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Intelligent Automation Senior Consultant at a consultancy with 5,001-10,000 employees
Real User
Offers great training, has good online forums, and saves time
Pros and Cons
  • "The initial implementation was pretty straightforward."
  • "For citizen developers, Studio is difficult. It's just too over their head."

What is our primary use case?

Often, the solution is used for a lot of connecting data from different systems, et cetera. Also, a lot of tasks involve taking data from Excel or an email and putting it into different PDFs at high volumes and then saving everything in a certain spot in the file directory.

How has it helped my organization?

With UiPath, people can do more knowledge work and don't have to spend as much time doing menial tasks. For example, connecting the different systems and handling large volumes of Excel and PDFs. From what I've seen with clients, that's really common. Typically, tasks with data like that would take like a lot of time. The same with pulling reports from a website and then having to run a tableau dashboard and refresh R code. There are a lot of different layers that RPA is able to connect to and with, which is cool.

What is most valuable?

I like that you can automatically take a picture of what you're getting the selector for. For example, the next developer can tell what was on the screen. That way it’s easy to transfer from developer to developer, which is sometimes difficult.

I also really like being able to put notes on each of the activities. That's really valuable for me. Even if I'm not passing it to somebody else, it reminds me of what I was doing.

On a grander scale, there's definitely other stuff, however, those are just little things that I find valuable.

The one bot that pulls reports runs the R code and then refreshes the Tableau dashboard saves a lot of time. I can't recall the number exactly, however, without the bot, it takes a long time to pull those reports manually. I’m talking half a day for one person. And we may need to pull 20 or 30 reports per day. The website takes a long time to load, which means for a person it's just a lot of sitting time, which is very annoying.

We’ve used the UiPath Academy courses. It’s well-known that UiPath's training is the best of any of the tools, including Blue Prism, Power Automate, or Automation Anywhere. Power Automate in particular doesn't really have as much specific training. With UiPath, the pictures and the hands-on nature, and just the scrolling is cool. The training looks cool and it's very helpful. After you take the training, you can actually go and do something. It's not like you've just read about it.

The biggest value in the Academy is the paths. You can choose to go down a certain path. It's nice to have it curated. Also, there’s definitely the hands-on piece that sets it apart. In some other solution’s training, they just describe the different features of the tool. With UiPath, it’s interactive and you have to do it. Part of the assessment is you have to do that big RA framework process, which is good due to the fact that, with just training, you've already done it. You’re already using the tool.

Building automation with UiPath is very easy. It has a good interface. I like how you can nest certain activities. It makes things more visible. The modular approach of having different pages and then invoking them is very intuitive.

We just use attended automation right now as there is a lot of proof of concepts going on. We're hoping to get to more unattended automation soon since that seems to be a big, high-value area.

What needs improvement?

In general, and maybe this is not the tool's fault specifically, however, more awareness of the limitations for federal clients needs to be considered. There is a lot of the cool stuff that we've heard about, and I'm probably going to hear about today, that we can't really use due to security.

A particular part of the platform hasn't been ATOD. If there's any way that UiPath could help support even more the federal clients by saying "hey, this is not going to break your system" that would be really helpful as some of it would be very valuable to them. It's just getting it past the review process that is the challenge right now, and security is the main concern.

For citizen developers, Studio is difficult. It's just too over their head. They don't want to finish the training. They're getting fed up. They already have their own job and they're just not as bought in on the process which is the tone set at the top. Their management has to deal with that. It just doesn't seem very realistic overall sometimes for a lot of clients to have citizen developers.

Buyer's Guide
UiPath
December 2024
Learn what your peers think about UiPath. Get advice and tips from experienced pros sharing their opinions. Updated: December 2024.
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For how long have I used the solution?

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

What do I think about the stability of the solution?

Sometimes clients think that they can just do something and then it runs forever. People who actually work with it know that it's going to break and you're going to have to fix it. However, that's part of the process. When it first starts running, you're going to have to make it better. There needs to be managing of expectations. It's going to give you value, however, it's not going to be perfect the first time, which is just not even the automation's fault. It's sometimes the systems. You have to learn the quirks of the systems and the systems that it works with. For example, a website might have a pop-up that you wouldn't expect. It'll break, and clients will ask "why is this broken?" You have to explain the bot doesn't know how to handle everything.

What do I think about the scalability of the solution?

In theory, the scalability is great. In practice, if clients hear "oh, you can just build a bot and then put it out to everybody" - that's not really the case. There's going to be that deployment and configuration process where you have to work with each of the analysts or whoever you're working with to actually make it work on the computer. There might be more expectation management needed. Sometimes, for example, a computer has quirks, and we have to do this and that. That said, overall, after you get situated, it's very easy to manage from the orchestrator new packages, et cetera. My assumption is that it is good.

How are customer service and support?

The responsiveness was quick, however, in my case, I wasn't really able to get the question answered. It was actually about licensing for one client. They were not as immediate in terms of their service, however, it was still good. We got an outcome. It just took a little bit longer than we expected to come to the conclusion.

How was the initial setup?

The initial implementation was pretty straightforward. It wasn't specifically at my organization, however, one of the clients did an implementation from the ground up and we helped them get UiPath. It was us coordinating with UiPath reps, and it was pretty straightforward.

For our part, it was just knowing what licenses to get and working with, and knowing the client's situation. We were working closely with the UiPath reps to say "this is what they need" and then we just got it for them. I thought it would be a lot more complicated to know what license structure they would need, however, it turned out just fine.

I don't remember the length of that project. Deployment might have been around eight months for the whole thing to get situated and start being used.

What about the implementation team?

We worked with UiPath to help our client set up the solution.

What was our ROI?

We've seen an ROI in UiPath. We just had a bot challenge with one client where they showcased different automation that they've made throughout the organization, and the numbers were great. I cannot remember the exact numbers, however, they were impressive.

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

The whole UiPath model is a bot for every person, so the attended licensing is obviously where the money goes. I don't know how realistic that is for a lot of clients. It makes a lot more sense to focus on making the process mining, task capture, and those type of tools, very user-friendly for people who would otherwise want to consider citizen developers.

You have to identify like the people who want to be citizen developers. There are really not many of those people, in my experience. One time I was working with somebody, and she didn't know where the start button was - and she was one of the people they had identified as a citizen. For her, this solution is not going to work.

Companies need higher-up people who know their organization and can identify those people. That's an internal thing. Overall, I would love to see UiPath figure out their financing to re-pivot and focus on citizen developers and get really good at identifying processes. Either way, we're still going to have dedicated people who actually develop and perfect as StudioX even is way above a lot of clients I've worked with. Taking into account all of my clients there has been one guy who could use Studio.

Which other solutions did I evaluate?

I've looked at Blue Prism and Automation Anywhere.

With Blue Prism, the pro is that the grid in the development environment makes it easy to align and then see from a very high level what your process is doing, which UiPath is lacking. Even though you have the workflows where you don't have to have everything on the page, you can invoke stuff from other pages. That's nice. However, it's still not as visually apparent in terms of what's going on, unless you put a lot of notes, which some people just don't do. Blue Prism is good at the high-level view. I don't like them for almost everything else. It's very antiquated. I know they came up with RPA, the name and everything, however, I don't think they've kept up with the current energy of the industry. Also, their training is not good and the online community is not at all as strong as UiPath. 

With Automation Anywhere, the development, everything about that has gotten better recently. It has mostly improved due to the fact that they were coming from a really low place. I did not like that tool a couple of years ago. Then, they redid their training, and the interface became a lot different. They've gotten better. However, they are still not my favorite tool. The use cases that the tool is geared toward are not always as broad as what UiPath can handle. I do not like the search functionality for the different activities. If you type into, which is a UiPath phrase for an activity, in Automation Anywhere it won't recognize the phrase. They don't use it as a search function. You have to type exactly the name of the activity. I understand that they don't want to accommodate the exact verbiage that UiPath uses, however, it's annoying. In UiPath, if you type in something similar, it'll still bring up similar activities, even if it's not exactly the name, which is nice. Sometimes you can't remember the exact wording and it's good there's an option to search in a way that will show you the closest options.

With UiPath, the pros are the training. With getting new people up to speed, you would never say "let's start you on Blue Prism." It's too complicated. The UiPath training is really good,  and the developer community and online forums are usually accurate, which is more than you say for some other stuff. Overall, the usability of the UiPath tool, the deployment, and the interfaces of everything we've seen are a lot cleaner. Even on a basic level, the solution just looks cool. The main downside is the lack of awareness surrounding what government clients can use and what they can't and then work to tailor to that.

What other advice do I have?

We are a UiPath partner. 

We have one client that is on version 20.4.3, however, most others are on the latest version of the solution.

We do not use the UiPath apps feature or UiPath's AI functionality right now.

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

I would love to see a change in the process mining and differentiation on how they're catering toward the citizen developers. That would be outstanding and would show a lot of self-awareness for the company. Maybe I'm just totally cut off from the commercial sector and maybe they have brilliant people who are just ready to develop immediately, however, that is not what I've seen across all of my clients.

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
Public Sector at Invoke public sector
Real User
Easy to build automations, reduces human errors, and saves on costs
Pros and Cons
  • "The functionality where you can quickly convert your code from Studio X to Studio is really nice."
  • "The StudioX interface is too different from Studio."

What is our primary use case?

We were with the Air Force and had really a lot of different use cases including finance, credit card transactions, flight authorizations for training missions, et cetera. There are a few hundred use cases.

How has it helped my organization?

UiPath has improved the way our company functions. For our customers, for the Air Force, they've seen a lot of enthusiasm around the ability to develop their way out of mundane work. For those individuals, it's been a good cultural improvement. That's really been the biggest thing for them.

What is most valuable?

The developers like the studio interface better than other RPA providers that they've used in the past and find it easy to use and can provide a lot of impact.

The ease of building automation using UiPath has been great. We actually have done them with airmen, with people that are in the Air Force. We've done training and workshops such as one-week workshops with about 250 airmen. Most of them, 80% to 90%, have built bots that work in production with basically little to no training. They can do a lot without any development experience whatsoever going into the solution.

The solution has saved costs for our customers. Overall, it's tens of millions of dollars there for a potential return. They're still working on scaling that out. However, bots that have currently been built could be spread out across the entire Air Force, which is 650,000 employees, and would have about $30 million worth of potential benefit.

UiPath has reduced human error. With one particular use case, we did with flight authorizations, they had to compare your names off of a PDF to a 40,000-row spreadsheet. That not only saves time, it also reduces that error dramatically as the bot can go and find the row in the spreadsheet and then match it exactly as opposed to somebody looking for it manually.

It has saved time for our customers, equally likely $30 million in potential savings and allowing for a shift to higher-order work.

We’ve used UiPath Academy courses. We actually have a new employee training right now using UiPath Academy, and we recommend it to our customers as well. It's fantastic due to the fact that we're not spending very much time onboarding new employees. We're letting them go do the academy and then help them in assisting where needed. That's a huge benefit for us as we can continue to do our job rather than focusing on onboarding. Users can also self-lead, and new developers can go and utilize it without a lot of interaction from others or a lot of help from others.

The functionality where you can quickly convert your code from Studio X to Studio is really nice.

What needs improvement?

The StudioX interface is too different from Studio. We have a lot of people and we'll go in and start people with StudioX and they have trouble mapping to StudioX from Studio.

For how long have I used the solution?

I've been using the solution for 18 months.

What do I think about the stability of the solution?

The stability has been very good. We've had no issues with stability at all.

What do I think about the scalability of the solution?

I haven't seen any issues surrounding scaling. We're looking at one of the larger implementations of UiPath that exists right now. We were looking at a 250,000-user solution, however, we haven't done it yet. Therefore, it's hard to really comment on that.

How are customer service and support?

In terms of technical support, our people have used it, and I haven't heard any complaints, although I have not used it directly.

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

We did previously use Blue Prism and Robocorp.

I prefer UiPath due to the sales support for this specific Air Force opportunity. We started with Blue Prism. We switched over to UiPath due to the fact that they were getting some traction inside the air force, and then we got really tightly in the line with UiPath. For me, it's not as much a software bake-off to determine which software is better or worse. It's really the attraction the customer has, and UiPath is the market leader. That support is really what's driven us to UiPath.

UiPath has a good attendance solution, which helps to ease the adoption. Our developers' feedback is that the user interface and development methodology are better in UiPath. That's why they don't want to go back to the others.

How was the initial setup?

I am usually involved in the initial setup of UiPath. Our initial setup is really unique due to the fact that we're installing it in a government cloud. That is fairly complex, however, that’s very specific to that use case. Therefore, there are lots of challenges with that, however, that's more of a government problem than UiPath.

On average, for us, the setup takes a long time. It's taken us months as we have to get through these approval processes and things like that. In terms of the actual setup itself, it’s pretty fast and takes maybe half a day.

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

In terms of pricing, UiPath is fine. It is what it is, and I don't find it unreasonable.

Our situation is really unique due to the fact that we're trying to sell an enterprise license agreement through the Air Force. It's a pretty unique licensing situation.

What other advice do I have?

It's my understanding that we are using the 2020.10 version.

We are just using the studio and the automation. Due to the fact that it's the Air Force, we're really focused on just the pure RPA piece of UiPath.

Our clients do not use AI functionality from UiPath right now.

I'd advise anyone considering the solution to go fast. What we see a lot is a lot of go fast and plan for scalability from the beginning. There's a ton of potential out there, however, we see people getting bogged down in a lot of different things instead of really just automating and developing automation as quickly as possible.

I'd rate the solution at an eight out of ten. Any software product is really difficult to be a ten, to be perfect. An eight is probably as high as I would go for any software product. It does a really good job and it's easy to use and scalable. I've had no complaints about any of it.

Which deployment model are you using for this solution?

Private Cloud

If public cloud, private cloud, or hybrid cloud, which cloud provider do you use?

Microsoft Azure
Disclosure: My company has a business relationship with this vendor other than being a customer: Partner
PeerSpot user
Buyer's Guide
UiPath
December 2024
Learn what your peers think about UiPath. Get advice and tips from experienced pros sharing their opinions. Updated: December 2024.
830,526 professionals have used our research since 2012.
RPA Technical Solution Lead at AG Consultancy & Apps. Lt.
Real User
Reduces human error, saves time, and is easy to use
Pros and Cons
  • "It has a lot of features, but the ones that I'm really interested in and focused on are the Automation Hub and the Task Capture tool that they have created. Automation Hub helps you in gathering a lot of ideas, and Task Capture helps subject matter experts in capturing the step-by-step processes. It helps them build their SOPs or a document system wherever it is not already available."
  • "Licensing is one area where UiPath could do better and can be more competitive. It is a little expensive. Their bundling of products is a bit confusing. For instance, if we want the UiPath Apps license, it is bundled with Action Center, so you also have to procure the Action Center license. These bundles are not tailored as per our company's requirements. If we reach out to the UiPath partners who deal with the accounts, they usually take your request into consideration and see what best they can do, but it is still not easily customizable."

What is our primary use case?

UiPath was used in-house in my first company for automating processes. We had deployed it on-premise. In my current company, we are giving UiPath automation as a service. We help companies with automation. We set up UiPath from scratch and help them achieve their automation goals or strategies. As a service, we have done on-premises and cloud deployments.

From a service perspective, we deal with a lot of clients who are predominantly in the oil and gas sector and energy sector. They have SAP systems for their ERP, and their use cases mostly revolve around automating SAP processes such as invoice automation, joint venture reconciliation, balance sheet reconciliation, and intercompany netting. So, the use cases usually revolve around the finance tasks, but sometimes, we have also seen use cases related to the supply chain and planned maintenance, such as purchase order closures, work order closures, and comparison of the work order plan with the deviations. 

In terms of the version, we always have the latest version. I've also used 19.4 and 20.4 on-premise versions.

How has it helped my organization?

UiPath enables us to implement end-to-end automation, starting with process analysis, then robot building, and finally monitoring all of our automation. They have created a platform to handle everything from process analysis to deployment. If you just had UiPath Studio, you would have to procure something for your attended or unattended robots. You would also need a tool to capture the process or task itself. Similarly, you would need a tool to collect the ideas from subject matter experts. If you don't have a platform that covers end-to-end automation, it becomes very challenging, and you'll have to find ways to procure those applications. With UiPath, you don't have that headache.

It has reduced human error and saved time. These two are probably the best things that we achieved from automation. We recently did a deployment for a customer who had purchase orders and other stagnant stuff from 2011 onwards. These purchase orders were not closed even though they have been receipted and invoiced completely. We did robotic process automation to takes care of these purchase orders. It is a recurring job that takes care of all POs that were created in the last one year and closes them automatically. It used to take 5 to 10 minutes for the customer to close one purchase order and recheck everything. There were probably 22,000 to 23,000 purchase orders every year. The business benefit that the customer got was close to 1,200 hours in a year, which is a massive saving.

It has freed up employees' time. It has definitely reduced the time for our clients. The time saved varies based on the project. It has saved the time of associates in completing their tasks, and they can focus on a lot of other things. In one of the use cases, an employee was spending 10 hours every month to complete a process, which is 120 hours in a year, whereas the robot takes just one hour every month. So, the robot takes 12 hours as compared to 120 hours taken by a human, which is one-tenth of their effort. It has reduced around 90% of their time for this project. For the purchase order closure project, the robot has saved close to 1,200 hours in a year. That's a huge saving.

There are other use cases where savings were not huge in terms of the efforts or hours, but the robot was very much compliant with a company's processes. It eliminated any sort of human errors that could have occurred. For instance, balance sheet reconciliations always had some sort of issues and were prone to errors. The robot completely eliminated all those issues.

We use attended and unattended automation. We have a couple of robots on the finance team's laptops, and they trigger the process as and when required, such as for month-end clearing, which is a process where the end-users have to do some kind of clearing task in the SAP system. They can trigger it as and when required. This attended automation has helped in scaling RPA benefits. The overall benefit was in terms of the efficiency with which the robot gave them the mismatches. At the end of the day, it is giving the end-user satisfaction. They don't have to repeatedly do the same steps for every company code and intercompany code. It has definitely saved a lot of time for the end-user and provided satisfaction with the process.

With cloud offerings, UiPath handles infrastructure maintenance and updates, which saves our time as well as our clients' time. The clients do not want to worry about the infrastructure and other such aspects. We are generally the ones who provide services to the clients and deal with these things. When they use the automation cloud, it is definitely time-saving because we don't have to install patches and other things. If there is a new service that they introduced, such as data service, we don't have to install anything new on the automation cloud. It is all taken care of pre-default. We just have to enable it or disable it as per our need. That definitely saves some time for us.

Their automation cloud offering helps in decreasing time-to-value. It definitely reduces time as compared to on-premise because all that you need to do is procure an automation cloud and the licenses for the UiPath team and enable them. With the on-premises setup, there is an overhead of installation of orchestrator on the virtual machine. In this aspect, an automation cloud is better than installing everything on-premise for the client and setting up the orchestrator and things like that. The automation cloud doesn't have any other thing that reduces your time. Other solutions, such as Blue Prism, provide the same benefit when you use a cloud-based orchestrator.

What is most valuable?

It has a lot of features, but the ones that I'm really interested in and focused on are the Automation Hub and the Task Capture tool that they have created. Automation Hub helps you in gathering a lot of ideas, and Task Capture helps subject matter experts in capturing the step-by-step processes. It helps them build their SOPs or a document system wherever it is not already available. 

The Uipath Document Understanding framework is also very nice in comparison to Abbyy and similar sorts of OCR technologies. 

In terms of the ease of use, I would rate UiPath very high. If you have some kind of coding background in C#, .Net, or VBA, the development in UiPath is very easy. You can customize it as per a customer's requirements. It has an easy-to-use Studio where you can build complex automation. On the Citizen Developer side, people without much technical knowledge and coding expertise can also automate their basic processes. We have done some training internally within our management, and they found StudioX very easy to use for their developments. 

What needs improvement?

Licensing is one area where UiPath could do better and can be more competitive. It is a little expensive. Their bundling of products is a bit confusing. For instance, if we want the UiPath Apps license, it is bundled with Action Center, so you also have to procure the Action Center license. These bundles are not tailored as per our company's requirements. If we reach out to the UiPath partners who deal with the accounts, they usually take your request into consideration and see what best they can do, but it is still not easily customizable.

For how long have I used the solution?

I've been using UiPath since the beginning of 2018. It has been three and a half years.

What do I think about the stability of the solution?

It has been reliable. We haven't had any reliability issues as such. Only the automation that we create could have inherent issues based on how a developer develops it. All of the out-of-the-box functionalities available in UiPath work as expected.

What do I think about the scalability of the solution?

We have seen customers starting with PoCs and scaling up to have running production bots. There are around seven to eight bots per client, which is good. From a scalability perspective, UiPath enables you to scale things quickly. We could quickly procure all things and deploy an attended or an unattended robot from a PoC to production. So, its scalability is very high.

How are customer service and technical support?

We have used their support. Most of the time, we reach out to the usual support logins that they have given. We also have a partner whom we keep in the loop if there is something very urgent. The support team has its own defined SLAs. If it is a priority one case, they get back within 24 hours or something like that.

We've always got a resolution for our issues, and they've always been helpful in that regard. They have got some technical guys who joined us over the phone and helped us solve some of the issues.

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

I have used Blue Prism and Automation Anywhere at the PoC level and the initial setup level. I've not developed any enterprise-level robot using these. So, I'm not qualified to tell the differences between these solutions.

How was the initial setup?

When new clients ask us to implement UiPath for them, the implementation is almost always straightforward. We know whether they have a cloud of their own, and what they need to procure. We have that very neatly outlined, and UiPath has also given us step-by-step instructions that are readily available on their documentation portal. So, if you want to install anything, everything is very well documented. It is very easy to follow the steps and install it.

If you have everything in hand, it would take a couple of days. If your virtual machine is ready, we just have to install the orchestrator. We also have to install Studio on the machines of the developers. It definitely takes a couple of days.

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

Its price is on the higher side as compared to the other players in the market. They are tying up with a lot of other products such as Druid, but they are independently also very expensive. That's what the customers say when we start giving them options of UiPath.

What other advice do I have?

Apart from the FKUs or the licensing that UiPath provides, if you are implementing an on-premise kind of solution for a client, you have to look at all the things that would be required, such as the virtual machines and the user IDs that the robot might use. We mostly deal with SAP, and if you are using SAP, the robot would have to log into the SAP system to get some data. So, the username that you would create within SAP is also licensed. There are a lot of other costs and related things that you need to focus on. There are a lot of things around UiPath that you need to deal with.

I would also advise using best practices while implementing the solution. Every developer has his or her own way of developing automation. A lot of times, we have seen a gap in the understanding and the kind of deliveries that teams do. So, it is very helpful to understand the skills and capabilities of a developer and see how that could impact the final deliveries from an automation perspective.

We provide solutions depending on our customers' use cases. For on-premise or cloud deployment, we follow the same sort of process and project plan. There is no huge difference in whether we use cloud automation or on-premise automation. At the end of the day, a robot has to do what is expected as per the objectives.

We don't use UiPath's AI functionality in our automation program. So far, we haven't seen any use case where we had to use any sort of intelligence or incorporate any sort of machine learning. We haven't had a necessity for that.

We are going to use UiPath apps in a new project that is coming up. We haven't used it so far. We did a PoC to see if we can connect the cloud apps to an on-premise orchestrator and if it is feasible, but that's about it. It is going to be implemented soon.

I would rate UiPath a nine out of 10.

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. The reviewer's company has a business relationship with this vendor other than being a customer: Gold Partner
PeerSpot user
PeerSpot user
Associate Principle Engineer at Nagarro
Real User
User-friendly with a drag and drop interface, good analytics reporting, and the support is responsive
Pros and Cons
  • "The Orchestrator is quite good because it is a one-stop shop where you can run robots after creating them using Studio. You can create queues, monitor the bots, and if there are any issues then you can debug them at the Orchestrator level."
  • "The built-in OCR is only 60% to 70% correct if you're analyzing a PDF that has images in it, so this is an area that can be improved."

What is our primary use case?

I have worked on a number of use cases, and one of them that I can discuss was used in a contact center environment. This is a project that we had done for an automotive insurance company, and it had to do with incident management. Our contact center received the first notice of loss (FNOL) from incidents, such as an accident.

When an accident occurs, they raise a ticket to our customer service representative. This can either be done using a chatbot, which is integrated with our ServiceNow platform, or they can call the customer service representative. In the latter case, the customer service representative will pick up the call and get the details. This includes adding their insurance ID and a couple of other fields, and that is integrated into our system.

Our system was acting as an intermediate between their existing platform and ServiceNow. Part of the system included a database, where they were checking to see if the insurance amount the claimant is asking for is above the limit. There were other similar business rules, as well, which the bot was responsible for checking. Based on the result of these checks, the claim was automatically approved, and then a corresponding ticket was raised in ServiceNow.

There was also a manual process, where there was a person who would go to the site where the actual accident took place. They do their analysis, and then they create a review report, and that report would automatically be handled by an attended robot. The robot would take the detail from the agent and based on the review, fetch certain details like the approved amount.

The bot is responsible for sending other information to ServiceNow, including, for example, details about damage to the vehicle. If there are scratches on the front or scratches on the back, then these details are all posted to ServiceNow. At that point, ServiceNow has a workflow that is initiated.

The workflow uses the information taken by the representative and moves from the review stage to agent verification, and then to a mainframe. The system running on the mainframe is responsible for generating checks, according to the amount that is approved, and then mailing them to the claimant at the address they have on file.

How has it helped my organization?

In our FNOL process for the insurance company, we use unattended robots quite extensively for both chatbots and IVR. We use the AI capabilities for language understanding and based on the user sentiment, it will trigger the unattended bot. If instead, they want to speak with a representative then it will trigger the IVR process.

In terms of the robots prioritizing and correctly routing a transfer to agents when necessary, it is a work in progress. From a priority perspective, if you talk about chatbots, let's suppose a customer sale is highly urgent, the AI model can use language understanding to determine an urgent message and in turn, create an urgent ticket. It is something that we can do but it is not 100% accurate. I would say it's 80% of the way there, because of the different types of sentiment that people express during interactions. As an example, when a customer says "I need to have this resolved as soon as possible", there are a number of different things that can happen. According to our business rules, when somebody says ASAP, it should be treated as a high priority, but 20% of the time, this does not work. Overall, at this point, the AI models and machine learning models are not very accurate.

The robot-enabled self-service channels have definitely increased the resolution of issues through self-service. Prior to using the robots, 90% of the calls would need to be addressed by a representative. Since implementing the bot strategy, only 10% have to be handled by a human. We have used UiPath Apps for this and also created some web pages, but those are just to help the bots. Definitely, self-service is one use case that has really benefited because of UiPath.

What is most valuable?

The Studio is where the development takes place and the interface is very user-friendly. You have the ability to drag and drop components, and this is part of why I think that Studio is the best feature in UiPath. The next best feature is Orchestrator.

The Orchestrator is quite good because it is a one-stop shop where you can run robots after creating them using Studio. You can create queues, monitor the bots, and if there are any issues then you can debug them at the Orchestrator level.

UiPath has a low-code feature called Studio X, which is specifically for business users. They can just drag and drop activities like reading emails, retrieving email attachments, reading data from Excel, and posting data from different sources into different platforms. It is a very good platform for business users who don't know much about coding. It is customizable in the sense that business users can have the system follow a set of simple steps, although it won't do complex things.

UiPath Insights is a feature that has everything from a tracking perspective, which tells you how the bots are working at the production level. It provides statistics about the live environment including how many processes are being run, how much time the bots are being used, and the productivity in general. There is more analytics available from data services, tests, and the AI center. All of these features really help when it comes to analyzing the data, not only from a development perspective, like tracking data on how much a robot is at a log level, but also from the end-user level in a production environment. Reporting on productivity in a single day will show how much time the bot was run, for example, 80% in terms of time or 90% utilization, and other such details.

The UiPath App feature is something that we can use to create simple apps, and these can act as integrators. Suppose there is a process that uses 10 different screens, we can create an app that will be integrated with all of them. As a developer, all 10 screens are used in my workflow, and instead of going to each of them, I can create an app that uses all of the fields that are relevant to me on each of the screens. 

The speed at which we were able to create automations for our contact center was very good. One of the reasons that we choose UiPath over other tools, such as Automation Anywhere and Blue Prism, is the ease of development. When it came to setting up the contact center, it was only the connection between different platforms that took time. The bot creation and the workflow creation were quite easy. It took approximately one and a half months to create the whole automation for the contact center, which is quite good.

What needs improvement?

The AI and machine learning capabilities need to be improved.

The task mining and process capture methods are capabilities that we use, but they sometimes miss part of the task. For example, let's say that for one of my tasks, I need to open my email 400 times a day. This is something that we can automate but for some reason, probably because it is related to email, it is not accurately evaluated. In this regard, the process mining could be improved and lead to better results.

The built-in OCR is only 60% to 70% correct if you're analyzing a PDF that has images in it, so this is an area that can be improved. Different companies use their own OCRs; Google has one, and Microsoft has one. The UiPath one requires that we use a validation step between workflows in order to improve the accuracy.

For how long have I used the solution?

I had been using UiPath for three years, up until a few months ago when I joined a new organization.

What do I think about the stability of the solution?

From what I have seen, the biggest factor for availability is the strength of the internet connection. Whether the deployment is on-premises or cloud-based, they both are the same in terms of stability. I have not seen any deviation between deployment types.

What do I think about the scalability of the solution?

Scalability is not an issue. In my previous company, we started with 10 machines and then after one year, we had 85 machines. There were no issues and the implementation was not a headache.

How are customer service and technical support?

The technical support is very responsive.

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

Prior to working with UiPath, I was an automation expert with Selenium for web testing. I was not able to fully automate a website because if there was an image that was used as a security check, where the person had to click an image to get through to the next page, I wasn't able to do it.

However, when I switched to UiPath, it was pathbreaking for me. I was able to accomplish what I couldn't do with Selenium and since that time, we have deployed more than 100 production bots.

How was the initial setup?

The installation is pretty straightforward. We usually get issues when we upgrade to a new version but I think that is a different discussion. Strictly from an installation perspective, we have not had many issues. We had no major issues and when we contacted technical support, the team was quite responsive.

The length of time required for deployment is about half an hour per machine. However, if you have 100 machines then you can do them concurrently.

For some of our projects, we used an on-premises deployment, whereas for others, we used Orchestrator and they were cloud-based. Cloud-based deployment gives us the ability to run bots from anywhere, including outside of our network.

What was our ROI?

Our clients with the contact center did not see a very large ROI in the first year, although that was because of the consultancy costs that we charged to implement the system. From the second year, onwards, they definitely saw a very good ROI.

We had different metrics to calculate RPA implementation ROI. The first is productivity, which increased by more than 60%. If I recall correctly, their investment was between $110,000 and $200,000 after the first year. I don't remember the exact numbers but it was a huge improvement.

It was not just productivity, but also other things like a reduced error rate. The quality of the processes improved quite drastically.

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

We analyzed and compared the costs of RPA from different vendors and we found that UiPath was the most cost-effective in the long term. An unattended robot costs approximately $8,500 annually. 

Which other solutions did I evaluate?

We evaluated other RPA tools including Automation Anywhere and Blue Prism. One of the reasons that we chose UiPath is its ease of development.

In terms of ROI, we found that UiPath was the best when you consider the long term.

What other advice do I have?

The length of time it takes to develop and deploy bots for a process depends on its size and complexity. We categorize processes as simple, medium, and complex. Based on how they are classified, we estimate the deployment lifecycle from one month to two months.

My advice for anybody who is planning to implement RPA is to begin by doing research on the vendors. You need to speak with each vendor and start planning, but don't think about clients at that moment. Rather, think about yourself. Consider that you want to implement internal automation, and consider the ROI you would garner during the first year or during the second year.

Once you choose a vendor, as we did when we chose UiPath, you need to make sure that at the very start of your project, it begins with low-hanging fruit. Don't start with all of the complex processes; start with some simple processes. That's why we have divided ours into three sets of processes. Then, don't think that you will achieve a hundred percent automation because that will never be the case. My thinking is that if you achieve more than 70% automation, that is a very good target. Keep your expectations clear.

Another thing to make sure of is that you secure your bot at the workflow level. UiPath provides very good security features that you can use, such as assigning permissions for who can access your workflow. Also in terms of security, be sure that you have all of the required certifications.

Once you have implemented some basic processes and you are getting good results, hyper-automation is something I suggest. Start expanding it to different technologies, such as AI. Also, engage all of your employees as much as possible.

Start with the community version of the software. Although this review is based on the licensed version, the community edition is free and you can create your bots for free. I always say that even one hour saved because of automation will yield a good return annually, and your results will be very quick.

If you keep all of these things in mind then RPA will be fruitful for you.

I would rate this solution a nine out of ten.

Which deployment model are you using for this solution?

Hybrid 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. The reviewer's company has a business relationship with this vendor other than being a customer: Partner
PeerSpot user
Senior Software engineer at Wipro Technologies
Real User
Our organization can scale up because the bot can work accurately 24/7 without any maintenance
Pros and Cons
  • "I have found Orchestrator is UiPath's most valued feature. It has the ability to automate different applications, such as, mainframe automation and Excel macros. It is so efficient. We can download up to seven days back in just one click, monitoring errors."
  • "We have seen that UiPath doesn't have the capability to identify unknown pop-ups. This needs improvement."

What is our primary use case?

We have a cross-platform infrastructure, where two servers are sitting. We have Orchestrator, which we connect to our virtual desktop infrastructure (VDI). In the VDI, we have a UiPath stationed. 

From India, I work for an Australian client. Previously, I worked for a European client. In order to work with the client network, we have a dedicated Wipro laptop. In that Wipro laptop, we log in and connect via the VDI. In that VDI, we have UiPath Studio. Using UiPath Studio, we are doing development for the client and automating functional business processes.

We are extracting data from Salesforce using a particular report that is sent by the business SMEs. We pick exact fields end-to-end, then we put these values into Salesforce. Next, we extract the value and data from Salesforce, putting that into an Excel application. After putting the return to Excel application, we generate a service request for the business and send transaction reports of the bot's performance and accuracy at the end of the day. The business was taking around four to five hours. Our robot takes around eight to nine minutes in order to automate this end-to-end automation.

For another use case, there is an application that submits invoices for an insurance client in Australia. Right now, the business is doing this. Whereas, the bot operations reads a file on the hard drive, picks up that file, and puts it into SharePoint where the bot performs some operations. After doing those operations, the bot will report the status, whether it is valid, invalid, or an exception. When we get the file, we develop the application that submits the invoice. After that, we capture the data from the Excel application and submit a request. This is an end-to-end process. This bot only runs after business hours, five days a week, so it doesn't impact the application. With this process, we send daily transaction reports, the success ratio to the client, and present the entire picture to our peers and business holders.

We have set up our own cloud, which is internal. UiPath has a different cloud. Per our governance, we are not allowed to use another cloud. We are using our hosted internal cloud, which is hosted on our internal servers in Australia.

How has it helped my organization?

With our rule-based tasks, we pick the processes which involve a higher transaction volume and run many times in a week or month. Next, we analyze how much time the subject-matter experts (SMEs) uses to do their end-to-end journey. We calculate that, then decide the scope of the operation and whether to use an attended bot or unattended bot. We do analysis to determine which parts of the operation can be attended and unattended. Our preference would be the unattended bot, because it handles a lot of volume and is uninterrupted. 

In our analysis, we thoroughly check the scope of the application, whether it is a legacy or new application, and the dynamic nature of the data. Based on this, we define certain rules. Combining these rules, we design a complete end-to-end solution and give a presentation to the business that this is our commitment, e.g., this is the amount of Average Handle Time (AHT) and FTE that the bot will do. FTE means that if four people are doing a task, then it will give me back four FTEs. We then calculate the cost, meaning how much they are paying to that FTE and the cost of the bot. We compare the two and present our case. If the numbers are good, and the business agrees, then we proceed further in our discussions with them. This is the power of analytics.

We don't need that much infrastructure. If an analyst is doing reporting with an Excel sheet, then we can give him a bot and capture what he is doing without paying attention to the infrastructure. From the captured information, we give them a bot that will help them to do their regular task. This process helps them to understand automation while not investing in infrastructure. 

We design end-to-end solutions. We have different roles, teams, and divisions. I am part of the technical department, so I design the solution. I am responsible for analyzing and developing the solution. Once I develop the solution, I monitor the bot for two weeks, which is the "hypercare period". After the business is satisfied that the bot is performing, we give it to the support team. This is how our RPA lifecycle flows. It has around nine stages, including discovery, analysis, design, development, support, presentation, and solution. 

We have developed a bot process called "Padlock". In "Padlock", there is security development. It is very important that the user input his credentials. Per the governance of the process, we are not allowed to store the credentials on the cloud. It is very dynamic and encrypted. We have deployed about 25 robots for this particular process. The robot does its job after the SME. After a certain point, there is a CAPTCHA. The robot helps the SME do things, and they need to input their credentials and click the CAPTCHA, which happens in real-time. They verify all the information, giving them more confidence in their regular processes. We have deployed a large number of bots using this process. This has brought a lot of value because we have saved on a good number of costs when it comes to attended automation. 

What is most valuable?

I have found Orchestrator is UiPath's most valued feature. It has the ability to automate different applications, such as, mainframe automation and Excel macros. It is so efficient. We can download up to seven days back in just one click, monitoring errors.

It gives you the ability to efficiently monitor the bot.

With the new updates, a lot of analytics have come from AI Center.

Its features help us showcase what the bot has done and efficiently delivered to the business.

They are improving the OCR feature for reading text and images as well as the operations for automating that. They have integrated third-party OCRs, such as, SharePoint, ServiceNow, Salesforce, and mainframe automation.

The advantage of using StudioX is I can see how long the bot will take or what went wrong for any particular use case.

What needs improvement?

In the future, I would like new services that can utilize robots as a service (RaaS).

Our legacy applications are a bit old, so we get issues sometimes in automating those. However, modern applications are very compatible with the UiPath tool.

We have seen that UiPath doesn't have the capability to identify unknown pop-ups. This needs improvement.

The API needs a lot of improvements because it does not give proper results. There are always some issues with the logs.

When it comes to real-time scenarios, we see in production that Citrix automation always crashes. This integration could bring a lot of value to UiPath. Our business could save a lot of time and money if we could automate Citrix effectively.

All of our code resides in GitHub, which is our central repository for managing the code. There was a performance issue using GitHub with UiPath; it was slow. They have recently upgraded the performance so we are happy with it now.

For how long have I used the solution?

I have been using UiPath for more than four years.

What do I think about the stability of the solution?

We always design a stable unattended solution that helps the business.

If fields are scattered, then the bot might get confused. 

Maintenance is handled by our support team. When something crashes, our dedicated support team monitors the bot. If the application crashes in production, the bot will send an application link to the support team and business stakeholders because the bot has faced some downtime in the application and kindly look into that issue.

Because I have automated a lot of enterprise solutions, I would go with the UiPath tool. They are frequently rolling out updates to the software. It is very stable compared to other tools in the market.

What do I think about the scalability of the solution?

Infrastructure is quite important at an enterprise level. There are a lot of mundane and repetitive tasks. Once we have the infrastructure, then we set up best practices and governance. Based on that infrastructure, everything can scale up. Though, if we are going to build a lot of bots on a personal laptop to automate something small, then infrastructure is not as important with that.

We started with two to three bots. Now, we have around 25-plus bots. There are around 300 to 350 using both attended and unattended automation.

How are customer service and technical support?

I have spoken a number of times with the UiPath product team. Initially, we were not able to use Excel, so we contacted the UiPath team. They provided a solution. They support the product well. I would rate the tech support as seven out of 10.

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

I have previously used Selenium. We switch because of scope. The Selenium tool was good with bot automation. With UiPath, we can do various automations, like mainframes, ServiceNow, SharePoint, etc. In order to increase implementation of automation from my end, I started with UiPath. I liked it because of its ability to automate applications. Those are the main reasons that I switched from Selenium to UiPath and SoapUI to UiPath.

How was the initial setup?

The initial setup and deployment are pretty straightforward. They provide free training, which is a good thing. We do the training correctly and religiously. Once we are good with the training along with a little programming knowledge that we have acquired over the years, it is easy to adapt and work on UiPath because it is structured and organized. 

Our setup is a mixture. Orchestrator is hosted on a server and the application is installed on a desktop or system.

In order to use UiPath on servers, we need to set up two servers: one in Australia and the second in New Zealand. 

The implementation is not that big of a task. It is very organized.

What was our ROI?

It has been a huge monetary benefit. Since the bot has been running for two and half years, it has given my organization a lot of business. When I joined Wipro in 2019, there was one guy who was developing the bot. We named the bot, "win-back". As the name suggests, 'win-back' means winning customers back. That was a maintenance bot which possessed a lot of qualities. If a person was physically doing the task, then we might need to spend $90,000 on them. This is the difference. While the robot has some costs, they are not huge when compared to the salary or compensation that we give to an SME. This is how an organization can scale up, because the bot works accurately 24/7 without any maintenance. Also, seeing the bot's accuracy, as well as the volume that it handles, motivates other business holders to go for automation.

We automated an internal solution because there were long keywords that led to spelling mistakes, since spelling mistakes don't look good on invoices. Therefore, we input this extracted data to an application, using end-to-end automation. This reduced human errors tremendously. For example, with the "win-back" solution, errors tended to happen because the volume is high. Therefore, we wrote a code that has reduced errors for the "win-back" solution.

Because of the bot's accuracy, it has saved us a lot of time and money, making the life of the subject-matter experts easier. It is a win-win situation. They are making the most of the bot, running it continuously. They don't need to wait for a particular report. For example, people, in our organization, work eight hours then send a status mail, which says, "I have done all these tasks." Instead of having us create the report directly, the bot saves a lot of time. 

The bot marks in the report what is successful and unsuccessful as well as the reason for not being successful, e.g., if it was an application, data, or particular element issue. There are a lot of areas that we call "exceptions". Every day, we are getting all these details in one go. Whereas, a person would be frustrated or bored providing all these figures. That is the cost of human error. If you are not paying attention to a particular task, then errors will happen naturally. 

The bot currently performs four times faster than the SMEs for the tasks that we automated.

After three or six months, we send out a survey to different SMEs in various production areas, asking how the bot is doing. From the survey, we have found that the bot is helping them out a lot. They are very satisfied with it.

The solution has reduced our costs by approximately five percent.

I have seen very high ROI from the processes that we automated. It is very good to invest in automation.

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

There are three leaders in the market: UiPath, Automation Anywhere, and Blue Prism. UiPath is in-between the two. BluePrism is on the higher end when it comes to pricing. Automation Anywhere is on the lower side when it comes to pricing. When comparing the automation of business processes, analyze the amount of work that your organization will save using automation, particularly compared to the pricing.

You will be compensated for buying the product when you see processes automating.

Which other solutions did I evaluate?

I also evaluated Automation Anywhere, Blue Prism, and EdgeVerve (which I used in a previous organization).

The trend of the other technologies is moving to the cloud. Other competitors of UiPath, like Automation Anywhere and Blue Prism, have already moved their applications onto the cloud. This brings more robustness to the product, because its performance is significantly increased. It is also very scalable when putting in new features. 

What other advice do I have?

I have attended a lot of UiPath's webinars.

We are in the initial stages of using the AI functionality.

The RPA technology is part of our digital transformation. For example, we are doing digital transformation by automating the Salesforce application.

They roll out an update every three months. With every update, we see a lot of new features. We are always exploring using those features so we can automate the stuff.

Don't rely completely on the UiPath tool to achieve automation. You should have some background and knowledge to understand what can be automated. There isn't a magical algorithm for building robots. You educate the robot on what can be automated.

We always rate a product based on other products. I would rate this product as nine and a half out of 10.

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. The reviewer's company has a business relationship with this vendor other than being a customer: Partner
PeerSpot user
PeerSpot user
Associate Project Manager at InfoBeans Technologies
Real User
Easy to learn and use, responsive and helpful support, and it saves our clients money
Pros and Cons
  • "I have trained people to use this product and it is so easy to use that even on the first day, people are able to start working with it."
  • "The combination of Orchestrator and Studio is a bit on the higher side, price-wise, for some companies."

What is our primary use case?

We provide RPA services and I am currently working on two different projects.

These projects are for two different clients that are each using a different version of the platform. In both cases, it is an on-premises deployment. Our clients only use the end product and don't do any development themselves.

One of my clients is a retail organization and the primary use case is invoice automation. Previously, the process was totally manual. They have different products and different departments and for each and every department for which they bill, like HR, there are printing and supply chain tasks to be completed. As part of their process, they generate invoices monthly.

To generate invoices, they need to gather data from different sources, such as a database or Excel files. What we have done is fully automated the process. They now only need to work with a consolidated Excel sheet and then email it, once complete.

Once they send the email to a particular email address, the robot retrieves it and reads the attached Excel sheet. After doing some cleaning, consolidation, and validation, it generates invoices each month in a particular template, and then it submits them to the EBS portal.

The manual invoicing task used to take between two and two and a half weeks. Now, they start it at 4:30 when they leave and it works overnight. The process is now fully completed within two days. The time saved is now time that can be used to focus on higher-value work. It has also improved employee satisfaction.

How has it helped my organization?

With respect to building automations, UiPath is very easy to use. I have trained people to use this product and it is so easy to use that even on the first day, people are able to start working with it.

UiPath enables us to implement end-to-end automation and it starts with features like task mining, process mining, and task capture. Then, we have Orchestrator, where there is a control room that gives you insights, and you can create dashboards using Kibana.

We have done work for a giant logistic firm, and the end-to-end coverage is very important for them. If you are spending and investing money then you should get a return, and the return, in this case, is measured by FTE savings.

Another way that UiPath has improved the way our organization functions is that we have introduced automation to clients that were not even aware of it. For example, we have a client that we have worked with for many years and we were ultimately able to introduce them to RPA. At this point, we have automated many of their processes. Essentially, when you automate a process or task for a company that is not even aware of RPA, they will start using it, which is very helpful for us.

UiPath has definitely helped to minimize the on-premises footprint for our clients. We work with a non-profit organization that we have done some automation for. Since they are non-profit, keeping infrastructure costs down is important. They run events each quarter and in the administration of those events, they have highlighted what they want to have automated and some of the processes include using AI and ML. As a result, the company is growing and creating new products.

I have seen companies that were hesitant about starting with automation because they were worried about the cost. However, in the long run, it saves a great deal in terms of FTEs, effort, and costs. Ultimately, it has helped to reduce the cost of digital transformation for our clients.

This product definitely helps to reduce human error. For example, if there is any human input that is required by the process then UiPath will help to catch these kinds of errors.

UiPath has also helped us to free up employee time. One use case that helped to free employee time was for our client that had to reset lost passwords manually. It was quite common that one of their users lost a password and needed to have it reset, so we created automation for it. The bot interacts with the Unix server to reset the password and the process is now free of manual effort.

Especially for a larger organization, time is money and if you're saving time, it's definitely saving you money. Overall, UiPath has reduced costs for our clients. 

What is most valuable?

The feature that we use the most is Studio.

Document Understanding is a good feature that is very helpful to us. We have an ongoing project that requires reading PDF files. We need to use different OCR engines and see which ones give us the correct data. Document Understanding allows you to extract the data into different types using different extractors. For example, there is an ML extractor and other types that allow you to pinpoint fields and determine which should be accepted. Based on the confidence level, it gets better every time. In this way, the feature has helped us a lot.

This is the friendliest community and forum that I have ever seen, which is something I see as added value.

What needs improvement?

I have been using UiPath for close to four years and I have worked with many of the features, but there are still some that I don't know. It is not obvious what all of the features do and it would be helpful to have more information about them.

For how long have I used the solution?

I have been using UiPath for between three and four years, since 2017.

What do I think about the stability of the solution?

UiPath is pretty stable. Over time, I have seen them add new features and I have not found anything that wasn't working.

What do I think about the scalability of the solution?

Automations are very easy to scale, regardless of what project you are working on. You don't have to think about the infrastructure, which is helpful. One of the things that make it more scalable is that we can integrate third-party tools and applications.

Our clients are expanding their scope in terms of RPA, so we expect to expand our usage. We will be looking for more use cases and developing more bots.

How are customer service and technical support?

I have been in contact with technical support and my experience was very good. They responded the same day and resolved the query.

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

Neither we nor our customers were using a different RPA solution, prior to UiPath.

I have a little bit of experience with Automation Anywhere and Blue Prism, although I have not used either of these to implement a bot for production.

The biggest differences between UiPath and these other products are user experience and ease of use. For example, with UiPath Studio, I can easily find things. Even after training on the other solutions, Uipath is still easier, which is a big plus.

How was the initial setup?

The initial setup is pretty straightforward. It was installed with the MSI installer. I have also installed the Orchestrator, both on-premises and in the cloud, and it is also straightforward.

For Studio, it takes a few minutes to install it, or uninstall and upgrade it. If you have the prerequisites and the AI settings and other configuration options decided, it will take between five and ten minutes to complete.

If you have a reasonable and straightforward process then it can be developed and pushed to production the same day that you install UiPath.

To maintain the Orchestrator and the other components, one or two people would be enough. One person might have the Orchestrator and UiPath knowledge of what settings are required, whereas another person is purely IT and can assist in that regard.  

What about the implementation team?

I have deployed this solution for a client on my own, so a single person is able to do it, without help from a third party.

What was our ROI?

Based on what my clients have saved in terms of FTEs, they are extending their scope of automation. For example, in one organization, they saved two FTEs and are now automating processes in different departments. I cannot estimate a dollar value but this saving in FTEs is their ROI. Overall, they are finding it very helpful.

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

The combination of Orchestrator and Studio is a bit on the higher side, price-wise, for some companies.

Overall, I think that the pricing is reasonable and it is similar to competitors. There are no costs in addition to the standard licensing fees.

What other advice do I have?

We have used attended automation for our clients but I have not worked with that functionality. My work has been unattended RPA tasks.

I have tried the Automation Cloud offering but only personally, for learning. The SaaS option is very good and important for some companies because it allows them to save money. Regarding the price, not every organization can afford the Orchestrator, Studio, and everything else that goes with it. These types of companies sometimes want to be service-based, rather than purchasing everything on-premises, and this SaaS offering allows them to save money doing that.

I have implemented the UiPath AI functionality in a PoC, but not in any project as of yet. It is able to handle very complex automations, including those that include third-party integrations, as well as multiple environments on remote machines. We have tried some examples using Excel, Word, and PDF activities and at the same time, interacting with SharePoint, and Microsoft CRM. We are also getting data from the Citrix environment. Applying the AI functionality, it is very much capable of accomplishing complex tasks of these types.

We have not yet used the UiPath Apps feature, although I have explored it. It is a low-code option that you can use to create apps based on where you can see and interact with data, and then use them from Orchestrator. We plan to implement it in one of our projects soon.

There is a myth that when companies develop automations, they will lose jobs. In our experience, there is nothing like that. In fact, we have hired more people since we started working with UiPath.

They have added many features in the time that I have been using UiPath. For example, the AI/ML capabilities have improved to include things like a chatbot. Document Understanding is another new feature that was added, along with an ML Extractor, and AI Center. These packages have a lot of good features that will be helpful for everyone.

The biggest lesson that I have learned from using UiPath is that there are a lot of processes in an organization that can be automated, and it is worth investing in RPA because you can reclaim that time for something more important. After using UiPath for some time, I am much better able to recognize processes that can be automated.

My advice for anybody who is thinking about implementing UiPath is definitely to go ahead with it. I recommend using it without thinking about anything else. 

I would rate this solution 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. The reviewer's company has a business relationship with this vendor other than being a customer: Partner
PeerSpot user
Senior Consultant at PricewaterhouseCoopers
Real User
Easy to use, integrates well with other applications, and is updated monthly
Pros and Cons
  • "UiPath is easy to use with very simple drag and drop functionality that allows you to automate processes without knowledge of coding."
  • "Exception handling and exception details can be much better and more user-friendly."

What is our primary use case?

Primary use cases involve the following automation environments and processes:

  1. Oil and Gas Domain: Automation of various applications specific to this domain such as Gopher, Tow, Toad, Excel, and various browsers.
  2. Finance Banking: Here we have to deal with various legacy applications with a lot of PDF and Excel-based automation. UiPath comes with a lot of reliable solutions here.
  3. Healthcare: Automation is a big challenge because the Healthcare domain is not a simple thing to automate. The ML extractor and Intelligent Automation activities are best to use here.

How has it helped my organization?

UiPath has improved the reputation of our organization in an exceptional manner. Our clients are happy with the solution that we provide them as a part of the automation. They are happy that robots are there with a helping hand, where they can learn RPA and give some time for their personal life as well.

UiPath helps them with saving their time, FTEs, and ROI.

What is most valuable?

Following are the most valuable features of UiPath:

  1. Every month, there are new features released. These are all next-level and can disrupt the automation industry.
  2. Vision for RPA and ML work together including ML skills, ML extractor, and Python activities.
  3. UiPath is easy to use with very simple drag and drop functionality that allows you to automate processes without knowledge of coding.
  4. Covering automation in all possible applications including SAP, G Suite, Salesforce, etc.

What needs improvement?

Possibility of improvement:

  1. Exception handling and exception details can be much better and more user-friendly.  Many times, details of exceptions are not understood by somebody with a non-coding background. Example "Object Reference not set to instance of object", this is the exception message that we got and log from UiPath. For a developer it makes some sense and meaning but for a SME or User it is very complicated to understand the meaning if this exception
  2. User interface in the coding area can be better and more compact: Some times expanding seq. cause the code to look very big and difficult to undertsand the scope of container

For how long have I used the solution?

I have been using the UiPath Platform for automating various processes for the past three years.

How are customer service and technical support?

It is extremely awesome. customer service/technical support used to assist with in an hour of raising services issue ticket on portal

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

Automation Anywhere

We switched to UiPath as it provides a lot of functionality than another tool in market

Which deployment model are you using for this solution?

Hybrid Cloud

If public cloud, private cloud, or hybrid cloud, which cloud provider do you use?

Disclosure: I am a real user, and this review is based on my own experience and opinions.
PeerSpot user
Web Developer at USDA
Real User
User friendly and can batch process a lot of the hands-on manual work that nobody wants to do
Pros and Cons
  • "It's accessible, but also has enough features for more hands-on developers to be able to do what they need to do. From the two that I've seen, it was the more user-friendly one."
  • "When you're nesting certain workflows, it can get a little complicated as you start getting deeper."

What is our primary use case?

At Forest Service, we have a massive onboarding season. Because our primary mission is to combat forest fires, we have a huge intake of firefighters that we hire every season. Because of that, there's a lot of onboarding material that needs to be processed through HR, literally tens of thousands of people in such a short amount of time. I can see, potentially, RPA being able to help with some of the manual work that we do.

It's probably the best bang for our buck, but there are certainly other use cases potentially. That is the area that I'm more familiar with, though.

How has it helped my organization?

UiPath can batch process a lot of the hands-on manual work that nobody wants to do. I think that's probably its best value. That said, it does kind of highlight the need for standardized processes, which can be challenging at times, specifically in our space. Just having formalized documentation about what the end-to-end process should be is key. Once that's standardized, then it's a lot easier to leverage UiPath for automation.

What is most valuable?

Having looked at other RPA software, I think UiPath is the most user-friendly. At the same time, it's robust enough to customize and get into the source code. It's accessible, but also has enough features for more hands-on developers to be able to do what they need to do. From the two that I've seen, it was the more user-friendly one.

I have used UiPath's Academy for some of the foundational level training, not the more advanced ones. I think I had some feedback at the time. It's been a few months since I've taken it. Overall it was pretty good.

What needs improvement?

I feel like it's pretty good as it is. One thing I would change is when you're nesting certain workflows, it can get a little complicated as you start getting deeper. For example, if you have multiple blocks that need to live inside each other, and you're using a library to drag stuff or just insert it, it can be very challenging from a visual level to see what level it's in or how deeply nested it is. It's hard to roll it up into a parent level display. So, that's a little confusing sometimes. I guess, if there's any way to improve that, I think that would be helpful.

I think UiPath uses VBScript. If there were some kind of library of common things that developers could use, that would be helpful, but it's not a big deal. You can just Google that stuff. Making something like that accessible would be nice, but I don't think it's crucial.

What do I think about the scalability of the solution?

The big question on my end is just how to scale and keep things stabilized. This is such a new technology for us, that there's a lot of questions around it. I think, being able to answer that would be helpful. I don't really know the answer.

How are customer service and technical support?

I don't know about technical support. We were talking to a developer that was helping us at the time just to walk us through. Our experience with the developer was good. They have a very knowledgeable staff. They're very eager to help us figure stuff out. All in all, it was a positive experience.

How was the initial setup?

The setup, at least from the local side, makes sense. This could be just more of my experience since my expertise in UiPath is not as high as it could be. I'm not super familiar with how Orchestrator is deployed and managed, in terms of multiple bots and scheduling, but that's probably a limitation more on my end then with UiPath.

What about the implementation team?

We are currently in the research stage. It's more like proof of concept work. Right now, it's really about convincing people that this is a technology to look at and pay attention to. We are trying to convince the people with the authority that this is a good way to invest.

I have local test environments that I've used personally. At Forest Service, they're very visually oriented. If you talk to them about it, they won't get it. They need to see it to believe it. So, I've been trying to do that locally in my own environment. I have been building use cases that I think are parallel to what we're trying to do, to demonstrate the value.

Which other solutions did I evaluate?

We looked at a couple of alternatives. Automation Anywhere was one of them. I haven't looked at the other ones, since we chose UiPath pretty early on, having heard about them previously. We also considered some others like Pega and a few others.

What other advice do I have?

Automation technology is non-existent in our company currently, but definitely something that should be leveraged for. I think there's a lot of value in being able to free up people from doing small repetitive tasks and just be more strategic focused. The challenge, really, is just convincing people that they're not going to lose their jobs. We need to show them that we're freeing up their time to be more valuable. The challenge is just educating people about what it actually is.

I would rate this solution as eight out of ten. I think it's going a lot of places. It's definitely more advanced than some of the other ones that I've seen. UiPath is probably the best one that we've seen so far.

My advice is to make sure you have your processes documented before you try to fix something that can't be fixed through robotic process automation. At a fundamental level, your organization needs to be ready for it. It's not a magic bullet to fix stuff that's confusing at your organization level. But, if you have it straight and documented and you're doing high volume amounts of it then you should use this to free up people's time and make them do better work. I think it would be useful.

Disclosure: I am a real user, and this review is based on my own experience and opinions.
PeerSpot user
Buyer's Guide
Download our free UiPath Report and get advice and tips from experienced pros sharing their opinions.
Updated: December 2024
Buyer's Guide
Download our free UiPath Report and get advice and tips from experienced pros sharing their opinions.