UiPath Reviews

Our primary use case is creating automation for day-to-day activities for our internal use, especially for performance management and reporting. Apart from that, we create some automation applications for our clients as they're using UiPath. That's another use case.

We prepare database reports where a lot of product data is consumed. Creating reports or reporting used to take a lot of time and effort for us. UiPath has been very helpful for us in quickening this process and making it efficient.

It enables us to implement end-to-end automation. With our data and reporting tasks, there were a lot of repetitive tasks that needed to be done, which sometimes can be irritating. UiPath has completely taken over this process. So, right from the input of data to the extraction of reports, the complete end-to-end process is covered by UiPath. I don't have any complaints.

With UiPath, our automations are getting better and better. UiPath is driving performance, innovation, and growth across our entire organization. With report automation being our main use case, we saved a lot of hours, and we have also reduced a lot of overhead costs with UiPath. With automated data processing, errors are minimal. The error rate is almost zero, and the time taken is pretty quick. Our efficiency has improved, and that has been a major benefit for us.

We have been using the cloud version of UiPath. So, our on-premises footprint has definitely been reduced.

It has helped us move a lot closer to 100% digital transformation. Our reporting is automated, and we are almost 100% digital now. There is also an overall reduction in the cost and employee time.

It has reduced human error. The error rate is minimal or nearly zero. It's 100% smooth for us. In the past, we would have overlooked or missed certain data points, and during our final report collaboration, a mismatch would happen, but that is completely reduced with UiPath. 

It has freed up a lot of employee time. It has also made our work much more efficient. Earlier, if seven employees were doing a particular task, only three employees are required now to do that task. So, other employees can focus on something else now. 

It has saved about two working days or 16 hours a week. With the amount of data that we work with for reporting, it was a very hectic task for us. We had a lot of data sheets, Excel files, etc. UiPath has saved us two days of manual work per week.

It has saved costs. We were a team of seven who were handling reporting. We were taking reports and consolidating everything, whereas now, only three of us are required to do that. The remaining four can focus on something else. That much time and cost have been saved. This has resulted in us focusing on some other aspects of our business and bringing in more revenue for us. These are some of the overheads that have been completely saved by UiPath.

One feature that is particularly very likable is the My Workspace option under the Orchestrator menu. We can easily arrange and/or segregate all the folders there. The My Workspace option has been a very big positive for me. I've been able to streamline my work and do structured work with this My Workspace option. It's one of my favorite features. Apart from that, I like the integration services offered by UiPath. There is also the Studio option with good features, but I have used Studio very less. It's basically used to design specific automations and applications.

UiPath is very straightforward for creating automation. Especially in the UiPath Orchestrator and UiPath Studio, you can just drag and drop items to create an automation flow. It's that easy. For example, for the reporting automation, I designed the automation flow by using the in-built features. I did not type any command or code. I just picked a feature and dragged and dropped it to create and implement the flow. It was that easy for me.

The UiPath community is very vast, which is a very major plus for us. Whatever doubts we have and whatever knowledge transfer needs to happen can happen pretty quickly with the UiPath community. I find it very useful. Apart from the UiPath community, there is an Academy option where we can take up some courses, and we can do some certifications. That is also very good. I have personally not taken any courses, but I'm aware there are courses because my teammates did the certification courses. So, in terms of value, UiPath is an all-rounder for us because apart from doing automation, we get a whole lot of other things. It's very good.

They can improve the in-app guides and in-app tutorials. One instance where I faced a challenge with UiPath was during the initial week of using UiPath. It can be a little complex to understand at first. The in-app guides or the in-app tutorials could be much more elaborate and detailed. That would have made my entire journey smooth, but that did not happen.

The AI functionality could be improved. We used its AI functionality as a base for our reporting automation. It's not 100% perfect. It's still evolving. We used AI to predict the data modeling and report structure, but it wasn't accurate all the time. It's an evolving functionality, and I hope that it gets corrected over the course of time. The basic functionality is on par with any other software in the market, but it's not helpful for simplifying complex workflows and modules. The AI functionality has also not been helpful in increasing the number of automation, but UiPath, in general, has been very easy to use and helpful for doing more automation.

I have been using UiPath for about eight or nine months.

I haven't faced any issues so far. It has been smooth. I would rate it a 10 out of 10 in terms of stability.

I believe that any automation software, including UiPath, is scalable. It's a cloud-based solution, so it's definitely scalable for us. With UiPath, we have been able to do more automation and reduce our overall manual work. Our manual work now is very limited. It has definitely helped us scale up in terms of revenue, efficiency, and performance.

They're definitely very knowledgeable. Until now, I haven't had any complaints about them. Whenever we have any doubts, we just email them our queries with certain documentation, if needed. They get back to us immediately. They are also patient. It's not like they're in a hurry. They're very patient. They make sure that our query is completely resolved before moving on. I would rate them a 9 out of 10.

Positive

In my previous organization, they used a software called Freshworks. It was for automating our reports and sales processes, but I personally did not like that software because it was a little bit complex for me, and it was also costly. There were very few integrations that were offered in that particular software. We were not able to get the results that we needed. So, we looked into different solutions, and that's when I recommended UiPath to my team.

In terms of performance, UiPath has been very reliable. It's a complete cloud solution. The Freshworks software was not a cloud solution. We used it on-premises, but UiPath is a complete cloud solution for us. It's a very reliable and stable solution. We hardly face any downtime, server errors, or something like that with UiPath. That has been a very noticeable difference for me. Apart from that, in terms of complexity, UiPath is not at all complex. It's a structured solution. You choose A, and you can come to B, and you can come to C. It's very structured, which is something that was lacking in Freshworks.

I was involved in its implementation. It was not a complex process. It just required me to sit with the UiPath team and get it implemented. We did not need an elaborate team or effort. Within 15 to 20 days approximately, we were able to set up everything and get it running completely. The implementation process was very smooth.

Its maintenance is also very easy because it's a cloud-based solution. We just need to keep it updated all the time. That's the only thing. We have employed just one person to take care of the maintenance.

It was a combination of the in-house team and UiPath specialists. Their initial training team was very knowledgeable, and they were very pleasant in addressing all our queries with respect to how to design applications, how to create automation, and things like that.

We have definitely seen an ROI. Four employees are now not needed to do reporting. We have been able to transfer them to other projects. It has given some returns within four to five months. We have reduced our overall work time by around 30%. We have been able to use that saved time for other things helpful to bring in more sales, automation, etc.

Our inbound revenue is going up. We have seen a 20% increase in our overall revenue after the introduction of UiPath, but I cannot directly pinpoint that to UiPath because there are other factors as well.

I was not involved in the pricing negotiations, but as far as I understand, my team was happy with the pricing. So, I assume that its price is moderate and competitive. It isn't highly-priced.

To anyone looking into getting this solution, I would advise getting UiPath instantly and integrating it with your business to proceed further. If not UiPath, I would definitely recommend trying any other automation solution because that is the need of the hour. We are humans after all. Manual work is prone to error and less efficient. An automation solution can definitely help you scale your business quickly. UiPath is one of the top ones when it comes to automation. It's a tried, tested, and trusted solution. So, I would suggest going with UiPath, but if you have any concerns about it, you can definitely try other solutions.

Considering the UiPath community, UiPath Academy, and UiPath's all-around capabilities, I would rate it a 9 out of 10.

My main use case for this product is process automation. For example, we use UiPath to make quick and easy applications for our internal office use.

It has reduced repetitive tasks. We now have more efficient processes. Manual testing was one of the time-consuming tasks that we used to do. Our testing team used to spend days and nights testing. UiPath has completely boosted the process. For example, previously, if we needed three employees to do a particular manual test, now, because of the automation that is available, we require just one employee. It has saved a lot of time, and it has also enabled us to deliver better-quality products. With automation, less manual work is involved, and the quality of the product that we deliver is very good. We have also been able to automate a lot of tasks, such as compliance tracking.

It's very easy to build automations using UiPath. Most of the things are just drag-and-drop. People with zero to minimal coding knowledge can build applications using UiPath. It's straightforward. One thing that facilitates this is that a lot of in-app guides or inbuilt tutorials are available, which makes UiPath very easy for a beginner who is starting out with UiPath. With such a good knowledge base, it becomes very easy for them to get a grasp of everything and start building applications.

It enables us to implement end-to-end automation. It also improves the employee experience. In software development, especially in the field of testing, there are many repetitive tasks, and they are prone to many manual errors as well. Automation through UiPath boosted employee morale, and it also improved the customer experience. We have been able to deliver better products on time to customers with UiPath.

It's a cloud-based solution, and it has helped to minimize our on-premises footprint.

With the AI functionality, we have been able to identify areas where automation can be implemented. We are trying to identify where process automation can be brought in and efficiency can be improved. The AI functionality is good, but there's a lot of initial work that needs to be done for this. It has enabled us to automate more processes. Within a month, we have been able to automate around 40 to 45 processes that were pending for a long time. It has definitely speeded up the entire process.

It speeds up digital transformation and also reduces the cost of digital transformation. Less manual intervention is needed, and less manpower is needed. It definitely reduces the overall cost for the company. Also, when something is automated, it's very quick. Redundant or repetitive tasks are completely reduced, and a lot of time is saved. So, it definitely saves time and cost.

This digital transformation didn't require expensive or complex application upgrades, or IT application support. Everything was inside UiPath. We just took some additional training from UiPath to get it implemented. Other than that, we did not use anything.

It has reduced a lot of human error. With manual testing, there were a lot of errors. With automation, that has been completely eradicated, and a lot of time and effort has been saved. It has reduced human errors by 100%.

It has improved our customer experience as well. We provide services to our clients or customers. Any human error leads to a delay in delivering the application. With automation, we have completely removed human errors, and we are able to satisfy our customers. It has impacted the retention of our customers.

It has freed up employees' time as well. A task that previously required three or four employees just requires one employee now. We do not spend all our time on a process. Once we implement and start an automation process, everything happens automatically. We can concentrate on other aspects of software development. It has saved 20 hours per week or 4 hours per day. 

It has saved a lot of costs for us in terms of employee reduction. We now need just one employee for a task rather than four employees. So, there are savings in terms of employee salary. We are also able to retain customers better, which has improved our revenue. Overall, about 25% of our cost has been saved. We were losing revenue and customers because they were not satisfied. With UiPath, our efficiency has improved, and the time to market has reduced. 

There are two features that I like a lot in UiPath: one is the Orchestrator option, and the other one is the Studio option. I especially like Orchestrator because it's very insightful for us. It's like a centralized hub to manage and maintain all of our process automation and task-mining. It systematically organizes each and every folder so that it's easy for us whenever we need to know, set, or take something. Studio is where we primarily do most of our designing. It's a very good tool. Most of it is drag-and-drop. These are the two main useful features for us.

The dashboard view could be more visually appealing. Dashboards in any software should stand out with colors, numbers, and other things, but in UiPath, the dashboard is not that visually appealing. The UiPath team could make it more visually appealing for us to get more insights.

Another improvement area is related to product updates. Earlier, we used to get monthly updates about the product, but that has stopped now. If they could bring that back, it'll be very good.

We have recently tried the AI functionality. There is a lot of learning that we need to do with regard to AI. It's good, but it's not as smooth as Orchestrator or Studio. The AI aspect of the product could be better. We're currently working on allowing the AI to automatically detect areas where automation can be brought in and efficiency can be improved. That needs some more refinement. It's currently not straightforward. Sometimes, it just repeats whatever it said previously, so nothing new comes out of it. The AI aspect of the product can be much more refined. Apart from that, I don't have anything else. It's a well-thought-out and complete product. It's very easy to use and easy to understand.

I've been using UiPath for around a year.

It's a cloud-based solution. It's very stable, and we just need to make sure that it's up to date. Personally, I have not seen any bugs, errors, or performance issues with this. We are not using an on-premise model. It's cloud-based. So, the service is always available, and it's always quick. It's very stable, and I have no complaints.

The applications that we develop with UiPath are also very reliable. They don't crash or have any performance issues. They are very stable and reliable.

When we started with UiPath, our main use case was to be able to quickly and easily make applications for internal purposes, but now, we are doing a lot more with UiPath. We are doing compliance, and we are doing AI-related process automation. It's definitely a scalable solution.

It's deployed across multiple departments. Each department has its own RPA functionality and RPA usage. In my department, 20 of us use UiPath, but I'm not sure about its users in other departments. 

Their support team is very knowledgeable. Whatever issues we have, they try to explain them to us in a better way. The SLA or response time is pretty quick. It's 24 hours for us. I have no complaints. I would rate them a nine out of ten.

In addition to the support team that UiPath has, I depend on the user community for all my queries. I see the UiPath Community as the main support tool. It's my go-to space for anything related to UiPath, and I am very satisfied with the quality of the community.

Positive

I am not aware of any other solution that we used to use.

It didn't take a lot of time to implement, which is a very good thing about UiPath. In about two to three weeks, we got the entire setup done. That was very quick.

It's a cloud solution. We have deployed it on AWS. Being a cloud solution, it requires very less maintenance from our side. That's one of the very good things about UiPath. We just need to make sure it's up to date.

We have definitely seen an ROI. Customer satisfaction has improved a lot. We have been able to retain customers better, and we have been able to reduce manual errors by 100%. 

Its pricing is straightforward. There are two editions: one is the community edition and one is the enterprise edition, which is a paid one. The paid edition is priced reasonably.

They charge extra for additional training and implementation, but that should be bundled up with the enterprise edition itself. All in all, it's reasonably priced.

To anyone considering UiPath, I would advise checking out the trial version of UiPath before going on to the actual version. Before you start using UiPath, there are a lot of things you need to get your head around. People who generally use UiPath have zero or minimal coding skills. This is something that you definitely need to know.

You can try out the UiPath Academy as well. They provide certification courses. I have not used UiPath Academy, but I have seen my team using it for the certification program they offer. I have heard that it's very good.

I would rate it a nine out of ten because I have not faced any issues with the product. Whatever we wanted to achieve with this product, we have been able to achieve.

We use it mostly for reconciliation, automatic emails, and monthly, quarterly, and yearly reports and extractions. Document Understanding is another big use case for us.

The AI functionality cuts down development time. The out-of-the-box models are pretty good at extracting and do account for variations. We don't have to do it template by template, at least for invoices and purchase orders. Thus, it's a huge time saver.

We have more than a hundred unattended automated processes and hope to scale as well. We have a healthy pipeline, and our COE just prioritizes them and chooses the ones with the most impact.

The core RPA is the best feature because of how easily we can get started. The other most valuable feature is DU or Document Understanding. It doesn't require huge setup and implementation times. When you look at a pure machine learning model, it requires a lot of expertise. Though UiPath is not purely plug-and-play, it's almost like plug-and-play because it can be up and running very quickly.

UiPath has definitely helped us with productivity. It has helped us to grow because as we bring in more companies, we don't have to add more people or train new people. The existing staff can handle the growth. Also, the team no longer has to do some of the manual, repetitive activities and can focus on more value-added work. We're looking at how to move analytics and data into the department and use the time saved to upskill the employees.

I connect with local customers and find it very beneficial to share best practices. My team tells me that the UiPath user community forums are pretty active and that if they're stuck and post a question they get a response pretty quickly. I only hear good things about the forums.

I took the UiPath Academy basic certification training before I rolled it out to the others. It's pretty good, but you still need to be technical. You cannot pick an analyst and then put them through the full certification. However, the training is self-explanatory. The Automation Academy is good as well. The biggest value I've gained from UiPath Academy is the self-learning methodology. Having free self-learning material makes sense when you don't know whether you are committing to the solution.

I would like to know more about the product features and real use cases. Sometimes, all I hear is how quickly the solution can be up and running, and I don't hear about all the work that goes into it. Because everybody has a choice with bots and process improvements, unlike that with ERP systems, I would like to have more information on how to constantly evangelize.

In the UiPath Academy, there's not much documentation for Document Understanding and Process Mining. Documentation for some of the newer tools needs to be added to the UiPath Academy.

I've been using UiPath for three years.

I haven't seen any degradation in terms of performance.

It scales well.

UiPath's technical support is pretty good. If their level one support is unable to take care of an issue, they will then escalate it to product managers. I would give technical support a rating of eight on a scale from one to ten because they are not as good at supporting some of the newer technologies.

Positive

The initial deployment is straightforward. It took a few months to set up everything, and we scaled slowly. It's easier now that we've moved to the cloud.

We did it all ourselves. We tested everything in UiPath Academy first to see if it would work for us.

UiPath has reduced the number of hours spent on manual work, and that is our ROI.

The cost could be lower. The pricing is not transparent, so we don't always know if we really are getting a good price.

We evaluated Automation Anywhere and Blue Prism. When we looked at the total cost of ownership, UiPath felt better for our situation.

Compared to other solutions, UiPath offers a lot of products in its portfolio. The customer success manager attends to our needs, gives access, answers our queries, and takes care of us. Also, UiPath has a robust community, so it pays to be with the leader to get all of these benefits. Thus, I rate UiPath at nine on a scale from one to ten.

We started using it to automate manual processes from other departments. We service other departments, to begin with, including the media between the business and the IT departments. 

We started automating very repetitive manual tasks that the business side typically had. For example, if they had to open an application early in the morning to try to process transactions. Then, late in the afternoon, they would have to do the same thing as well. Now we have a robot that does that in the morning and the afternoon, which saves a lot of overtime since it has to be done at six or seven at night, and previously sometimes people would be forced to stay. Therefore, this way, we save that time and overtime. 

Another example would be we use it to download ATM transactions from a webpage. The robot downloads those transactions and then uploads them into our data warehouse, which reports for them. Normally, we don't have that information there.

Another use case would be in a department that would print a bunch of wires late in the afternoon. The department would print them out physically and store them somewhere where they review everything later. Now, with UiPath, we scan the transactions from the Fed, and we just print in PDF and send it to them via email, and it saves a lot of time.

The solution has saved us not just in automating but also in updates. For example, all these service charge codes for these particular lists of credit card accounts. We let the bot run. It ran for a really long time. I can only imagine how much longer it would've taken with humans.

I'm not sure of the exact cost savings. We just started asking about time savers. Some customers have told us it saves about 45 minutes a day. There's another process that only runs once a month. To put it in general terms, it reviews all of our credit card accounts and itemizes them, and makes them into a lot of reports. That saves about eight hours a month. Also, when it comes to helping us avoid overtime, there are 15 minutes of actions to be done, yet we are saving an hour or two of pay every time. 

The ease of automation is great.

The unintended robots are very useful. Just letting it run and having visibility, and controlling how everything works is definitely helpful. Sometimes they want it to run a certain way. Sometimes they'll tell us, "Oh can we tweak it a certain way?" And they do that more often than would I thought they would. It's simple to handle.

I really like the user community. When I go online to search for help or anything else, it's very valuable. Everyone's so helpful online. Whenever I'm stuck, and I'm basically self-taught when it comes to UiPath, I turn to the community. I've learned everything through the community. It is easy to learn.

While we haven't really taken any UiPath Academy classes, we were basically given the platform and just told to learn it ourselves. I did start doing the academy courses however, right off the bat, we had to develop already. I kind of had to do both at the same time, and that's where the online community comes in handy. The courses definitely taught me the basics, at least. And they helped me expand on that.

While UiPath works super well with other applications and browsers and app pages that we use in the RedLINK wires, when it comes to experience, sometimes it doesn't detect what it's supposed to be doing as easily. I have to do a workaround and so sometimes it can be tedious.

We've been using it for about two years.

We've never had an issue with performance stability.

We currently have 20 to 30 processes, and less than ten are via developers. We initially hired developers to help, and then they left, and now we are working on it ourselves. 

I see the potential of its scalability. We're still at a very small scale with it. 

I've used technical support once. They helped me. When the developers set up UiPath for us, it ended up being kind of faulty. What we really needed was the enterprise edition, and some other settings weren't configured for our purposes. I contacted them for help, and we had a Zoom call. They were very friendly. They helped me set it up correctly in the way we needed it. While there were some communication issues, they helped us in the end. 

Positive

We did not previously use a different solution.

I was not directly involved in the initial setup. However, the setup was not exactly right, and I contacted support for help. It seemed pretty straightforward in the end.

We had third-party developers from Peru that helped us to install it and then they just left. We were just given the platform, and we had to teach ourselves how to use it.

We have witnessed an ROI. The company has mentioned the hours saved, and I'm not sure about the money saved.

We did not evaluate other options. 

While we could use UiPath for good causes, like sustainability or the environment, we do not use it in that capacity yet.

We do not use the AI functionality just yet.

I'd advise other potential users to get a partner. We didn't have one. That's what we're doing right now. We're shopping for a partner so we can learn as we develop. Again, we were self-taught and it would've been much easier to dive in with a partner.

I would rate it ten out of ten as it does have massive potential. 

We work as a center of excellence and we develop automations centrally for other departments. All our deployments are unattended bots that are deployed and managed by us, centrally. They are all running on a virtual machine. Nothing is running on client computers or laptops. We do not have any attended use cases. The process owners are interacting with the bots.

We use the bots for a lot of reporting, including monthly and weekly reports. We are a construction company and we have a lot of reports for all kinds of things, such as construction projects, different construction sites, and various subsidiaries for regional departments. A region like Bavaria, for example, needs its reports. And there are plenty of controlling departments in all of the subsidiaries.

We also have some ticketing use cases. One of them is for IT services, meaning internal ticketing. That bot regularly checks our ticket software and automatically processes some of the tickets. For example, when an employee needs rights to a specific system, the bot checks whether they fulfill the requirements and approves or declines the ticket.

Another type of ticketing use case is more about processing customer tickets. As a construction company, we also do facility management, and that means there are a lot of external customers with their own systems in which they record tickets. The tickets are not visible in our local systems so someone has to go to the external systems, export the tickets, filter them, and then tell everyone what they're supposed to do to their buildings as a result. The tickets might be about small repair jobs, for example. We run this daily and, in the morning, everyone receives an email with all the tickets that have to be done within one day, three days, one week, et cetera.

Both of the ticketing use cases are connected with SLAs. If you miss a certain time frame before processing a ticket for external customers, you have to pay a penalty fee. For the internal tickets there are SLAs for internal tracking purposes. Because those tickets have to be processed within two hours, that bot runs every two hours and checks for new tickets.

Another IT services use case is for getting access rights to local drives.

We also have many recurring processes. For example, in HR they have to go to the system and confirm a process. It’s a necessary evil which is probably due to the legacy systems we have. Someone defined this process a long time ago and it still has to be done.

We also have use cases in finance and treasury. They are not tickets, but they process requests from employees. For example, they can request cash on a specific card and the bot will check the emails and then basically transfer data from an email, or from a PDF form attached to an email, and enter it into the finance system.

One last type of use case is where the bot works as an interface between systems. Data has to be exported from one system and imported to another system and there is no existing API. The bot exports and imports the data. We have one bot that exports PDF documents and sends them to an email interface. It defines a specific subject and then attaches the file. That file will automatically be uploaded to another system. Or the bot may log in to a system and upload the document. These use cases are due to the fact that there is no interface between two systems and they're either not big enough to develop an API or they may involve an external customer system and the customer has no interest in providing an API.

UiPath has freed up our employees' time and that's its main purpose. We don't have huge use cases, but for our bigger use cases it could be saving us 35 to 40 hours per month. With the smaller processes, people save about two hours a month. We have 23 use cases that are live at the moment and the total time saved by them is about seven or eight person-days a week. The big processes account for 50 to 60 percent of all the savings.

Employees have more time for more important things, but there are no direct cost savings from our automations. What we do have are a lot of efficiency gains and some time savings. Any cost savings are on the lower end of the scale.

The solution also definitely reduces human error. We have some processes that involve penalty fees if there is human error, so the reduction in errors has probably affected the business on a very small scale.

In terms of the cost of automations, before UiPath the whole automation process was much more complex. There might have been software providers involved in that process, charging us and providing APIs. And the whole process took way longer. Now that we have a UiPath license, the cost of implementing any automation is zero, other than our salaries, which would be paid anyway. The automation creation process is definitely a lot faster. It's also cheaper because there is no involvement of an external software developer, which is probably the most expensive part.

I like the REFramework. It's one of the unique selling points of UiPath because it gives you a framework within the software to structure your processes. It's perfect in terms of error handling and it provides a lot of functionalities for processing multiple transactions. It makes the whole solution more robust.

I tested the Process Mining at my previous company and I don't think it's suitable for RPA processes. It operates at a way higher level and, using it, you may find an area in which you can optimize a process, but it doesn't just give you a defined process for automation. It doesn't necessarily help you to identify the processes.

The Task Capture component offers the ability to record a process and it will give you process documentation. It tells you how many clicks are being made, and it will create screenshots. It tells you the basic activities that are being done in the process. When we tested it, the quality of these documents was very low. It took more time to take the output and make it useful than it would have taken to analyze and document the process ourselves. 

We are not using any of that. Together with the customer, we are manually defining and documenting processes. We are doing the actual automation, of course, with UiPath. In terms of monitoring it afterward, it's 50/50. Standard Orchestrator definitely offers you some ways to monitor your processes. It tells you how many processes failed and why they failed. You could also define a process that sends you an email when it fails.

UiPath also offers some BI components, but that requires a separate license and costs. We are not using them. The whole BI reporting functionality of standard UiPath is not that great. We use external dashboards in Power BI.

We also have a calendar application because, with standard Orchestrator, there's no overview about when you have bots running and when you have free slots. So it's also not great for planning license usage. The whole visualization piece, out-of-the-box, is not so nice. UiPath is mainly the automation tool for us, and it's definitely great for that. But in terms of analysis and monitoring, there's definitely still potential for the software.

I have been using UiPath for two and a half to three years.

Their tech support replies quite quickly. But when we had technical problems, most of the time, we had to have multiple calls. It's not that great. They definitely provided us with all the experts, but they just didn't immediately find solutions, most of the time.

It often took two to three days to fix our issues. We would have to explain the issue one or two times and then they say, "Okay, we need to do a call." After the call we would try out the solution but it wouldn't work and there would be another call. Support is another potential area for improvement.

Also, we bought our licenses from a UiPath partner. We are actually supposed to talk to them for support, but they charge for their consulting services. They are the reason we didn't have constant communication with UiPath. From my experience at my previous job, where we worked with UiPath, we were in close communication with the UiPath success manager. There was way better communication and support because we always had a channel that we could talk to regularly. And they already knew what our issues had been. If you are working directly with UiPath, the tech support is good, although not great.

Neutral

We did not have a previous solution.

I started in RPA with my previous company. My boss just told me to get into this topic. I started with the UiPath Academy before we were even using the software, but I could follow all the courses. It's all video training, so it's easy to follow. The Microsoft training often consists of long sets of text and it says "expected reading time is 23 minutes," but it's 23 minutes just to read the text. Now, UiPath even offers training exercises. 

And because they offer the Community version, you can download the full-featured software without actually having a license, for personal use and for training purposes. That way you can try out whatever you learn. That makes the learning very practical. And the Community version is not limited to 30 days like test versions of some other solutions. It's a version that you can use for testing forever and you can use all the functionalities. That definitely helped me when I did the training. That's how I got from knowing nothing about RPA to knowing a lot about RPA, before working with it.

If you have a basic understanding of the software, the most important thing is to develop with it, because that gives you practical experience.

They also have very specific, deep-dive courses, for working with Orchestrator, among other things. They're easy to find. You can invest two hours and learn the most important aspects of the UI and look for what you need.

With the Advanced RPA Developer certification, there is an exam. That is where I got the most practical experience. It's not just quizzes, it's also practical projects.

Overall, the Academy is great. It has training paths as well as very specific courses. 

UiPath is quite expensive and whatever additional components you want to use will have additional costs. We are not using the Document Understanding feature because of the cost. For Document Understanding, the cost may be per transaction.

Compared to Power Automate, UiPath is quite expensive to set up. What we are trying to do, and likely everybody tries to do this, is fully occupy one unattended-bot license before getting another one. So it's not just a matter of buying a few licenses, because they are quite expensive. That definitely also affects the return on investment, especially if you automate smaller processes.

Also, we are currently working with centralized automation development, but we are planning to decentralize it with citizen developers as well, for smaller processes. For that, we intend to use Power Automate Desktop because in that scenario the pricing disqualified UiPath. If you give a UiPath Studio license to many people—to fulfill the vision of a bot for every person—or even to one person per department, they would have to work quite hard to see a positive return on investment. 

For UiPath, you need Orchestrator, which is already quite expensive, although you can use just one to start with. But if you have multiple unattended-bot licenses and multiple Studio licenses, it gets expensive quite fast. 

Also, the whole pricing structure is very unclear. You can't find out anything about prices before talking with UiPath or with a partner. At that point, you're still not sure what kind of price you're getting. Of course, they offer savings when you order many licenses, but there's no fixed reference point if you haven't talked to UiPath before. There is no real information about what you actually need and how much you can expect it to cost. 

With the Microsoft platform, you can directly see the kinds of packages they have and whether they're charging per process or per transaction. You see the price. It's very transparent.

When I compare UiPath with other providers' solutions, UiPath offers a very structured development interface. It is more structured than the interface of Microsoft Power Automate, for example. It offers a very visually appealing way of structuring the processes in flow charts as well as in sequences. It makes it easy to see an overview of a process. I definitely like UiPath's development interface.

UiPath Orchestrator is definitely great, and better than what competitors offer because it enables you to use queues very easily, which again helps to create robust automations.

In addition, the UiPath community is the best among all the software communities that I've seen. There's a great forum. Whatever question you have will either be answered by other developers or even UiPath employees who participate in the forum. Also, there is already a huge stock of questions and answers about automation. Usually, you will get an answer to any question within hours or even minutes. Together with the training platform, the whole ecosystem around the community is much better than that of any other software I've ever seen.

In my previous company, we evaluated the big ones at that time: Automation Anywhere, Blue Prism, and UiPath. 

In my current company, we mainly evaluated two solutions. The first was UiPath, because it's probably the most powerful solution. The second was Microsoft Power Automate, which is now becoming more mature. Power Automate is probably also the easiest to implement because we are Office 365 users. We could just provide a Power Automate desktop license to any of our employees. It's definitely much easier to acquire Power Automate licenses and provide them to the users. It's directly integrated. There's no need for IT involvement.

In my opinion, UiPath is easy to use. Once you have been using it for a while, it's pretty easy. If you're using it as a citizen developer, meaning that you want to automate your own processes, it's probably a bit complex. It offers a lot of functionality and properties that can be edited per activity. You have to have a basic understanding of variables, arguments, et cetera, if you want to build a robust solution.

The macro recorder is not that nice. It's not like you can just record a process and then run it over and over again. It definitely requires some experience to create a robust process. All in all, I think it's easy to use. 

I also tried the StudioX version, just for testing purposes, and that may be a bit easier to use, but it's still not a tool that you can give to someone and they will be able to start developing on their own. In particular, they will not be able to run something unattended because that requires a lot of testing. It requires basic knowledge, which comes with experience, about the HTML selectors.

In general, UiPath is the most powerful solution there is on the market right now for RPA, mainly because of the easy structure provided by UiPath Orchestrator for larger transactional business processes.

As consultants, we have implemented UiPath for clients when they have asymmetric workloads because of COVID and they want to scale up but don't want to hire new people. We've implemented automations for clients that want to decrease their workflows. And we've seen efficiency gains as well when clients want to complement the work that humans are doing with the help of automations.

A good example of a client use case is a client that does mortgage loans. When someone comes to a loan officer, there's a lot of information that needs to be provided. There's a manual process that includes inputting the information into the system. Once the information is in the system, they need to run a lot of services, such as lien and credit checks, location verifications, inspections, flood reports, et cetera, before a loan application can be approved. 

We've automated this entire process for them. Our automations, built on UiPath, run all these services, generate all the reports, and store them in a centralized repository that can then be eyeballed by a human. That way they can make a judgment call on whether a loan should be processed or not.

Our in-house use case right now is around structuring reporting with UiPath. We have a Power BI layer and we use UiPath internally to check employee availability, as well as who is charging hours, and how many, to our projects. Overall, we use it for HR activities. We go into our HR management system, generate and download the reports using UiPath, and then modify and massage the data depending on business rules. We then publish that data into Power BI and that's used as a centralized dashboard for reporting for the organization. 

We recently did an engagement with some leaders in HR management. That organization has two kinds of certifications that they give out. We automated those processes as well as the reporting and the revenue reconciliation around them. They wanted to understand how many people were doing re-certifications, and their demographics. They wanted to see what the pass percentage was. They also wanted to be able to give the marketing team data about whom they should be targeting.

The automations we built for them using business rules produce information on whom they should be targeting. They help them understand which part of the world is doing their exams and which part of the world is not doing their exams, and where they need to spend more on marketing.

Before we automated these things, they had a team of four people doing that kind of work. Now, there is one person managing the automations instead of managing the actual processes. That was a big win for them as an organization. They were able to redeploy three people to do other work inside the organization. And in terms of savings, if the average person works 2,040 hours per year, we saved them around 8,000 person-hours of work annually.

Internally, in our company, the reporting process that we have automated used to take 45 to 50 minutes for the HR team to do. Now, reports are generated automatically. It has decreased the amount of effort that the HR team needs to do to generate reports.

There is also a lot of benefit with respect to human error. The tasks that you want to automate are usually repetitive, mundane activities—the swivel-chair activities where a junior analyst might be processing 500 loans in a day. People tend not to concentrate and they make mistakes in that kind of situation. Automation is not going to make those mistakes. There's a great reduction in human error when you implement RPA using UiPath.

In addition, as a small company, one of the biggest advantages we see from using UiPath is that they handle infrastructure, maintenance, and updates with the cloud offering. That helps a lot of small and mid-tier companies implement automation, companies whose IT practices aren't as mature. That's one of the most important features and benefits of UiPath.

The cloud version does decrease your startup time. Where you might have spent four weeks provisioning a server or a virtual machine, installing things, and then securing network assets, with this solution you don't have to do those things. It's all available directly, plug-and-play from UiPath. The time to value is decreased. Cloud instances are, obviously, a little bit more expensive than what you would pay with an on-prem solution, but because UiPath gives it to you at scale, the difference is that great.

For SMEs, the effort to stand something up themselves adds a lot of work to the automation. The ROI is quicker for SMEs when they do a cloud implementation.

The only way you're able to show true value with an automation program is if you automate something end-to-end. UiPath does end-to-end automations and, among all the other tools that are available, UiPath is the leader in end-to-end automation. 

In addition, they're growing their platform. It's no longer just an RPA program. It's a platform that gives you capabilities like AI, Computer Vision, and chatbots. It's not just about task or process automation, it's about the end-to-end life cycle. Previously, if you wanted to do a chatbot integration, there was no end-to-end solution for it. Today, UiPath offers direct integrations with chatbot services and direct integrations to some level of AI analysis on your processes. No other provider today does any of that. If you get into specific, end-to-end scenarios, UiPath certainly is a platform that allows you to achieve that end-to-end automation.

UiPath's AI capabilities are pretty good. Computer Vision is their AI functionality that helps you look into images. If you're automating inside a Citrix environment, for example, you really can't access the usual selectors or data boxes or text boxes. It's all an image. We had to do an automation in such an environment, and we used the AI capabilities of Computer Vision to build dynamic selectors. That was beneficial. I don't think any other vendor currently has that capability. The way they've implemented AI is not just a buzzword. They've really applied it in the Computer Vision feature.

And when it comes to the UiPath user community, nobody would be able to do implementations without it. It's a lot like Stack Overflow, but for RPA. It's a very strong community and it helps anyone who is doing development, management, initialization, et cetera. 

They can certainly improve their Automation Hub, which is their centralized place to gather new opportunities. The improvement could be, in part, in the capabilities. For example, it would help if there were a centralized dashboard. Maybe they could combine Insights and Automation Hub into one solution.

And they also need to revisit the pricing model of Automation Hub. It is an expensive functionality that clients don't really want to pay for. They feel that it should be part of the program and available out-of-the-box. Because it's not, clients just do things using an Excel sheet.

I started doing automations back in 2015, and I've been using UiPath since around 2017. I work as a management consultant. The company I work for provides consulting services to organizations that want to use UiPath, Blue Prism, and Automation Anywhere.

I started out doing development with UiPath, and now I do a lot of infrastructure initialization. I've done development and implementations on the on-prem solution, although I've never set one up, and I've set up cloud instances of UiPath myself.

As a company, we also use the free Community Edition in-house so that we can build a point of view on solutions, but most of our implementations are for clients as consultants.

Scaling is a benefit of the cloud offering because you can easily add a new license without provisioning a new server virtual machine, and you can also or decrease licenses. This is only applicable to an organization that does not have high IT maturity and does not have virtual machines that can be spun up. If a client is very mature, Fortune 100 or Fortune 50, with a very robust IT team that can easily spin up virtual machines, the cloud solution is not going to be beneficial when it comes to scaling.

They have multiple tiers for technical support. I've used all of them. With the Premium Plus Support you get immediate remediation. You have a support representative available who is like an account executive and who is the go-to person for any issues. It's very easy and very quick. 

The mid-tier is Premium Support where you don't have a direct point of contact, but you still get priority service. 

We recently had a production issue with Orchestrator. I opened a ticket on February 2nd and we just resolved it this morning, six days later. It wasn't a big issue but it took them some time. That was with the free support. I didn't expect them to prioritize it

Overall, they are responsive. The top-tier support is a 10 out of 10, the mid-tier is about an eight out of 10, and the free support is about a seven or eight out of 10.

One of the biggest advantages of UiPath is the ease of setup. Their cloud instance is probably four or five releases ahead of what Blue Prism or Automation Anywhere offer right now. You can buy a license in 30 seconds and get your own automation instance set up on the cloud within an hour.

UiPath has made setting up and starting an implementation very easy because it's a service. If you're going with the cloud, there's no installation, no setup, and no server or VM initialization.

UiPath also has something called REFramework (Robotic Enterprise Framework). The REFramework is built-in and helps streamline implementations with some of the industry best practices for development. UiPath provides that to everybody as a basic template to start an implementation. Blue Prism or Automation Anywhere usually provide you with a blank slate and a junior developer might struggle a bit to actually understand how to do exception handling or logging. UiPath allows you to do that very simply with REFramework.

We have also used the UiPath Academy courses and they have been very beneficial. UiPath started giving all their Academy material free of cost to everybody. They were the first RPA vendor to do that. By doing that, they created a competency, globally, inUiPath. It certainly helps everybody. If I don't understand something about a new feature that comes out, I open the Academy and watch a video, or I read some material or a white paper that they have published, and I understand it better.

The material is really good. It helps you understand their platform in a very robust manner. There are walkthroughs where you can do implementations and developments while the course is going on. That really helps as well.

The Academy helps us build an internal understanding of new capabilities and then go to clients and tell them, "This is another new capability. It's available to you free of cost because you've already purchased the licenses. Here is what its potential is, and this is how you should implement it." As a result of the Academy courses, we can advise clients better and help them unleash that potential.

UiPath changed the way that they do licensing, starting in 2022. Any partner that has status with them is now allowed to sell licenses, because UiPath itself does not sell licenses anymore. They have a sales team that manages licenses and works with vendors like us.

They can definitely work on the way that they publish material about their licenses. Every year they change their license SKUs. They change the definitions and the naming conventions. They change capabilities and functionalities. It becomes very hard, as a user, to track it. We recently had to renew our licenses and the way that they defined the RPA developer license had changed. The RPA developer license is now called an automation developer license. The two capabilities are very different. We had to go through learning to make sure that we would have all the capabilities that we had previously, and understand what the new capabilities are.

There was no material available on their partner portal or on the internet to help us understand which licenses give you which capabilities. That's something that they need to make more transparent and not reinvent it every year. They need a level of standardization.

There is a tool called Power Automate which used to be called WinAutomation. Power Automate is available to everybody with an Office 365 license. The only other competitor to UiPath's community would be the WinAutomation/Power Automate community. It is a very community-driven solution, similar to UiPath. That community is as strong as the UiPath community.

UiPath recently got into the process analysis space. They've started doing things like task mining and process mining, but I wouldn't say UiPath is a leader in that space. They do have something called Task Capture that allows you to document processes for automation. But UiPath's process analysis piece is not yet as developed as much as something like Celonis.

The way we break down the process around automation is into three stages: advice, implement, and operate. The advice piece, which includes process assessment and building business cases is an area where UiPath is not great as a tool. It has the capabilities, but it's fairly new.

But at the "implement" stage, obviously it's a great product.

And the "operate" is where they have realized that the stickiness comes in with clients. There's always going to be a need for "operate" and they are getting into it. They provide something called UiPath Insights that gives you analysis about how your automation is running in production and to help you manage the automations. It gives you quick dashboards to present to senior leaders to show ROI and business case creations. UiPath needs to grow in the "operate" space and they are doing so. Neither Blue Prism or Automation Anywhere offers anything for process mining or task mining.

In terms of innovation, I don't think that the cloud solution helps me innovate. UiPath's integration functionalities can help me come up with an innovative solution, but the fact that it's a cloud instance or software as a service, does not really help me innovate as much. I could do the same innovation with an on-prem solution.

We have two use cases.

One is for our claim accessing process, for which I have developed a process for logging into the client's application. It includes launching the browser and getting logged into the application by entering the username and password and handling two-step verification. Handling that requires some logic. Once logged in, it navigates to the claim status feed and selects the organization's and payer's details. It then enters the required details of the patients. These details are given by the client in an Excel document that the process reads. It searches for the values, one-by-one. If there is no record for the patient whose details are entered, it will throw an error stating that there are no claims present. It captures such exceptions and records them in a separate Excel file.

If that person's claim is present, it fetches 25 to 35 key details from that record and they are written to an Excel document. Once the process is done, the Excels will be sent as email attachments to the client.

The second process that I am currently developing is one where I need to get the data from Google Sheets. This process involves four or five practice management systems. It has to log into each practice management system and, for each one, it needs to schedule appointments based on the data present in the Google Sheet. The process involves navigating to the respective screens, filtering the details, and entering them in a CSV file. Based on that file, we have all the data related to patients' records. The process checks the patients' payment records. There are exception-handling routines and any errors are noted in an Excel sheet. Once all the patients' records have been completed, it closes the application and sends the data to the respective clients. It produces a log file in Excel as an attachment, as well.

Automation has definitely saved us time and money. For example, for data entry, if a person takes around eight hours per day to complete and upload about 200 sets of data, a bot can easily upload around 3,000 to 4,000 sets per day. It reduces the amount of time to get data uploaded. If a person uploads one record in three minutes, the bot can upload the same data in about 30 to 40 seconds. The bot provides much greater time- and cost-efficiency. It speeds up digital transformation.

It has also reduced human error. Among those 200 records that a person can upload per day, mistakes may happen in 10 to 15 records. Bots don't do things incorrectly at any point in time. Values are entered correctly in each field.

As a result, it frees up employee time. If a bot runs for eight hours, a person only has to look at it for a little while, because a bot will definitely do the process perfectly. That means we don't need a human to dedicate much time watching something run end-to-end. If the bot does the process properly for four records, it will definitely do the next 4000 records correctly as well. So there is not much time required of a human to watch the bot.

On the basis of costs in India, where I work, if a person earns 30,000 per month, the cost of the process they work on is 360,000 per year. A bot for the same process may cost 150,000 or 200,000 only. Automating is more cost-efficient than hiring a person to work on the process.

Among the most valuable features is the ability to read Excel and Word documents with API calls.

In the Google platform, I need to generate security-related things like an API key and an API secure code. That enables me to get the data into UiPath. The product is built such that only if all the security requirements are properly done am I able to get the required data.

UiPath is also the best tool for a beginner or someone who has no knowledge of programming. It is easy to learn quickly and to understand. You can get working in it much more quickly than if you had to acquire a programming background.

I would rate the ease of building an automation at 3.8 out of five, as I have only been working in UiPath for the past 11 months. I am now able to understand everything and can design the kinds of processes I need to build. There are many courses available on their website in the UiPath Academy where they completely show you how to do things. Within a short period of time—I spent the first three months in the UiPath Academy—I was able to understand things clearly, including descriptions of the Properties panels and every field. I understand the uses of these Properties.

Also, many of the Activities are pre-built, but if any activities or logical processes are not available, I can get them through third-party packages that are in the UiPath Marketplace. I am able to build automations quickly. In the worst-case scenario, if it's a large project, I can develop that project within two months.

I have used the AI functionality for PDF automations. In these processes, the bot is able to capture the data properly about 70 to 80 percent of the time. But if a document is not proper or it isn't handled the right way, the bot struggles to get the required data. UiPath has to work on this aspect so that the bot will be able to completely capture the data.

There is also room for improvement in the area of third-party integrations. In the last week I have gone through a video for an integration service, but it did not show things end-to-end. Rather, they just explained the connection details only. After performing the steps they showed, I was not able to get things working properly in my process.

I have been using UiPath for around 11 months.

The stability of UiPath is quite good. In some particular areas, the bot struggles a bit and we have to implement Human in the Loop. Those cases are where the bot can't do certain validations. But overall, the solution is stable and accurate in the results.

The scalability is a four out of five. 

At a certain point, we needed support from UiPath. The solution can be integrated with ABBYY. Getting an AABBYY license doesn't happen just like that. You need to get a trial license and it's a long process. We needed support from the UiPath team to get it done.

You can try to get a solution from the UiPath forum or from the documentation sections, but the UiPath support is the best. I have raised three or four support tickets over the year and they have helped me through each issue, completely, to the end. They respond within 24 hours. When you explain your issue to them, they create a step-by-step process to sort it out. And once I solved the issues, they inspected what I had done.

Positive

I used Microsoft Power Automate. I switched because Power Automate is not very user-friendly when compared with UiPath. And when it comes to integrations in the Microsoft product, most of the connectors are still in the preview state. In UiPath, all the integrations are active and enable you to get the desired result. Also, the Microsoft community does not have many active people handling it. With the UiPath community, you get an immediate response for any issue you have posted.

I use the UiPath forums if I have an issue and I'm unable to find a solution or develop my process. If I post it on the forum, in a maximum of two minutes I'll get an email response from other UiPath users, as well as from senior users who may have two or three years' experience. They politely answer my issues. I have also provided solutions to questions in the forum over the past two months. UiPath's user community is absolutely the best one.

The initial setup is completely easy and straightforward. It is just like installing software in a system by clicking "next, next, next." At the end of it, you have Studio in your system. 

If you need to allocate a particular system to Orchestrator, even that is a very simple process and there are videos available on the internet that show you how to set up the process quickly.

Instead of giving a monthly salary to a person, you can get a bot on a yearly basis. It is cost-efficient and will save you money. You'll also get a more accurate and stable result than if you had a human work on it.

Pricing is based on your process. If your process is fairly simple, it will not cost much.

UiPath has enabled me to build automations much more quickly when compared to other tools. If you go with Blue Prism or Automation Anywhere, you need to have some programming language skills to implement things. But UiPath is completely drag-and-drop.

I looked online at which is the best tool. I looked at many details, what each product provides, and decided that UiPath is a better solution as an automation tool.

Overall, UiPath has the best user community and the best, detailed videos. It is easy to understand, there is no coding at all, and even a beginner can create a process in a short period of time. It is also easily integratable. These are the points where it stands out against any other tools.

For us, in some use cases, end-to-end automation means a need for Human in the Loop. There are certain points where the bot is not able to validate things and a human is needed to verify whether the bot has done things properly or not. But bots are able to process 90 percent of an end-to-end process. For monitoring, UiPath has Orchestrator. If any error occurs, the data is immediately updated in Orchestrator and you can easily see the error and the cause, and you can easily resolve it.

In the UiPath Academy, UiPath offers the best content for each module and, after each video, there is a quiz so that we can show we have understood what we have learned from the video. There are also activities and a practice session where we can implement the use cases by practicing them in Studio. If we are stuck at any point after the practice, they have a solution area where they explain the steps you need to implement in Studio to get the desired results. They give sample workflows as well. I don't think any other software tool does this. They even provide detailed, step-by-step videos for third-party integrations.

Our use cases for UiPath are all across the board. We started primarily in the finance and accounting sectors and moved to our integration center, which is made up of individuals working with our field operations folks to schedule and conduct work.

We have also moved into HR and found a lot of hours there, as well. We have also done automations for our IT and supply chain sectors. We probably touched about 15 different business units within our organizations with UiPath automations.  

We have seen a reduction in human error. A perfect example of that is an automation that takes a report from our bank and identifies all of our customers who have changed their routing or checking account information from the previous day. It then goes into the system and figures out which of these customers are check-free and updates their routing account number information. This process used to take four people four hours each day. It now takes the bot less than 15 minutes a day. There was a lot of room for human error in this process that has been eliminated. It has been automated, improving the data quality instantaneously.

The UiPath Academy was one of the biggest reasons why we chose this solution over other products. What was important for us was the availability of the free online training that we could do. 

The other vendors we were considering at the time were offering training but for a fee. We would have to pay some $2,000 per session and our upfront investment to get the team off the ground would have increased exponentially as a result.

Also, with those classes, you don't always know which quality you're going to get. Sometimes they're phenomenal and other times not so much. 

We've leveraged the UiPath Academy with our college recruits/interns. We have been able to say, "OK, we're going to hire you, but here's your commitment. You need to go through these training classes before you start your job." This would help them hit the ground running, which is phenomenal. 

The UiPath Academy expedites onboarding, which is probably its biggest value.

There is more that we could be doing with the platform. At the moment, we're just leveraging RPA right out of the box. We're just doing what I would call plain Jane automations. We're not doing a great job of leveraging the process discovery tools, which is a huge pain point for us. A lot of businesses are dealing with people shortages right now, which is taxing. And the people that are there are doing too much work so they don't have time to sit down and document their processes. Having those process discovery tools will elevate our game and allow us to be able to help them more quickly. That's a huge win for us. 

The other piece of the pie is that as we roll out automation to our organization, we're finding nuances with the process. Using some of UiPath's process mining tools, we can identify discrepancies between, for example, processes in Ohio versus Pennsylvania or Virginia or Kentucky. This would be huge for us because we spend a lot of time addressing these nuances for the automations.

The pricing could be more transparent. Overall, I think the pricing is fine, but they keep changing it. It should be more structured. They don't have to tell us what their pricing is, but they should publish how the product is broken down. 

Also, as a customer, one of my frustration points is that I'm not sure the customer success team is engaged at the right level with the customers. There's too much focus on selling more product versus helping to evolve the COE. 

There are many partners out there that have kind of learned over the last two years like this is what we need to get it off the ground. There are so many customers out there that I've talked to that have bought UiPath and it's just sitting on the shelf. If they can help them get it off the ground and get it going, then they can increase the community. 

Another issue that we run into that is not necessarily a reflection of the solution is the fact that our IT operations team does not want us running automations during business hours. This is because they don't have a good understanding of what the true impact of automation is on the source system. It would be great to have UiPath help us educate other members of the organization that automation is no different than human interaction. This could help people like me communicate with stakeholders and increase our ability to run even more automations. 

We started using UiPath in November of 2018.

I haven't seen any issues with UiPath's stability. 

We haven't seen any issues with scalability. 

We have had a mixed bag with UiPath's tech support. We have upgraded to premium support now because we need more help. The reason why we went with premium support is because we were not getting what we needed from the customer success team.

The setting up of the infrastructure and getting off the ground from a technology standpoint was the easy part. The complex part was setting up the governance model and setting up the COE model. 

I think it's probably gotten better since 2018. When we started, I didn't feel like UiPath or the partners had their heads wrapped around governance and the infrastructure set up.

At the time, I felt like I was on my own when it came to security aspects and things like setting service-level accounts for bots, setting up bots on virtual machines, and governance aspects like setting up a steering committee or the structure around the intake, tracking, or ROI processes. 

The service providers and UiPath did not help me. It was difficult in that sense in the beginning. I even ran into some trouble with my superiors because the whole process was taking longer than expected. 

We are running around 20 bots and have 105 automations in production today. One of our automations saved 25,000 hours. Overall, I'll say we have more than 250,000 hours saved for the organization.

I think we take a fee of $50 per hour, so that's well over $10 million saved that went back to the organization. 

UiPath's pricing can be confusing. They are changing it all the time. It would be nice if it was a bit more transparent. 

Before settling on UiPath, we looked into Automation Anywhere and Blue Prism. This was back in 2018 and the product has come far since then. 

To be honest, the best product offering at that time was Automation Anywhere. However, we understood UiPath's vision and saw where it was going. We liked the training that was available and there were a couple of use cases that we needed that Automation Anywhere would not be good for. 

Cost was another factor. At that time, UiPath had aggressive pricing that helped them get their foot in the door and enabled us to get off and go. 

My first bit of advice is to ask questions of customers. It is helpful to build a community around you of individuals that you can call upon and just ask questions. In Columbus, we started an intelligent automation user group that brought together customers. It wasn't necessarily UiPath-specific. We talked about different topics and challenges that we are having. 

For me, that was helpful, especially in terms of governance because I got a lot of good ideas from different people in regard to how I should set up my governance or how to handle certain security issues. I highly recommend connecting with other customers and leveraging the experience and knowledge that they have rather than trying to figure it out on your own.

We love UiPath Studio and we have done a little bit with StudioX. We have not had a high level of success with them because our business has been taxed. Trying to find business resources to put towards those efforts has been our biggest hurdle to getting a citizen developer program off the ground.