scalability of the solution?

Until now, it hasn't scaled a lot. From 2018 to 2021, the tool, the overview, the look and feel of the tool have been scaled a lot. It has scalability, definitely. We haven't scaled it a lot. 

In our organization, we have between 100 and 150 users on the solution.

How are customer service and technical support?

The vendors are really helpful. Whenever we have a concern regarding any of the issues, including if there is an issue with upgrading, it gets resolved well. For example, when we upgraded the studio and didn't upgrade UiPath’s Orchestrator, there were some issues. The board was not connecting to Orchestrator. We had to raise a ticket to our support team and it got resolved. 

I'd rate them at an eight out of ten, as we've gotten a good response overall.

Which solution did I use previously and why did I switch?

In the last five years, I have worked in two to three organizations. All of them have started exploring automation tools. I've used Blue Prism as the very first tool, then I got the opportunity to work with UiPath and explore the different sets of opportunities with it. 

At this company, WinAutomation was previously used. That was four years ago.

How was the initial setup?

The initial setup is pretty straightforward. It's not too complex. 

We have a server we implemented the solution on. We installed the certificate to have the application installed with the Orchestrator URL.

The deployment took around two days of full-time work for us. There were multiple servers involved.

The implementation strategy was very simple. We got onto a call with the UiPath team and they had a lot of data with them, including all of the details regarding the applications. We wanted our certificates to get installed and we had our internal team involved as well. Between the two teams, it was working properly and it got installed in less than the expected amount of time. 

We have a team of 25 to 30 people that can handle deployment and maintenance. Maintenance would be, for example, if you have certain packages missing, someone would have to deal with that. Or if something wasn't working as required. Another example of maintenance might be if we are accessing multiple applications, or if we are accessing SAP, and there were tools that the bot accessed, the maintenance team would need to go and check the particular environment on which the bot is going to get deployed.

What about the implementation team?

From the very first organization, I have implemented UiPath end-to-end.

We don't use a third party for deployment now. We have our own team. There's an internal team within our current organization which deploys everything.

What's my experience with pricing, setup cost, and licensing?

I don't have any details in regards to the pricing.

Which other solutions did I evaluate?

We did POCs in the past with WinAutomation and we also looked at Automation Anywhere. At the time, we were looking to deploy more on the cloud, which is why we went with UiPath instead.

What other advice do I have?

I am just an end-user of the product.

I'm not sure if the version we are on now is the latest. It likely isn't. We are in StudioPro currently.

I'm not sure about the infrastructure side of things, in relation to the cloud, as I'm more on the side of developing and deploying the project. We have an internal team that looks into cloud deployment and other stuff. While we were working on and purchasing the license from UiPath, the very first instance, then definitely the team got integrated with the UiPath team, however, after that, the internal team is capable of handling the end-to-end part of it.

We don't use UiPath as a SaaS solution and we do not yet use UiPath apps.

In the process of UiPath, speeding up and reducing the cost of digital transformation, I have never required expensive or complex application upgrades or IT application support, however, we have a different set of teams that work on the licensing part and the management side of it. They likely worked with UiPath to get their issues resolved. I do not have much knowledge regarding this.

A person who's starting on UiPath can also up-skill himself with the tool as well as it is easy to learn. 

The best part about UiPath is that they provide a trial version. Any organization or any individual or any business looking for automation solutions can give it a try. There are a lot of things which you can explore and you have a lot of integration. If we have a module that is already running, which has been designed in almost any language, you can just integrate that in UiPath and keep that running.

It is reducing a lot of dependencies on other tools and it's making sure that our lives get easier from the deployment and monitoring perspective. From the licensing and the cost perspective, there are a lot of items that are really helpful. In terms of integration with third-party tools, they have a lot of packages which are available on the internet. You can download the packages and integrate it with any other tool. It really makes UiPath a better solution for organizations compared to any other tool.

The biggest lesson I have learned from  UiPath is that if a single step of the solution is not working, you have to keep trying. There are other ways of doing things. You have options. There are a lot of ways by which a user can understand and explore.

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

Which deployment model are you using for this solution?

Private Cloud
Disclosure: PeerSpot contacted the reviewer to collect the review and to validate authenticity. The reviewer was referred by the vendor, but the review is not subject to editing or approval by the vendor.
PeerSpot user
Buyer's Guide
UiPath
August 2024
Learn what your peers think about UiPath. Get advice and tips from experienced pros sharing their opinions. Updated: August 2024.
802,829 professionals have used our research since 2012.
RPA Engineer at a tech vendor with 201-500 employees
Real User
Great end-to-end automation that increases efficiency and reduces human error
Pros and Cons
  • "The initial setup is good. There are no problems."
  • "Between version 19 and version 20, the orchestrator tool interface has changed a lot. It totally changed. The menu changed, the place of the button changed. It took me a week to understand and to make myself used to this new interface."

What is our primary use case?

I am an API developer and I use UiPath for development. I use it to develop solutions for banking problems, like banking automation.

For example, in my previous company, I used the API for developing automated reporting solutions that take a lot of Excel files, check their data, and try to generate a web page containing many graphics based on the Excel data. It's basically translating the data on the web and it's made automatically every month. 

For my current company, it's a banking company, and I'm working on the banking solution. It's a process of verification of the user identity or the client's details. This process is based on taking the ID card of the person and digitalizing the data. It's a technology meant for reading data from documents. After reading this data, we automatically take this data and put it into the database and create accounts for the user or do a lot of automated things. 

At my current company, the use case is for the process of managing the relationship between the client account and any fees. A robot always checks if there is something to pay for the client and can take the fee automatically if that is the case. Then there is a transfer of money based on the request.

For example, when someone wants to do a transfer they add the money and sign a paper. This paper contains the information of the client's account, including details such as the client name, the account number, and the amount of the transfer. We take the data and the robot automatically takes the data and, via the web, goes to the apps of the bank in order to search for the client, search for the account, say the amount, and take the proper amount from his account, et cetera. We're able to save steps as everything is automated.

How has it helped my organization?

The actual company has three environments. There's one for development, one for pre-production, and one for production. Every element has two UiPath robots and one Studio. We have in total three studios and six robots, and each one has its own lessons. 

In the first, there was only one robot and one studio. They upgraded the solution from one studio one robot to three studios and six robots and they have found a good benefit in that. They know that it will give them more opportunities and more advantages within the banking environment. They made an investment in this technology to make their work easier so that they could be the best in the market of banking. It's helped them become more efficient.

What is most valuable?

There is an additional library that I discovered that allows me to work with the previous version of UiPath. There are some libraries that are new on the UiPath Studio, which are also helpful.

In terms of the ease of building automation using UiPath Studio, I must say that I used Automation Anywhere once as well. However, the way the UiPath connects the idea for development makes it so easy to build with the components that we can just drag and drop in. It's the easiest way to develop a solution and is an easier tool to use.

UiPath helps implement end-to-end automation starting with process analysis, then robot building, and finally monitoring of automation.

Being able to implement end-to-end automation is important for me. As much as they make me work, they make the work easier for me. For example, I use it to make the connection between ABBYY Studio, a solution for OCM, and writing scripts inside. I try to launch the script and take the output of the file and try to do a lot of things to make a connection between UiPath Studio and ABBYY Studio. UiPath Studio has given us a strong and new plugin, that we'll put some parameters around and we are done. It makes things easier like that. The features added into the latest update are helping a lot.

UiPath Studio has helped minimize our on-premise footprint in that there's less staff required. Previously, the company had three or four people doing the same thing. Now, only the robot does it. The four people are doing something else now. It's allowed them to focus on other tasks. The robot did not replace them, however. They still work in the same company, however, they are focused on doing different jobs - specifically jobs that can't be automated. They work on jobs that require a human operation, human intervention, and that's it.  The employees are happier too. The current company recently won an award based on employee happiness. In 2021, they were awarded excellence in employee condition. Automation hasn't made them bitter or changed their work ethic.

Robots started doing a lot of tasks that four people take one week to finish, except they can do it in one day. It's saved lots of time. For example, if we have 52 weeks, every week the robots can do a week's task in one day. A human may only be able to do 52 tasks in a year, whereas a robot can overperform by roughly 86% over the course of a year. 

UiPath speeds up and reduces the cost of digital transformation. The robots are extremely helpful, as they can work 24 hours a day, every day. They can do processes faster than people. It makes everything ultimately speed up.

The product has reduced human error. Even the robots make some errors, however, at least we are aware of them. The errors end up being fewer than that of a human counterpart. The issue with human errors is that we can't know if and when an error is made. At least with the robot, if it makes an error, the person is blocked somewhere and therefore we know that the robot missed something or it found a wrong account number, for example. The robot will notify us of an error whereas a human might miss it completely. 

What needs improvement?

Between version 19 and version 20, the Orchestrator tool interface has changed a lot. It totally changed. The menu changed, the place of the button changed. It took me a week to understand and to make myself used to this new interface. In the end, I found it's a good change and it's helping so much in understanding what the robots are doing in terms of checking logs, extracting some data there to make some analysis, and giving reports to the director.

The scaling could be better. There are so many parameters and options to check and so much to do before the solution is ready to use. Not everyone knows what to do at the outset and it's all a little bit complicated.

For how long have I used the solution?

I've been using UiPath for one year and a month. The company may have been using it for longer than that.

What do I think about the stability of the solution?

While the stability is fine, with a license that needs to be paid yearly, UiPath will put out a new version annually. That way, when companies go to renew, they often need to upgrade or pay for a new license. The product does this to keep earning money year after year. 

What do I think about the scalability of the solution?

For me, having the ability to scale automation without having to pay attention to infrastructure is okay, generally, however, even though I find that the company can use the tool to make the process automate well, I don't have so many people working with process automation. There are now just a few people developing in the APA and the licensing is still expensive and clients aren't excited to do anything even if it's a good solution for automating the process.

If you have a lot of money, you can put it all in UiPath and make the robot far bigger. I heard about a company located in Qatar that has 3600 robots. They buy it every year. It's a banking company and every year they pay for it. They are not using all of the robots, however, they've given their developers full reign of the environment.  

In my current company, I'm the only one using it. Many companies actually spend a few years testing it before they officially start using it. However, the company does plan to increase usage and does plan to add three or four more people to the team who would be working with me. I would manage them and provide training as we expand. 

How are customer service and technical support?

There's a third party that takes responsibility for troubleshooting. They made the environment, and they are in charge of everything. Personally, I go first to the UiPath forum if I need help. I've found a lot of answers there. If I don't find something useful or helpful, I write an email to the third-party provider so that they can take charge of the problem and solve it.

They are good. There are three people who assist me typically. One is from the Middle East, one is French and the other is from India. Their way of communication, their way of giving information, and giving support have been great.

Which solution did I use previously and why did I switch?

Both companies I have worked for that use this product have never used an automation solution before. 

How was the initial setup?

I have worked with the solution for two enterprises. One was a Canadian company. I implemented the solution for them. I met the organization's boss, and I also put the training together too. I made the environment and I developed the solution and did the full implementation. 

The second, which I am actually working for, is a combination between Europe and Africa on the main. In both companies, the solution is already implemented and I work with it. The solution was started by another department. We don't share or manage the site of escalation or choose which kind of installation. The installation in this case is on-premise. We have constructed on our IAS, local server, and that's it. It's on the server, and we're not using UiPath's cloud.

The initial setup is good. There are no problems. Setting up the robots is also good. For the Orchestrator, sometimes I face some issues surrounding not UiPath, but the OS. For example, installing the Orchestrator on Windows 10, version 19.02, it's not the same process as it would be with Windows 10, version 20.82. Sometimes the visuals of the operating system change and it affects the installation too. This is well documented in the UiPath community. You'll find that many people face problems while working with the Orchestrator.

The deployment sometimes took me two hours. Sometimes I come across an issue and it takes more time. However, often, it can be deployed in 30 to 50 minutes if all goes well.  

With the installation for a Canadian company, I have a very simple installation experience. The environment was already prepped and ready and I just needed to start the installation. 

There is an IT team that does perform the maintenance as required, for example, if there are any updates or upgrades. I don't handle that aspect. I'm only a developer.

What was our ROI?

We might study potential ROI in the summer of 2022. We're still on the development part and therefore we still can't make reports. We don't have statistics.

What's my experience with pricing, setup cost, and licensing?

There can be costs related to digital transformation. There are two ways this can happen. The first is when the robot is using an internal application, the application made by the company. There often is some modification to the interface of this app. There are some options that become available only for the robots. The second is when the robots use the websites of external companies. Internally, we made some changes to the robots to ensure they work well. In terms of the expense and how much it costs, the information is managed by another department. I don't have information about that.

I can't speak to the exact price, however, recently I heard in a meeting that one license for Studio Path costs 2,825 Euros per year. This price is approximate and may fluctuate.

The license is always per year. They don't show the pricing on the internet. You must contact the support or a seller. 

Which other solutions did I evaluate?

For the company I currently work with, I was in the meeting that chose the automation solution and they put the UiPath blueprint and Automation Anywhere on the table. The company wanted to choose between them. They found that, in terms of money, performance, and popularity, UiPath was the best. That is why they choose UiPath.

What other advice do I have?

We are not resellers. We are customers and end-users.

For now, I am fine with UiPath Studio and I will likely keep developing automation solutions on this tool.

For the attended robots, we are not using them yet. We are only using unattended robots. First, we must make the financial employees understand how robots work. They need understanding or training as a first step before we can use attended robots in development. We are going to use attended robots in the future, however, for now, we're focused on unattended robots.

We don't yet use AI functionality. We're going to start using artificial intelligence and also the machine learning solution of UiPath via AI sensors. We'll use it to measure credit and to gauge the likelihood of clients paying, however, for now, we are not yet using AI features.  

We are also not using UiPath apps.

UiPath Studio has reduced the costs of our automation operations, although I don't have an exact statistic that reflects this.

Sometimes, when you come to a company and you tell them that you will make a robot to do their job, the first thing they will start thinking is "we're going to lose our job. They're going to fire us." With that mentality, they often aren't cooperative. 

For example, in a Canadian company I worked for when I was working on the process, the parts of the activity for Excel automation, I kept notifying them that they should keep using the same name of the file so the robots can read the file. However, I would get files in different names with letters off or symbols in them as if the staff was trying to get the project canceled by trying to show the robot wouldn't work. However, over time, as they came to understand no one would lose their position, they became cooperative. They weren't happy at first, however, they came to embrace the project.

UiPath has a huge marketing strategy, and they have been the first in the world with a lot of this technology. If a company wants to integrate automation into its processes, it will likely start looking at UiPath first.

If a company is considering UiPath, they should know exactly which process should be automated. When you know what kind of processes will be automated, they will understand better if they need attended robots or unattended robots, and then can proceed with a purchase. What one recent company did is they went and bought one studio and one robot. Then, later, after understanding which process was going to be automated, they figured out that they needed three studios and six robots. It's better to know which process to develop to make it automated, then later go to buy solutions for it.

We will still always need human workers. Of course, there are some tasks that can be automated 100%. However, in the end, and specifically in the banking domain, we always need humans to understand some things that make the work easier. if we combine automation, things like robots, and human intervention, then we can get great results.

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

Which deployment model are you using for this solution?

On-premises
Disclosure: PeerSpot contacted the reviewer to collect the review and to validate authenticity. The reviewer was referred by the vendor, but the review is not subject to editing or approval by the vendor.
PeerSpot user
Application Development Senior Analyst at a tech services company with 10,001+ employees
Real User
Reasonably priced, scalable, and excellent for creating automation protocols
Pros and Cons
  • "The solution reduces human error significantly."
  • "The should be more out-of-the-box models if UiPath keeps adding on."

What is our primary use case?

In our organization, we are using UiPath as a service model. It is an on-premise model where UiPath is deployed on-premise. We are not using it on cloud services. 

We have a center of excellence that has been set up to communicate with UiPath for all the licenses, for all the tools, et cetera. Individual teams will connect and will communicate with the development team to get those licenses. For the team structure, we have a COE manager, and a COE is again communicating all the relevant information to the teams.

First of all, you would have to go and submit an idea to the COE team. The COE team will review and see this is the correct candidate for our solution and we can leverage it as automation. They provide us with the required licenses and the cycle continues.

The use-cases for the UiPath are limited. For example, if you are coming from a banking background, there would be use-cases it comes from the data solutions. If you are coming from an insurance background, would have use-cases where you would have benefits that are being reconciled. Healthcare might be dealing with patient data, et cetera.

If I talk about the support teams, in general, the use-case for the UiPath is as a ticketing system, where you have a lot of data to add to the queue to remove the need to add items manually.  

UiPath has the ability to implement with multiple systems. You can extract the data from any other application, click the data to enter the specifications, and start the automation cycle. That way, you have a technology that helps you to build a fully automated enterprise.

Our use case depends on the client and their needs. It's specific to their industry. We basically use the product to build automation for them.

How has it helped my organization?

We have seen the benefits both in terms of cost-saving, and time-saving. If you are doing automation which a human or an entire team is doing, let's say five hours a day, and there are seven to eight people doing the same amount of stuff, then you can automate that. 

When it comes to automating your process where the company is paying for software if you can use it to make robots that take energy away from repetitive tasks, you end up saving a lot of man-hours - which helps pay for the software.

Savings are measured both in terms of active saving or cost-saving. Then again it entirely depends on the kind of automation you're organizing. 

What is most valuable?

The most valuable feature of UiPath the process mining. The half capture was a tool that was provided by UiPath in the earliest reviews which simply allowed you to record the operations

It's great for automating tasks specific to business cases. It makes it very easy to do so as well.

The solution offers pretty good analysis capabilities.

The solution ensures there is proper documentation throughout the process.

The product creates a kind of skeleton for developers to help them work faster. 

UiPath is a low-cost platform.

If you are someone who is coming from a business background, and you don't have much coding experience, and you don't want to go through the coding world, UiPath, has UiPath StudioX. With the help of UiPath StudioX you can automate your items to read emails, download specific things, and do other small automation tasks that do not require advanced coding.  

If you are a developer who is more into coding and wants to do more coding, you have Studio and Studio Tool. Based on your level of expertise, UiPath has various levels of product: StudioX, Student, and Studio Pro, for example. It is always good if you have a programming background as sometimes you might need to write a small piece of code, however, it is a comparatively very easy task compared to the other traditional programming languages where you have to write a lot of code to do simple automation.

With the application of AI in recent releases, automation such as document reading can happen faster.

The UiPath app feature has increased the number of automation you can create while reducing the time it takes to create them. Recently, we had a UiPath hackathon which was contacted by UiPath for automation. We went to an NGO, and, for that NGO, we created a solution with the help of UiPath apps. For example, we used to create the invoices that would take seven to eight minutes to manually create. However, with the help of UiPath apps, we were able to do the same path in less than one minute. We have seen a drastic change.

The solution reduces human error significantly. When you are doing a process for more than five hours, you might deal with human error. However, robots don't make mistakes and can run 24/7 without issue.

What needs improvement?

You do need some coding experience.

AI is not available on older versions. I don't know if it is available in the latest versions of this review. Most enterprises, I'm working with still are at the previous version of the UiPath studio.

UiPath needs to enable more of the features which are available. For example, today, if I have to implement an automation path for the mainframe application, I cannot do the mainframe application without the client. I cannot just do a trial. If UiPath could create dummy applications for the developers who want to try new features, that would be helpful. 

The should be more out-of-the-box models if UiPath keeps adding on. Recently they have added a model in their AI section. However, it would be useful to have out-of-the-box models direct themselves towards plugins. 

You need to continually update the solution as, if you don't, after a few months you won't recognize the product due to all of the new releases. It will be like using a completely new device.

For how long have I used the solution?

I've been using the solution for five years. It has been a while.

What do I think about the stability of the solution?

Stability-wise, UiPath can handle the different varieties of stability on the applications you are automating. 

For example, if you choose to automate applications that are expected to change in the next few months, then UiPath cannot help you. That takes an entirely different form of planning. However, the more stable the process, the less likely any part of the process will change, the better UiPath can assist. 

What do I think about the scalability of the solution?

The solution is scalable. If you have to add new functionality to the robots, you will find that is definitely scalable. Let's say you have automated a process and you are getting 1000 tickets only, and then you suddenly get an influx of 10,000 tickets. You don't have to go and run and change your code or anything. Scalability-wise it is just with the click of a mouse that you can handle the change. And, just as easily, you can decrease usage if there are only a small amount of tickets. While developers and coding will be necessary to make it happen, I would say the solution scales extremely well.

How are customer service and technical support?

I have not contacted UiPath via the contact center. The firm I'm working for has a center of excellence. We do not, as individual developers, directly communicate to UiPath. There is a team that sits in the company that communicates with UiPath, as we're an enterprise. We don't have direct access to the UiPath team.

That said, I do interact with them on the community edition, which I also use, and I find that if I raise a ticket, they listen to my feedback and adjust accordingly. They're excellent.

Which solution did I use previously and why did I switch?

I have not used any other solution.

How was the initial setup?

The initial setup is straightforward. From an enterprise point of view, from the client's point of view, there are certain restrictions that the company might have in place that could affect the way it's set up. 

The company needs to have a checklist to ensure it's set up optimally.

That said, there are no drivers, no scripts, nothing. Everybody can do it. You just have to click on the approve button, select it, and the job is done, that's it.

We do our own implementation strategy, however, I am not directly involved in what exactly has to be implemented. There are separate teams for that.

What's my experience with pricing, setup cost, and licensing?

While I can't speak to how much users pay for enterprise-level editions, I can say that their community version is quite good and free to use. I've used the community license for the last five years and it's been great.

What other advice do I have?

I do mostly 90% unattended automation. I have created only one attended automation for a client and that was a specifically requested requirement. That was a bit difficult to automate. 

One piece of advice to everybody who is working in UiPath would be to practice and keep UiPath updated as the technology is growing and it is getting updated frequently. If you do not keep yourself updated for three or four months, you'll be dealing with a completely different tool. Keeping it updated allows for the gradual changes to come in in a way that a user can handle, as opposed to having to re-learn or re-discover the product if you have let updates lapse for months.

I'd rate the solution at an eight out of ten.

Disclosure: PeerSpot contacted the reviewer to collect the review and to validate authenticity. The reviewer was referred by the vendor, but the review is not subject to editing or approval by the vendor.
PeerSpot user
RPA Lead at Slalom Consulting
Real User
Human and robot interaction happen seamlessly with Attended bots
Pros and Cons
  • "They've got the bolt on the market, so even with the new launches that happen with some of the new tools that came in, I think Connect really speaks to an overall automation strategy. I think that sets it apart."
  • "I talked to the product team. They are very passionate about this. In my opinion, all the different components that they have now released should be integrated under a single umbrella, available through a single landing page. That way, everything integrates with each other and they are able to communicate data back and forth. To me, that would be the ultimate solution."

What is our primary use case?

We're a consultant, so we help customers use this solution to develop automation and help set up COE. We provide the means for an entire organization to build its use cases. That's how we use Orchestrator both attended and unattended.

How has it helped my organization?

The solution has helped eliminate human errors. The amount varies by specific use case, but it is sometimes 50% to 60%.

It has also saved organizations time. Internally, we're not at a stage where we've measured it. I would say right now it's not that great, but maybe 15 or 20 hours per person.

What is most valuable?

Orchestrator's value really comes from scheduling and jobs, where robots can trigger other robots. I can't speak to the new versions yet, but they all seem great. Attended is where the human and robot interaction can happen seamlessly. With unattended, some of the processes that were earlier so mundane are all being done without any human interaction, so that provides true end-to-end uninterrupted automation.

I would rate the ease of use for this solution as five out of five.

The UiPath Academy RPA training is awesome. It's top of the line, so I would also say that it should get a five out of five rating.

What needs improvement?

I talked to the product team. They are very passionate about this. In my opinion, all the different components that they have now released should be integrated under a single umbrella, available through a single landing page. That way, everything integrates with each other and they are able to communicate data back and forth. To me, that would be the ultimate solution.

I get it. There is a roadmap and it's a journey. Still, I would like to get to a place where everything integrates with each other. Now that we have all these different means that can help us enable a customer in their journey, making sure that they're integrated would truly add value. That removes the overhead of combining data from all these different sources.

What do I think about the stability of the solution?

I would rate its stability as five out of five. With any tool, there have been occasions when a job did not trigger or aborted, but that's been very rare in my experience.

What do I think about the scalability of the solution?

I would say we have more than 20 users. There may even be around 50 users, if not more.

How was the initial setup?

It was very easy to install this solution.

It does not take long from the time one purchases the UiPath license until they have a real bot in production. We do this mostly for our customers, but also for our own internal use case. We were able to get it done and up and running in weeks.

What was our ROI?

We have absolutely seen an ROI. The time to get an ROI varies from case to case. 

What's my experience with pricing, setup cost, and licensing?

Attended is fairly cheap. Anytime you bring in Orchestrator, that starts to become a little more expensive. I'm a little concerned about all the new SKUs that are coming in and the products associated with them. I am really interested in finding out if someone wanted a full product suite, what kind of money are they looking at annually.

What other advice do I have?

I would rate UiPath as ten out of ten. I've done implementations across tools, so I'm familiar with some of the other market leaders too. Honestly, though, UiPath is very good at keeping up with the times. It's easy to implement. Its ease of use and how quickly you can get set up and going stands out, in my view. They've got the bolt on the market, so even with the new launches that happen with some of the new tools that came in, I think Connect really speaks to an overall automation strategy. I think that sets it apart.

Which deployment model are you using for this solution?

On-premises
Disclosure: My company has a business relationship with this vendor other than being a customer: Partner.
PeerSpot user
Senior Systems Analyst at a pharma/biotech company with 10,001+ employees
Real User
Robots work on-demand to complete tasks quicker, but there is a learning curve
Pros and Cons
  • "The robots that I have developed can take a process that is normally very complicated and simplify it."
  • "The licensing process is complicated and needs to be improved."

What is our primary use case?

I primary use Studio, but I also use Orchestrator.

I develop robots for reducing tasks for our business users.

We run some of our automations in the Citrix virtual environment. We have found that the Citrix environment tends to present challenges, so it can take a little longer.

With a year and a half of experience, I am still learning with this platform. I find that the ease by which processes can be automated is not as much of an issue with the platform, but rather how it behaves with other applications that the robot controls. The learning curve is mostly how the robot behaves in maybe a Citrix environment, or in how it behaves with the applications that it's controlling. Sometimes they have their own little quirks that you have to learn.

I got started with this solution by using the Academy training. On a scale of one to five, judging how beneficial it is, I would rate the training a three. It is easier to get started because you are learning by experimenting.

From the point that we purchased our UiPath license until we had our first robot was approximately seven or eight weeks. 

How has it helped my organization?

Some of the robots handle high-volume processing, where people would take months but the robots are doing it in weeks. We have probably saved two hundred hours so far, using robots. Timing is a big issue. The tasks can be completed quicker because robots can do it on-demand, rather than having to schedule a person's time. I would say that for the tasks, they are saving forty to fifty percent of the time by using the robot.

Not all of the tasks we have automated were existing in-house processes. In some cases, after using the platform, we thought about ways to create automated tasks that were never being done before.

Human errors have been reduced, if not eliminated by using the solution. When users have to complete a task in a timely fashion they sometimes miss one of the steps, but this is solved using the robots.

What is most valuable?

The robots that I have developed can take a process that is normally very complicated and simplify it. 

What needs improvement?

The licensing process is complicated and needs to be improved.

For how long have I used the solution?

I have been using this solution for a year and a half.

What do I think about the stability of the solution?

With respect to the stability, on a scale from one to five, I would rate this solution a four. The tool itself is quite stable and I haven't had any real issues with it. The issues that I have had tend to be with Citrix or the environment that the robots are running in, and not the platform itself.

What do I think about the scalability of the solution?

In the US, we have two developers who are working with this solution.

How was the initial setup?

The installation was straightforward but activating the license was slightly complicated. I'm not sure if it was a UiPath issue or something at the company.

What was our ROI?

We are definitely seeing performance benefits for users and the turnaround time for tests that we have to do.

What other advice do I have?

I have seen a demo with Studio X and it should help with the coding so that we can go live quicker than we do.

Using RPA has given us another tool to offer with respect to business solutions. Automation is something that we're actively looking for places to make use of.

This is a good solution, but there is a learning curve. One you are familiar with it, this solution works well and it is fun to work with.

I would rate this solution a seven out of ten.

Which deployment model are you using for this solution?

On-premises
Disclosure: I am a real user, and this review is based on my own experience and opinions.
PeerSpot user
Project Delivery Manager at Deloitte
Real User
Consolidates information and eliminates redundant manual tasks
Pros and Cons
  • "I think there's some scalability to UiPath that's going to make everything pretty convenient and easy to use."
  • "I would like a new feature like some sort of generic interface or input where other UiPath users can examine our product or our situations and help us fix them."

What is our primary use case?

We are using UiPath primarily for process automation. We are trying to consolidate information, eliminate redundant manual tasks, and save some money.

What is most valuable?

I'm developing my first bot, so I can't answer that yet. I've just got my UiPath certification, been thrust into a project which I'm pretty excited about. I don't know what our client is going to ask as of yet. Obviously, those parameters are probably going to change weekly, if not daily. I think there's some scalability to UiPath that's going to make everything pretty convenient and easy to use.

The tool is very simple, even for a layman like myself without a coding background. It's a gateway to the process automation industry. I think this is really the simplest and easiest way to do it.

I used the UiPath Academy and got a certification. It was very easy to use, they are very patient, but it's not automatic. They are very diverse and applications are necessary. The steps just take you all the way through. If you reach a stopping point, you can literally just start over. Then you can try again with another series of questions, some more accessibilities, or different paths towards the same outcome. I loved it. I thought it was pretty simple and pretty easy to use. It's very non-stressful.

Regarding automation, we serve the federal government here, so I'm working for a very specific division in my company. We're serving the client, so I don't even know how new and exciting this is going to be. This is going to be huge. I think we're right on the cusp of all of it. The sky's the limit.

What needs improvement?

Due to the sensitivity of my project, I would like a new feature like some sort of generic interface or input where other UiPath users can examine our product or our situations and help us fix them. Some sort of official UiPath community within, where everyone can kind of help each other out.

What do I think about the stability of the solution?

The stability is fine. The only factor we have is a finicky customer. We need to help them with their choices, changes, reversals, augmentations, but it seems to be pretty simple and intuitive so far.

How was the initial setup?

Our initial setup was pretty straightforward. We used it on a secure client-server, so there was no change from what I'd learned on my own and what I had to use in the work environment. It was pretty simple.

What was our ROI?

In as far as learning the product, it is almost free in its efficiency in teaching people like myself how to use it. With regards to the client, it's a little early yet, but they project incredible savings. One thing I should say about UiPath and process automation is that it's not an attempt to eliminate jobs. This is a huge misconception and stigma. It's an attempt to make working more efficient. In that respect, I think it'll save everyone a lot of money if they're willing to try it and implement it.

Which other solutions did I evaluate?

I've heard about some alternatives, but I haven't used them yet. UiPath is my first entrance into this. I really don't see the need to use anything else. The client likes it as well, so if they're happy with it, I have absolutely no desire to investigate anything else.

What other advice do I have?

I would rate this solution as a solid nine out of ten, just because I haven't used it very long. I'm probably going to give it a ten. I don't know what else UiPath can do for me, and I'm sure there's more.

Disclosure: I am a real user, and this review is based on my own experience and opinions.
PeerSpot user
Automation Engineer at a consultancy with 1,001-5,000 employees
Real User
Allows me to drag and drop pre-built functions to speed up bot creation
Pros and Cons
  • "The number-one valuable feature is the ease of use. I come from a development background where I wrote a lot of code. The fact that you have these activities with pre-built functionality is great. You can drag them in and use them as shortcuts to get to an end result faster than if you had to do it in a programming language."
  • "There is some room for improvement in the area of error handling. I had to create a custom approach to error handling. If there were some sort of activity or workflow that could be easily dropped in to help support that, it would be good. Error handling and logging, as well as process logging would be a big help."

What is our primary use case?

In general, we use it for automating monotonous, manual processes which a lot of our clients have. We also use it for internal employees in our company.

How has it helped my organization?

We had a use case where there were a lot of documents that had to processed to give access to certain systems. With UiPath, we were able to really streamline that. Instead of having an end-user go through these documents manually, do reconciliation, and send emails back and forth, we were able to automate that solution from beginning to end, with very little human interaction. In the end, over the entire process, it saved hours out of their day, when you compound how many times they run this. It has really freed them up to do other more important tasks. That was my first foray into the client side, and seeing how happy they were to have this bot was great. At first, they were skeptical, but once they saw what it allowed them to do and what it's capable of, they were really happy with the software and what we were able to develop for them.

In this use case, UiPath reduced human error by 100 percent because we completely removed the human element from the data reconciliation for those documents. Through automation, along with some fine-tuning, we were able to get the data reconciled between the two files with 100 percent accuracy, and inputted into the system. Not every use case is going to be that straightforward, but in this use case we were able to get that result, which was wonderful.

What is most valuable?

The number-one valuable feature is the ease of use. I come from a development background where I wrote a lot of code. The fact that you have these activities with pre-built functionality is great. You can drag them in and use them as shortcuts to get to an end result faster than if you had to do it in a programming language. UiPath exceeded my expectations in this area.

Also, the training that's available through the UiPath RPA Academy, as well as the community - the forums, where you can ask questions - both are helpful. The community is a good way to see what others are doing and learn tips and tricks for the platform. That's very useful in comparison to other companies that do RPA but don't have robust training.

What needs improvement?

A lot of the features that I had been asking for have actually been released. We were using an older version of UiPath and we were having issues with Computer Vision and the OCR engine with UiPath. But now that we see that there's a whole Computer Vision activity suite available, I'm excited to use that. I haven't gotten to get my hands on it yet.

But in terms of additional features, I can't think of anything that I would request. I see that they have the AI functionality, as well as the Computer Vision. They have a lot available that I haven't even been able to get my hands on yet. I think once I get some more time to explore the tool and exhaust its capabilities I can look for additions from there.

There is some room for improvement in the area of error handling. I had to create a custom approach to error handling. If there were some sort of activity or workflow that could be easily dropped in to help support that, it would be good. Error handling and logging, as well as process logging, would be a big help.

What do I think about the scalability of the solution?

I can't speak about its scalability too much because we haven't gotten there, even as far as using Orchestrator. Most of the automations that we have done have been one-offs which are done locally on someone's laptop.

But from what I've read in the training and what I've seen in the demos, it seems like a very robust platform that can definitely scale, when designed properly. I'm looking forward to the next phase of the development journeys that we have, where we are actually doing things to scale and thinking long-term about how we can share bots across an entire enterprise. It does appear that they have a pretty robust toolset.

How are customer service and technical support?

I have had to reach out a few times to support, especially when I started and was trying to find my way around the tools and some issues that I was having. The response was great. I was able to get on a video call and actually show my use case and show the kinds of issues I was having and they were able to walk me through the process and suggest ideas about how I could approach them. My overall experience with technical support has been very good.

Which solution did I use previously and why did I switch?

Our company is always looking at the latest digital trends and what we can do to offer our clients new solutions which keep them at the forefront of IT. We were aware of RPA and it was just a case of narrowing down which solution was the best to deliver to the clients.

How was the initial setup?

The initial setup is straightforward. I've used other tools where there are components that you have to install prior to installing the software. You have to create a database and things like that. Whereas, with UiPath, it was a very light install. You just have an executable. It is able to install the components that it needs on its own. There was no other configuration that I had to do on top of that to get rolling. That's a major plus to me and, especially, to our clients. If we don't have to spend as much time getting them configured and set up, it's better for them.

What about the implementation team?

We did the installs ourselves. We have a test lab that we built. We set up an Orchestrator lab so we can get more familiar with the tool. That was all done in-house as part of our training to get familiar with the tools. Essentially, if we want to sell this capability to clients, we want to at least have some knowledge of how to do it ourselves and not have to rely on a third-party.

What was our ROI?

Unfortunately, a lot of what we've been delivering right now are pilots. A lot of our clients are still in the "show me" phase of what RPA can do. We don't really have any data to say what the return on investment is. But they do see the potential. I definitely see the potential. Once we get past that pilot phase and into something that we can actually deploy in a production environment, we'll have a better sense of the ROI.

Which other solutions did I evaluate?

I did work with Blue Prism initially. I found it hard to get support and training on their platform. Whereas, when I transitioned over to UiPath it was much easier. I knew where to go to get assistance. Also, the "Welcome" documentation really helped me in developing and creating solutions for clients.

We also worked with Automation Anywhere.

The decision to go with UiPath was due to the ease of use and the training. Having that available, that we could train our employees internally and our clients as well, is invaluable. That allowed us to really get through the initial phase of familiarity and get right into development. Those other tools required a lot of learning on the job and on the project, which is not always available, especially when there are tight budgets.

What other advice do I have?

Start small. Don't try to automate the most complex use case you can find. And definitely go through the training. There's a wealth of information on the Academy site as well as in the forums to get you that foundational knowledge, to really be able to do some cool stuff with UiPath. I know a lot of people don't read the manual, they like to jump right into things, but there is a benefit to going through some of the training courses to get yourself familiarized before you dive in.

I've been working in automation for a couple of years and have used quite a few tools. I do find that the overall approach that UiPath takes toward RPA is really good for getting people in and developing and delivering in a much more efficient manner than with some of the other tools I've used.

Automation technology is something that's needed, although I don't think it is known enough yet. People know that it's out there but they don't know in what capacity it can be used and how it can help them. It's definitely something that needs to be pushed and communicated. But I see it as a technology that can assist in all facets of an organization. It's something that all people within a company can benefit from, whether internally in our company or externally for our clients.

I would give UiPath a nine out of ten. There are always things that can be improved.

Disclosure: My company has a business relationship with this vendor other than being a customer: Partner.
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Buyer's Guide
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Updated: August 2024
Buyer's Guide
Download our free UiPath Report and get advice and tips from experienced pros sharing their opinions.