UiPath Reviews

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

I've been using the solution for 18 months.

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

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

It's on multiple platforms like Oracle EBS and other IT applications. We have a few of the local government applications that the client uses. We have worked on multiple use cases with all of these applications. All of the client's major work is all through Oracle EBS. We have finance-related use cases. They have Seabridge applications, which are one of the applications that we are automating using UiPath.

Oracle itself has been very helpful when using this solution, thanks to the redundant task they've currently defined. All those are being automated. We mostly use the UiPath Assistant, Video, and Orchestrator. These are the only three products that we use day-in and day-out for our clients.

The ease of building automation using UiPath is great. It technically provides good features in order to develop, automating different kinds of applications using UiPath.

UiPath enables you to implement end-to-end automation, starting with process analysis, then robot building, and finally monitoring automation. It's usually very important. In some regulation cases, redundant cases, it’s been very useful. Instead of avoiding human intervention digitally, we are utilizing the UiPath to build up automation and run those in unattended mode.

If we could use the UiPath Apps feature, it would increase the number of automation and reduce the time it takes to create them. That said, at this time, I do not use this aspect of the solution.

UiPath has reduced human error in some cases. For example, a client has monthly payroll activities, which have to be done for multiple entities and in multiple in order to ensure the reports to be pretty good. It's a huge asset, having these multiple entities. It takes a lot of time for a human to execute the task. Here, automation plays a key role and it creates everything automatically through unattended mode. Of course, when a human is involved, there are chances for errors, such as missing the entities and updating the parameters. All of these things are instead being taken care of by automation. The likelihood of error is removed when the human intervention is.

The product has freed up employee time. It’s likely freed up more than a day, an average of 12 hours at least. That’s 12 hours per day. It allows our employees to focus on more high-value work.

We do use the Apps feature, however, it hasn't really helped reduce any workload. Everything is dependent upon the client's local language, which is Arabic. That is the major reason why we could not implement or utilize much of the Apps. It's not able to recognize Arabic versions properly. That is the challenging area which we are observing currently.

The solution is helpful in terms of speeding up or reducing the cost of digital transformation for our clients, however, the license cost is a little high. We are facing some challenges in the form of money. The license is costly. 

While employees can now focus on more high-value work, I would not go so far as to say it has improved employee satisfaction.

In UiPath, we have multiple products and recently there have been many product videos. There are videos around customization, deployment, et cetera. are all scattered all over. There are different products and different server setups and various other things, however, it is not organized. If it was simplified, it would be much better.

It could be more user-friendly. There are so many offerings and configurations and customizations that make things a bit complicated. Streamlining it would be ideal.

There are a few small things that should be included in UiPath. There are a few, although I can’t remember all. One, for example, is, when we are sending an email, we should be able to set up options and customize it a little bit. At this point, we need to create custom code and then go through APIs if we want to customize. It should be a built-in functionality, however.

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

Stability-wise UiPath is good, however, it releases twice yearly. Therefore it will be a little hard for people to upgrade in-house each and every time. Clients also question why it's necessary every six months to upgrade. It won't be reasonable for the management. Every time when an upgrade is available, we have to complete the regulation for the previous use cases and whatever we already have deployed at production. 

When redeploying, everything is kind of a hectic task. Once in a year is okay, however, multiple releases in a year is a bit much. Clients would not be aware that yearly this many releases are happening and every release will have something more to add, that there are changes. Having to adapt to changes is something that is very difficult to make the client understand.

The solution can scale. 

You can use the application to automate any kind of application or any kind of use case. A few of them require some customization, using other technologies. 

Already we have some 25 bots running in production and a few of them are about to deploy to production and the client is looking for some more use cases. We are looking into a few more use cases that are in the discussion stage as of now. We are increasing our use cases and expanding usage.

The technical support is very helpful, however, there have been cases where we have had some urgent issues and support seems to move at its own pace. They won't rush for you. They don't seem to understand our concerns and they seem to only focus on their own timelines. 

Our SLA expectations are not always matching theirs. Even when we mark something as urgent, still there's a timeline of two to three hours. In that time it'll be hard to hold on.

Our clients did not use a different RPA solution before UiPath.

I do not have any other RPA solution experience beyond UiPath.

I am the solution architect who setups.

I was working on the 2018 version of UiPath. The 2018 and 2019 versions are very easy and very straightforward. There were not many changes or many complications in order to set up or upgrade. However, when it comes to 2020, from 2020 onwards it's very complicated.

Now there is an IAS. There is no connection string update. We cannot update any connection strings, and yet we could in the 2019 version. From 2020 we're not able to do the changes at all unless we go further and do another upgrade or something like that.

Earlier it was straightforward. Maybe there was a little bit of conflict, fine, however, now that it's split into multiple things with a conflict DLL file, orchestrated DLL file, identity server file, then an app setting the adjacent file. That is gathered completely into all of these things, where until and unless you have both end-to-end documentation understanding, you cannot go ahead and do anything.

On top of that, there is the SSL certificate. Until 2019 we didn't require each and every robot or a development machine to have the same SSL certificate. Now, we have to export and import to all the machines and add the user's perspective.

From the licensing perspective, licenses were straight, and there was no migration required for the license to be utilized in any of the versions. From 2020, there is a license migration required from the UiPath end. We now need to contact UiPath for that in order to get this migration done.

All of these changes, as well as the identity server database creation, everything has a kind of impact on the ease of deployment.

Upgrading doesn't take much time, however, users deploying the solution should have a ton of knowledge about each one of the steps. They need to remember everything in order to perform the upgrade or else something might be missed. Even if you miss one step you will have to spend hours and hours in order to rectify that.

For the 2020 version, for the initial deployment, I did not actually do it from scratch. I just upgraded. That said, if a user wanted to do it, I would estimate it takes more than a day to complete.

The implementation strategy depends upon the requirements of the client. For example, if it is on-premises versus if it is on cloud and/or if the client is looking for Elasticsearch or Insights or test automation, et cetera. All of these things will be dependent on the other. If you ask for Insights, you need to have an extra server setup for that. The same thing follows with the test automation and SQL database. What we call roles and responsibilities also will be dependent.

The unattended licenses are a little costly. That's the challenging part for us. That said, with the continuous support to the client, as we are increasing the use cases, it will lessen the cost probably by the middle of next year. At least, that’s what we are hoping for. We hope to see an ROI then.

The license cost is a little high. Unattended modes are really costly. If it's not as costly, then we could propose and purchase the licenses. Of course, we get discounts from UiPath, however, just for 10 bots, not even 10, if we load 5 to 10 unattended bots within the production orchestrator with the three development licenses, we have to pay for them twice. I'm not sure how much it is exactly in terms of the dollars, however.

My company does not have a business relationship with UiPath.

We do not use UiPath in a contact center environment.

We use completely unattended automation. 

We do not use attended automation at this time, or AI, although we are aware those are options. We're looking forward to AI and it is part of the reason we recently upgraded to the 2020.10 version.

It's one of the best tools where you can work for automation. If you have more redundant work, then it is very helpful.

Except for this upgrade and installation initial steps, apart from that, the solution is pretty easy to use.

I would rate the solution at an eight out of ten.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

The technical support is very responsive.

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.

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.

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.

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. 

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.

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.

I have worked on two UiPath use cases. The first use case is for the IT Infrastructure team for submitting server requests. They receive a request from a third-party portal through email, and then my bot reads the email and fills in the details in the company portal.

The second use case is the data extraction from Word documents. The team receives Word documents with some important contract information. I extract those paragraphs and put them in the CSV format given by the customer.

We are using UiPath Studio 2020.10.2, and the Orchestrator version is 2019.

I heard about UiPath RPA in December 2019, and I went to the UiPath Academy website and completed their learning plans. Till March 2020, there was free certification, and I completed the free certification and kept on practicing. I showcased my skills to the management in my company, and I got into RPA projects. The certification has helped me in getting good projects. It has also helped me with my work for the use cases. My position is now better as compared to the previous years, and my work is also good. 

They provide end-to-end solutions. They have UiPath Studio for the development, and they have Orchestrator for package deployment. We can also monitor the performance and execution in Orchestrator. All these are helping us in managing end-to-end automation.

All UI automation activities in UiPath Studio and REFramework are useful. UiPath Orchestrator is also valuable. These features help me a lot in my projects. 

UiPath Studio's UI automation activities help me in easily developing automation. It is difficult for RPA developers to write complex code because no one knows everything about all automation areas. For UI automation, it is not mandatory for a developer to know how to write the code for the element on the screen that needs to be clicked or typed into. The UI automation packages of UiPath provide built-in activities, and developers can directly drag and drop and indicate the element on the screen that needs to be clicked or typed into. 

REFramework is a template using which we can prepare quality workflows for the transactional processes. It has very good error handling, retry, and logging mechanisms.

We can monitor robots in Orchestrator. We can check logs, monitor the performance of each robot, and divide robots into different environments. These features are very helpful for me in managing my work. If I have two or three robots on a set of machines and I want to define my process only for these robots, I can add that process into the environment. My process will be executed only on those robots. This is a good functionality.

For every transaction, there is the queue functionality in Orchestrator. I can go to a queue and add each transaction item to the queue. For every transaction, I can check the logs. I can also check their logs based on the jobs executed. We also have triggers, so we can schedule our jobs with the help of triggers. These features are helping me a lot in managing the performance of my robot and understanding how my robot is performing.

They have UiPath Forum where I can ask any questions. Many UiPath Most Valuable Professionals are on that forum, and they help us a lot. We get quick replies. If anyone is having any challenges, they post their challenges on the UiPath Forum. I can go through them, and if they are already solved, I gain knowledge by reading those solutions. If not, I try to answer them. In addition to gaining the knowledge, I'm getting some visibility in the UiPath Forum. All these things have really helped me a lot in increasing my technical level and expertise and getting good work.

UiPath Studio supports three types of workflows: sequence, flowchart, and state machine. Flowchart and state machine are good. Sequences are also good, and they're for linear workflows. However, in a sequence, as we keep on dragging and dropping the reusable components, the size of the screen increases. If we drag and drop the conditional or looping activities on the site, the screen size increases in length and breadth, and it becomes too complex for a developer to navigate between activities. 

All programming languages, such as C, Java, Python, or Visual Basic, have script-level support. So, we can reuse their functions because they support scripting. For example, if we want to use any reusable components, Python has modules, and there is a way to import packages. For complex automations, if we can write a script, it makes it easy to manage and know the line on which we are getting a syntax error or a runtime error and how is the structure. If I want to modify the logic, it makes it easier to know in which block I need to make the changes. So, it is easy to navigate in the program. Instead of the drag-and-drop blocks, UiPath should have support for scripts such as VBScript and PowerShell. It should support scripting even for complex automation.

The user interface for logging should be improved in Orchestrator. Currently, the logs in Orchestrator show how many hours ago the execution is completed, but it doesn't say how much time it took for a particular execution to complete. It just gives you a rough idea that it started three hours or one hour ago. It doesn't tell you exactly when a particular execution started, and at what time, it stopped. To get a clear idea, I need to click one more button and go to the details of the log. I need to check the start time of the first log and the end time of the last log in the same job, and then I need to calculate the difference to know the exact time it took for completing the job. Instead of doing all that, there should be a column that gives me the exact amount of time in minutes and seconds. It will help me in understanding how much time each execution took and what I should do to improve the speed of the execution.

In my current project, there are no intelligent automation requirements, but I have learned it recently. Just today, I completed the UiPath AI Center course. I also have some basic knowledge of machine learning. They're giving us options to use the out-of-the-box models developed by UiPath and their third-party vendors. With our internal data science, we can also develop our models, integrate them through UiPath AI Center, and deploy them. They're giving us an option to use them as a part of our RPA workflows with the help of the UiPath Studio activity called ML Skill. So, it becomes very easy for RPA developers to integrate machine learning models into their automation workflows, which is very nice, but I feel there should be some more improvement. They should give more visibility into how much time a model takes to finish the training and on how many algorithms it is running. They should also give visibility into which algorithm is best suited for my requirement and which algorithm is giving the best results for my requirement. If they can also give such insights in the same UiPath AI Center, it will help me in picking up the correct model and algorithm for my requirements.

When it comes to intelligent automation, machines use machine learning. No machine learning model can reach 100% accuracy or give 100% accurate output, which is a limitation. However, there is a possibility to increase the accuracy by tuning the parameters. So, UiPath should give more visibility into their models, how the pipeline is running in the AI center, and which factors can improve the accuracy of my model. Such insights will be useful for me in improving the accuracy of my intelligent automation.

In December 2019, I started learning UiPath, and I became an RPA developer in November 2020.

Until now, I have seen good uptime. There were no disruptions in data. I've seen the services running properly 99% of the time. Their logging mechanism, job schedules are also running properly in Orchestrator. So, it is a stable environment.

We're getting good support from UiPath. I would rate them 75 out of 100. Most of the time, I get fast and good replies from the support team. Sometimes, I receive late replies, or they don't understand the question properly, and I need to explain multiple times, but they are mostly good. 

I have worked on different IT process automation tools in the past. Their support did not respond as fast as UiPath's support, and they put the tickets in the suspended mode for a long time. They also didn't understand the question a lot of times and took too much time to analyze the issue. 

I also have the advantage of talking to my Infra team because we've deployed it on-premise. They can act as the first level of support and check if there is anything wrong with the on-premise server. If it is related to UiPath functionality, then we raise a ticket with UiPath support.

It was already set up when I moved to this team. I was working in IT process automation, and I moved to the UiPath development team. The setup and licenses of UiPath Orchestrator are managed by our Infra team members. They provided me with the licenses and links to the UiPath Orchestrator. So, I make use of the resources already deployed by my team. I just build and publish the packages to UiPath Orchestrator.

I have not deployed anything in the live environment, so I cannot comment about the return on investment. I've seen my colleagues deploying it, and with the help of data automation use cases, they have reduced around 10 hours per month for each support team. For my use case, we will be able to reduce at least one or two FTE for the support team when it goes live. I'm able to predict this because I have developed and tested many test cases for my use cases.

I only know about the community version. They give us two robots as a part of the community version, and they are enough for my practice and personal automations. For the office work, my Infra team checks the licenses needed for a particular use case, and my management team manages the pricing and licenses. 

Nine times out of ten, I would recommend others to use UiPath. I have also worked on other IT process automation tools, and none of them provides the functionality, support, and community like UiPath. I had conducted a survey on LinkedIn and asked about the RPA tool that people preferred. I got 60% of the votes for UiPath.

From the development perspective, I've seen a lot of improvement in the UiPath services in the last one year. They're giving more out-of-the-box models for the AI Center, and they are also improving their courses. They are also introducing new functionalities such as the orchestration processes in which you can use persistent activities, and your robot can wait for the human task to finish, and then it can continue its job. If they make any enhancements required for our current automation, we will make use of new UiPath functionalities to enhance our automation.

They have released two new versions of their certifications. One is UiPath Associate Certification, and the other one is UiPath RPA Developer Advanced Certification. I have completed the Associate certification. For these certifications, we have learning plans. There is recommended training, and everything is given on the UiPath Certification Program website. We have the option to check their recommended training and do the practices. They also guide us about how to book the exam from the Pearson website. Going through the recommended training and doing the Associate certification has increased my credibility. I've gained more trust in the company. It has changed my career. So, UiPath has played a prominent role in my career.

It can reduce errors by 100% because a machine can give 100% accuracy and work faster than humans. Just like all RPA tools, UiPath can provide 100% automation accuracy for rule-based automation. You also get better speed because machines are faster than humans. When it comes to intelligent automation, machines use machine learning, so there is a limitation. No machine learning model can reach 100% accuracy in automation.

I would rate UiPath an eight out of 10. 

I started my RPA journey as a developer, and I first heard about UiPath as a low-code, drag-and-drop automation platform. Back then, it was very much in the beginning stages of its development. Ever since then, I've seen it evolve quite fast. I would say even faster than other RPA platforms that I've used, in just a few years.

Thinking back to when I first started using it, there are many new features and updates and it's my preferred platform for RPA.

We primarily used unattended automation, where you deploy the bots to work autonomously. This is unattended, end-to-end automation with no human in the loop, other than providing the inputs or checking the outputs.

We have several use cases, but our main one is reducing manual work. The processes that require a lot of manual input and have a lot of human error are the focus. That could be, for instance, processes that have to do with invoicing, billing, reporting, and coding, which require a lot of man-hours, are very reliant on a human being available, and are time-sensitive. Those are the ones that are on the top list to be automated.

Beyond that, I can't specifically talk about the processes that we've automated.

UiPath helps to implement end-to-end automation, although the discovery of processes, gathering requirements, and creating the design, all happen outside of UiPath. But the development, which is developing the bots, then testing and then deploying them, does happen end-to-end within UiPath.

The end-to-end development capability is important, but this is because every tool offers this and it is expected. That said, there is definitely room for improvement in that end-to-end should include process discovery. It is end-to-end, but those ends can extend further than what it currently is. In that sense, it's no different than other RPA tools.

Another way that UiPath improves the way our organization functions is that the robots can run 24/7. If you think about a human workforce, they work eight hours a day, they take days off, they get sick, they leave, and they take knowledge with them once they leave the company. But, the robots can be run non-stop 24/7, and each process can be scaled up. The same process can be run by one bot, or it can be run by 10 or 100 bots. This means that there's a lot more flexibility that the bots bring, especially for high-volume processes that perhaps even have some peaks, such as an end-of-month rush to produce invoices or meet a deadline or an end-of-financial-year crunch.

These robots have an easier time addressing and variability when it comes to volume. They really create a lot more scalability to where businesses can grow and know that they can meet the demands of the future. So, they're a lot more future-proof, whereas people are harder to rely on.

Speaking from a business perspective, it's the FTE savings. A company obviously needs to spend money on UiPath licenses and development costs, but those costs are oftentimes lower than the cost of that FTE, the full-time employee, whose work is getting automated. If you purely just think about the financial benefits, it's the lower staffing costs.

There is also the ability to free up people. This means that even if people aren't replaced and their salary isn't saved, what they can do is pivot their focus to, for instance, be a lot more customer-facing or do a lot more strategic or creative tasks that perhaps get pushed to the side because there's not a lot of time allocated towards performing them. Now, FTEs have a lot more capacity to contribute and perform tasks that still to this day cannot be automated, like creative thinking, complex decision-making on the spot, strategy, and just human interaction.

In the beginning, employees meet automation with a critical eye. They're thinking, "Well, what's going on? Why are these robots coming in? Are we going to work alongside them? How is this going to work?" But to be honest, in the end, there are winners and losers. What I mean by that is that some jobs are replaced, and that's just simply because of that FTE saving that is usually the driver to justify the cost of development. But on the flip-side, the employees that do stay and do work alongside the bots are usually a lot happier because they have to juggle a lot fewer things.

The robots are there to make people feel like people and not like robots, where they just do the same thing over and over and don't enjoy their job or don't enjoy what they do. A robot takes that away and helps people enjoy their work a lot more because they can do non-repetitive tasks. They can be a lot more customer-facing and perhaps build stronger relationships with their customers, know them better, and have more time available to work on other projects or work on other things that they may never have had the time to do.

In our organization, the robots work on multiple projects. The amount of employee time that is freed up depends on the project and what you are automating, but a pretty good estimate would be a 20% to 40% savings.

With respect to the reduction of problems related to human error, the fact of the matter is that some employees, whether you like it or not, are more error-prone. By automating a process, we were able to standardize it, and therefore, identify the cause of the human error and remove it by replacing the process with a robot that makes a more reliable judgment in terms of action. It is literally just an if-else statement. It's a lot easier to quantify and therefore it's a lot easier to evaluate, and therefore the result is a lot more reliable. Whereas with an employee, let's say the output of their work is a lot more unreliable simply because they could be working on 10 different things on the same day. There could be a deadline approaching, and the quality of work fluctuates with an employee because of it.

With a robot, you will notice that over time, in fact, the quality improves, and that's just the basic truth of RPA. It doesn't happen automatically, and it does require work. It happens because you see the results of the automation and you see areas for improvement, ultimately leading you to make adjustments. You iterate on the RPA solution and make it better over time.

Although it does not improve automatically, through a conscious effort you can be a lot more confident in the output and then be able to see unbiased results at the end of the day. Part of these results is your exception rates, which can be errors. It can be failures, whether technical in nature or decision-making business rule types of errors. Then, you can adjust your process to where it can positively improve that exception rate, and just iterate on that to where it becomes acceptable. Moreover, it's quite stable, which is not the case with the human workforce.

The automation cloud Orchestrator has its benefits and negative sides. The benefit is the fact that it's web-based. A person who has the login credentials can access it without the necessity to have something installed. The development and the monitoring of the bots are separated in UiPath, where the development happens in the Studio and the monitoring happens in the Orchestrator.

In other tools like Blue Prism, it happens in the same place. I've used both, and the Orchestrator is nice. It has a very nice UI, it's user-friendly, it has a lot of features, and I find it quite easy to use. For example, you can see all of the machines, you can see the robots, and you can schedule them. If the business wants to see a lot more across the output of the Work Queue, they can have that visibility from Orchestrator, which is great.

The downside of Orchestrator is the package deployment, which is perhaps another minus of UiPath in general. The deployment of a new package does not take a long time, but there are a lot of steps. It's not an intuitive process. If you have to release a lot of packages, which does occur, especially in the early stage of deployment, when you are releasing hotfixes, or when something goes wrong and you need to redeploy a fix really quickly to minimize business impact, it does slow you down.

I wish it would be just one or two clicks, rather than the whole importing or exporting and connecting to the desktop application and everything that accompanies it. I wish it were a lot easier. Again, it has its upsides but it's not perfect.

The best feature in UiPath is their robotic enterprise framework because that is an inbuilt processing framework for utilizing their work queues. It's plug-and-play, and already pre-built to where you don't have to start from scratch. It's enterprise-grade and ready to be used. All you need to do is populate your dispatcher, create a queue, create a performer, and you're good to go.

The highest benefit of it is that it's just there, ready to use, and you don't need to start from a blank screen. You don't have to figure out, for example, how to create an environment where the robots can check if there's anything in the queue to be worked on. The framework is already there. The other tools that I've used, like Blue Prism, don't have that built-in quite as well.

My perspective and overview are from that of a developer, and I find that the recorder feature is really good. This is because UiPath lets you record your actions on the screen. So, if you want to interact with a web-based interface, for example, then you have UiPath record your actions and then build the activities that you would need in order to replicate those actions through the robot. It makes it a lot better and although it's not perfect and it does need to be reviewed and adjusted, it speeds up development quite a bit. This is especially true when it's basic back development like populating fields and clicking buttons and navigating on a web.

Compared to other RPA tools that I have used, something that stands out to me in UiPath is that it has a very extensive library of activities. Those activities are easy to search for and use.

When you are writing code, there is a feature called IntelliSense, which autocompletes your code. More specifically, when you're typing code, if you're starting to type the name of a variable, it will show you all of the variables available and you can just click them. It's very interactive and it's reminiscent of the Microsoft Visual Studio environment, both from the UI perspective and the coding perspective. This means that developers that are familiar with Visual Studio will probably feel right at home using UiPath. It's very developer-friendly and it's geared towards appealing to existing developers.

The UiPath Academy courses definitely help in the process of bringing employees up to speed. The Academy is the go-to place for UiPath learning and I think that other RPA tools are copying this model of disseminating knowledge, being a lot more open with training, making it freely available, and providing an online classroom. These are things that UiPath has always done, and it certainly helps new developers get upskilled in RPA, and specifically with UiPath.

When it comes to ease of use, UiPath is intuitive insofar as the basic features have a low learning curve. However, if you want to take full advantage of what UiPath can do, and if organizations want to create more sophisticated automation solutions, it is more difficult. For instance, automations involving back-end access, maybe writing directly to databases such as SQL or using API, that's a steep learning curve. In fact, I think the learning curve is exponential.

If you just want to make a robot that sends an email, that's really easy to do. But, if you really want tangible benefits, like if you really want something that solves a business problem, it is a huge learning curve and it takes a while to master. Obviously, it does have that low-code requirement, but I would say that's only for entry automation projects, like proof-of-concept or something along those lines. For something that really solves a business problem, you would need code, because that just makes it a lot more robust and a lot more powerful if you can custom-code certain steps of the process.

Features for process discovery would improve the end-to-end development capabilities.

From a developer's point of view, my biggest struggle with UiPath is debugging. The debug mode in UiPath feels clunky and it is a sore spot. It feels it's hard to control the flow of the process. There are a lot of internal errors and it's not intuitive. In general, debugging is not a good experience and I don't enjoy doing it. In contrast, Blue Prism has better debugging capabilities.

Blue Prism is a little more dynamic; you can adjust variables, you can jump around the flow, and it's easier to control. With UiPath, it's a little bit of a nightmare. It becomes harder to debug the bigger your automation is, because it's quite unpredictable, and it's quite unstable. Definitely, if debugging was improved, I would say UiPath would get 11 out of 10.

Something that I noticed recently is that they have moved to paid certification for developers, whereas it used to have free certification. This is a little bit outside of the platform itself but the pain point here from my perspective is that there is a barrier to entry for new RPA developers, or ones that want to renew their certification. It has become a lot harder and that used to be a differentiator for UiPath. It had a very strong online learning offering and it offered no-charge recertification on top. This is now very similar to what other tools are doing and I see that as a negative.

My first introduction to UiPath was in early 2018 or late 2017.

The robots could be a lot more stable, which is another area for improvement. The stability issue with UiPath is a prominent one, especially in comparison to other tools like Blue Prism. I feel that there are a lot of errors that are caused by the UiPath framework, as opposed to the robot design. Sometimes it's just very unreliable and crashes unexpectedly, which creates serious issues in terms of reliability. In early deployment, it always happens that it's very late nights, and there's a lot of babysitting processes. The robots need it because you never know what's going to crash.

In comparison with other RPA tools, it is average when it comes to reliability. I would rate other tools a little bit easier to manage expectations as to what you can reasonably expect to go wrong, and what you can reasonably expect to break. With UiPath, our developers, even our experienced ones, oftentimes get errors that we've never seen in our lifetime. This is partly due to the flexibility of UiPath, with it being so easy to adapt to all types of applications and all types of environments and it being so malleable. It is one of the most versatile tools; it's industry agnostic, platform-agnostic, and tool-agnostic, but that flexibility creates a lot more room for error in the code. It means that a lot more things can break or interfere with each other, compared to other platforms that are perhaps more niche and more targeted in what they're actually trying to solve.

UiPath is definitely scalable. It is modular, where you build a workflow and that can be reused across multiple robots or multiple processes. Those processes can then be run by one, two, three, five, and 100 bots, provided that they can work concurrently in the same environment, performing the same process. It's wonderful and the scalability is uncapped. If you have licenses, then you can use them, which is great.

The only limits are how many licenses are you willing to buy, and the inherent limits of your own infrastructure and your own process. It comes down to how many robots can realistically work concurrently in the same infrastructure and in the same network without breaking it.

We have approximately 20 developers who use UiPath. We have business users, but it is difficult for me to say how many there are.

I have been in contact with technical support, and I have experienced submitting a support ticket to them. I even got on a call with them and they were very helpful. We had been having issues with automating a platform and we wanted to get their specific insight as to what was going wrong. It had to do with UiPath not being able to extract selectors from that specific interface.

I was really surprised because they spent the time to not only address my ticket and answer my questions, but also to allocate time to schedule a meeting, and really look into the platform via screen share. I was sharing the screen with them and showing them what was happening, and they really looked into it and gave it a lot of attention.

I understand they get a lot of tickets, and I really felt they provided a good answer. They responded really fast, I would say within 24 hours, and we began exchanging details through a back and forth conversation.

They provided me with the outcome that I was happy with. It was a very good experience.

In addition to UiPath, we used Blue Prism and Automation Anywhere. UiPath is king here, and I rarely hear anything about the other two. I would estimate that we use UiPath 95% of the time, perhaps even 99%.

The alternative to UiPath that I am more familiar with is Blue Prism. From my perspective, UiPath is geared towards developers. The audience towards which it's skewed is the developer or the technical person. Blue Prism is geared more towards business people. It's geared towards converting business people, including SMEs and subject matter experts that know the process well, into developers. You will find that the language that each program uses is one that's geared towards the target market. Consequently, UiPath uses a lot of developer language and developer concepts.

For example, UiPath works similarly to the Visual Studio Environment. Blue Prism, on the other hand, uses a lot of flowcharting visuals, as well as the language that it uses for the same concept. It's going to use a definition that's more from a business process flowcharting realm. Recently, both platforms are converging onto each other and I feel like they're becoming more and more similar, but they still have a few things that are different.

One thing that stands out for me is that Blue Prism has wonderful debugging. It's a lot better than UiPath, and it's an all-in-one tool where the monitoring and the building of the robots happen in one application. The deployment is also really easy.

Blue Prism also offers online learning, which is great. They didn't use to have that offering, and I think that they got a lot of inspiration from UiPath. Their online courses have been great because previously when I was learning RPA, I had to use YouTube. Now, they have a whole Blue Prism university, which is amazing.

Blue Prism has inbuilt version control and a lot of other great features. They have a heavy emphasis on security and encryption, which UiPath perhaps needs to improve on. Companies such as banks, insurance agencies, and finance agencies are a lot more interested in Blue Prism because of its very strong security protocols. The encryption offering is a key requirement for companies that work with a lot of sensitive personal data.

I have never been involved in the initial setup, although my understanding is that it's quite a journey.

The areas of the organization with the most ROI from UiPath are operations, finance, HR, and sales. Those are the key departments, although it's across every organization because those departments have a lot of manual work-intensive processes that are the first contenders for automation.

We have a yearly licensing model that gives us access to the development and production environments. The cost of licensing is expensive.

Part of automation is the analysis and optimization of processes because the analysis phase is a by-product of wanting to automate a task. If you want to automate something, you have to break it down into parts and really look at it and think, "How can I reduce this into a series of business rules, a series of decisions, or series of steps?" It's an exercise of process optimization in and of itself because a good practice in automation is to not just take what it is and automate it, but to think, "Does what is currently in place actually work? How can it be improved? How can it be streamlined? How can it be done in fewer steps?" It's a good chance to practice some process review, improvement, and transformation.

The idea is to make it optimal because the current process usually has unquestioned practices that maybe haven't been reviewed for a very long time. A lot of businesses say, "We've always done it this way," and they've never thought to revisit the approach. RPA gives you an opportunity to think about whether what you've always been doing will work when it's being done by a robot. Most often, the processes get streamlined through the requirements gathering phase, understanding the as-is, and then a key part of that is doing the process design, which is the to-be vision.

During that time, processes go through a few design iterations where they are optimized and streamlined because we want the robots to be as efficient as possible. This means performing as few steps as possible without sacrificing value and efficiency. It is important because any inefficiencies in a robot are going to scale with the number of times you're going to run that process. If you run a process a thousand times, and let's say there exists inefficiency that results in an extra minute being used, that could be shed if you were to review and optimize that process.

Ultimately, optimization is an important exercise because the benefits include a further capacity to run more automated processes, and less time is taken up by inefficient steps.

Something to be aware of is that updates to the platform have to be managed because any update could impact the performance of a bot that was built with an earlier version. To avoid having a newer version impact the performance of something that was built previously, all of the updates need to go through a due diligence process.

The biggest lesson that I have learned from UiPath is surprising; not everything needs to be automated. It feels weird to say it because thinking, "Well, I have this platform, I have these bots, why not just automate absolutely everything?", but the truth is that there are things that can be streamlined outside of RPAs. Also, some processes can be automated through other means. Consider the very simple example of sending automated emails, or sorting out your inbox by putting the right email in the right folder, those types of things can be done with email rules rather than RPA.

If a platform already has some sort of inbuilt automation, whether that's a social media platform, email platform, networking platform, or any other type of platform, it's always better to explore that first before looking to solve that problem with RPA. There are times when an Excel Macro or an email rule will be a lot faster and a lot more cost-efficient. RPA should be directed towards big-ticket items, big problems, and large volumes to where no existing solution would provide the same level of value.

My advice for anybody who is considering UiPath is to try it out for themselves. The most beautiful thing is when companies take the leap to have a very small citizen developer team, where they upskill a few technically-minded people with free courses and try to build a small proof of concept to see if RPA is the right path for them. I really encourage that sort of curiosity and experimentation because all of the resources are out there and anybody can learn, as long as they're driven and passionate and curious about automation. I would really encourage people just to give it a try and see what comes out of it.

In our organization, UiPath is the number one RPA tool. Being close to the industry as a developer, and I do feel like it's the preferred tool, at least where I'm based in Australia. It is definitely the preferred RPA solution on the market. Our usage is definitely going to increase in the future. I feel like the future is bright for UiPath. That said, it isn't perfect.

I would rate this solution a nine out of ten.

We are a small but global company. We are about 1,200 people. We are a logistics company, and most of our employees work in our warehouses. So, our office workers are somewhere between 400 to 500 across the globe. Being a logistics company, we are maybe a little bit old-fashioned. There are a lot of papers going back and forth, and we are trying to automate different scenarios. We cater provisions to ships, so we are basically a grocery store for ships. 

One important thing is when a ship is going into port somewhere, they put in an order for whatever provisions they need for when they leave port again. So, we need to be quick at expediting their orders. When they put in a request for a quote for whatever products they need, we need to respond very quickly, because the tendency is that whoever responds first gets the order. So, we want to do that. We are trying to sort of increase the speed of those types of operations as well as the quality of them. 

It is hard to really pinpoint what it is we are doing, but it's the communication between customers. When we receive a communication from a customer, we want to move the process through our company as quickly as possible and with high quality.

We are fairly new to UiPath still. We do intend to use it company-wide and have started out with purely unattended scenarios so far.

We invoice every month quite a substantial amount of money to our customers. We saw a problem in that about 20 percent of our invoices were sent to the wrong addresses. That meant that, at month's end, when we were expecting money to come in, we would be missing around 20 percent of our cashflow that month. Of course, we wanted to prevent that because 20 percent of the cashflow of $300 to $500 million a year is a lot of money. 

We have automation that runs every night through all our invoices. Because we have some problems with our master data in the company, it does a number of measurements, on whether an address for an invoice seems to be the correct address, and a number of checks, such as, what ship was the goods delivered to? After that, it looks up information through the international registers of ship ownerships, then it will do a number of checks, giving each invoice a score as rating the probability that the address is correct. If it is below a certain threshold, then we will do some manual processing, and we are looking into UiPath Action Center for this. For four or five of our largest branches in the US and Asia, we have seen a significant improvement in the payments at month's end, which has definitely improved our cashflow.

The administration is a SaaS solution, which helps to minimize our on-prem footprint. The only things that we have running on-prem are the machines running the robots. Everything else is handled in the cloud. We don't need to worry about backups, etc.

We are adopting as much as we can some of the things that should reduce the maintenance costs. We are using Robotic Enterprise Framework in our development and Automation Hub to sort of qualify our ideas. So, we are trying to implement a uniform way of doing things throughout the lifecycle of an idea. UiPath supports this fairly well, and I think it will get even better.

Just this week, we are launching our Automation Hub effort because we need to start building a pipeline for our automation candidates. Right now, we have eight or nine ideas in our Automation Hub. That will grow quite quickly because we need the help of Automation Hub to decide on which idea that we will be moving forward with next.

UiPath continues to add services to the Portal. It is fairly important that they are all managed from the same place because it is a single point of access, which was a factor that really played into our choice of vendor, UiPath. We use Automation Hub to sort of collect ideas and discover what ideas are good for information, then we use Orchestrator to manage them once they have been developed. We are hoping to use Insights at a later point, when that is available in the cloud, so we have a complete end-to-end solution in one place. 

Automation Hub is an immature product. We have only been using it seriously for about a week and have already seen some things that will give us a few headaches down the road. We are committed to using it and will continue to use it, but I have some suggestions for improvement. We have been in contact with our local UiPath office about that, and their initial response was positive.

We would like to see more detail and refinement. It is still a young product, and we are confident that the product will improve a lot over the next few months.

We are hoping for some integrations between Automation Hub, Orchestrator, and Insights.

We are missing a way to quantify that money isn't everything with this solution.

Our license was activated sometime in July. So, we have been using it for about six to seven months.

We have seen a few quirks here and there. Overall, we are satisfied with the stability.

We have only a couple of handfuls of automations running, which are very stable. So, we are not doing much maintenance at all. Maintenance needs half an FTE, if even that.

The potential scalability is really good.

I don't know what the scale is for UiPath Portal. There are still signs that it is a young product, but we see it moving and improving at a really good pace. So, we have high expectations.

The technical support has been good. I have only used them a couple of times. The response has been good. They are knowledgeable. 

One of the big reasons why we chose UiPath is that it has a big following in online communities. It has a good forum itself: Forum.UiPath.com, but I really wish that UiPath would have moderators in their forums who are more active. There are a lot of questions that go unanswered, and that is a shame.

We didn't previously have any other automation solutions in this company.

Our initial setup was very straightforward. Our deployment took only a couple of days. We are a small operation with only two unattended licenses. We created the Orchestrator account and installed the robots on two servers. 

As far as development goes, we really just have the base package. Then, we are adding on Automation Hub right now.

We did engage with their local consultancy. They sort of helped us build a strategy for the infrastructure structure setup and strategy, as far as how to identify candidates, operations, and development. However, initially, we just wanted to pull the trigger very quickly. We had an evaluation phase of a couple of months, where we were testing different products and had tried to set up UiPath before, which helped.

We have used Carve Consulting, and our experience with them has been fantastic. We are working with this third-party consultancy to have them come up with a couple of ideas for some solutions that would involve AI Center for the end of this year or next year.

The initial deployment needed just a couple of people from our side, including me. I worked a little with some of our infrastructure guys, getting the accounts set up, the service division, provisions, etc.

We just haven't scaled to a point yet where there has been any kind of return on investment.

There are not very many users because the stuff that we have automated so far has just taken work off people's hands. Where a person used to spend all day uploading pricing data into a database, we have a bot doing that now. So, people are not using UiPath, they have just sort of been relieved of their duties. While that sounds bad, we have made an effort to find areas where FTEs get to spend time doing what they are best at.

The licensing is too expensive. It is not a cheap product. We constantly have to build business cases where we have to justify our existence as an RPA team. 

We have engaged in a long-running licensing agreement because we believe in the product.

We have used a third-party consultancy, and that's definitely not free.

We looked at a local variant of Kofax RPA called SmartRPA, which was built by a Danish company. It is basically Kofax RPA with an Orchestrator service built on top of it. We evaluated that. We also looked at something called OpenRPA, mainly due to price.

UiPath is built on top of Windows Workflow Foundation, which is a platform that I have worked with previously. So, there was a lot of familiarity and extensibility. Then, we looked at how good the product is at automating desktop applications. There was not really a contest there; UiPath was better by far.

The fact that this is a SaaS solution very positively affects how fast we are able to innovate when it comes to automation. When we did the evaluation of what product to choose, UiPath versus something else, the ability to assess deployment of the whole administration was a key factor.

In our decision to go with UiPath, it was very important that we didn’t have to worry about future installations and upgrades of Orchestrator. We just didn't want the trouble of having to do upgrades. With UiPath being a young product that is evolving very quickly, we would be doing on-prem upgrades every few months and we don't have time for that. So, we liked the idea that it is a cloud-based setup.

Security was a factor in our decision to go with the solution. We didn't look into all the technical specs and certifications. We just looked at some of their customers, and said, "If that bank is using it, and it is used in the defense industry, then they know what they are doing." They had good references.

It is the best product.

It is an automation product. At the end of the day, it is software development. If there is anything that is important in software development, it is that you have a defined process from beginning to end, from the birth of the idea until it has been put into production and eventually retired. So, you need to have a defined process for different stages in the lifecycle that you need to be in control of. The product somewhat helps us do this with Automation Hub and the Robotic Enterprise Framework, but we are looking forward to even more tools for stuff like that.

So far, we are still in the meat and potatoes space. We haven't really gone into the AI or Document Understanding stuff yet. 

UiPath Portal is good overall for enabling administrators to work with Orchestrator. I have seen a lot of improvements, even in the last six or 12 months. We are learning as we go. For the first few months, we were working in a classic folder. Now, we are adopting modern folders in order to better be able to scale our efforts.

UiPath provides granular, role-based access control and management. Right now, that is not so important to us because we do everything unattended. So, we have a couple of service accounts that run everything. However, once we move into attended scenarios, then it's really important that we have that granular control.

I know that there are some new features coming out in regards to deploying automatically and elastically, but we haven't looked that much into them. We don't expect them to be a problem.

We are looking forward to doing attended robots, but that will probably be in the second half of this year when we start looking into that.

For the size of our company, we started fairly big. We went all in, buying licenses, consultancy hours, etc. We have spent a lot of money this first year. I would probably advise someone to start small but still be ambitious. Do a lot of PoCs and see how it fits into your organization. There needs to be a lot of disciplines surrounding it, e.g., if you just stay with five or 10 automations, then things are good. However, once you build 100, you start running into maintenance problems and things like that, so there needs to be a discipline. 

You don't need to spend a million dollars to sort of get off the ground, so I would advise people to start small.

I would rate this solution as an eight (out of 10).