UiPath Reviews

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

I would rate UiPath a nine out of 10.

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.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

It gives you the ability to efficiently monitor the bot.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

I have been using UiPath for more than four years.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The solution has reduced our costs by approximately five percent.

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

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

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

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

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

I have attended a lot of UiPath's webinars.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The feature that we use the most is Studio.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

I would rate this solution a nine out of ten.

Primary use cases involve the following automation environments and processes:

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

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

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

Following are the most valuable features of UiPath:

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

Possibility of improvement:

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

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

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

Automation Anywhere

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

We use it in our robotics lab to deliver front and back office solutions for the clients. We're a BPO CRM organization, so there is a huge amount of opportunity, not just internally as an organization, but for our clients as well. We use UiPath as a delivery method to find reductions in costs and the like, year on year.

I would rate the performance benefits a very strong eight out of ten. You have to make sure that you pick the right processes that you're looking to automate.

For me, the biggest feature is that my developers love it. And if my developers are happy, then I'm happy. We're totally agnostic and we use multiple providers. But the developers definitely absolutely adore the product.

The speed that in which it can be deployed is something I really like as well because that cuts down on delivery times. I also like the ease of use.

I like the fact that we can program our own .NET to plug into it and there are APIs for multiple different solutions, and the convenience of artificial intelligence and machine-learning and those types of capabilities as well.

The new release broke everything, so I'd like to see that not happen next time. All of our automations broke. It happened to one of our centers of excellence. They just upgraded, pressed next, next, next, and probably didn't really go for the due diligence that we put in place, which is to do a controlled release.

I'd also like to see more machine-learning functionality. I'm really excited to see what's actually on the agenda. There's some really strong stuff about machine-learning being adopted. Unstructured data, robotics being able to read unstructured data, is really one of the strong cases for us. That's likely where we'll be going.

It's phenomenal. The stability is really good but some of the releases have been a little shaky.

To scale it is very easy. But you need to know how to scale robotics, it's not just deploying one on a PC somewhere. We do it on VMs in a data center which is fully monitored by a help desk. We know how to scale bots. It is very easy to scale, if you know what you're doing.

Support has been very good. One thing that the developers are always talking about is the social networking side of it, whereby the blogs and things like that are ongoing. They really like that, that we can actually find a lot of problems already solved within the community and take solutions from there. And the ticketing system is very quick as well.

We've been involved in RPA since early 2014. In 2014 we were using one provider and then we moved into another provider as well. But then we started to look at UiPath and the way it was performing in our proofs of concept. We felt that with those three providers, and our bespoke solutions as well, we were able to pretty much handle any project that came at us, depending on the infrastructure type, and the applications that are interacted with.

When selecting an RPA vendor, our criteria include ease of use, adoption, skillsets in the country, and the relationship with the vendor. I won't name them, but I have challenges with certain providers out there and the way they actually manage relationships. If I were to look again, relationship would be a very strong indicator. And that was one of the things that attracted us to UiPath in the first place, that relationship, that ease. They are very involved in listening to us.

Two things that attracted me to UiPath when we were doing the evaluation were: First, we'd done a proof of concept and we could not understand - I have some very smart architects and they could not understand - how fast UiPath was performing the tasks. The other factor was the interaction with the client side, the relationship side, with UiPath. Considering some of the challenges I've had with other providers, I think this is a refreshing approach. I'm just hoping that UiPath doesn't outgrow itself and leave that phenomenal customer service behind.

We see ROI all the time. We also see performance benefits all the time. We haven't delivered a project where we haven't seen a return on investment using UiPath. The return on investment is normally six to nine months, maybe a little bit less. But we've never not actually been able to achieve a return on investment.

Sometimes it's actually about setting the expectations as well, regarding what you're trying to do. Sometimes it's not about headcount reduction, it's about quality. It can be about looking at what the customer is actually really wanting, and then being able to deliver on what the customer requires for it be a success.

There are some outliers out there, but there is normally a very strong return on investment.

Look at what it is you're trying to achieve. Do due diligence on the assistance that you're going to interact with, the infrastructure that you're going to be managing, and then actually go out and have a look at a few providers. One of the really strong things about UiPath is that they provide evaluation licenses. There's absolutely no reason why you shouldn't try it before you actually start doing it in anger.

We have solution architects, senior developers, developers, business analysts, consultants, help desk, help desk supervisors, infrastructure, and a data center involved. For maintaining and developing UiPath there are 15 people who report directly to me, but the entire support structure is probably closer to 35 people, maybe a little bit more.

In terms of Academy training, we've done the basic and we've done the advanced training as well. The basic training is phenomenal. I think it's groundbreaking. The online university, in my opinion, is revolutionary in this area, when you look at some of the offerings that other providers have.

The advanced training was a little bit of a let down for us. We just didn't get out of it what we were expecting to get out of it. It just didn't achieve what we thought it would, especially for the price. Our expectations were that we would actually be able to sit all our developers in a room and do a process that we had already done, re-engineer it, and make it better. And that never materialized. It was just a little bit of a letdown. But the university piece is absolutely phenomenal.

Overall, UiPath is a very strong nine out of ten. I'm one of these people who doesn't ever leave a five-star review, there's always room to improve. Still, the nine is a very strong nine. This has become our weapon of choice. That speaks volumes.

We use UiPath to automate simple, everyday processes like email automation.

We have deployed UiPath both on-premises and in the cloud.

Using UiPath to build automation is easy compared to the other automation solutions I have used.

UiPath enables us to implement end-to-end automation, which is important because it helps us eliminate human errors.

The UiPath User Community is good.

The UiPath Academy courses are helpful, and all of our team members use them. We have learned a lot about UiPath from the courses.

UiPath helped to speed up our digital transformation and reduce the cost of doing so. We did not require any expensive or complex application upgrades or IT application support to speed up our digital transformation.

We have repeatedly tested our processes with humans and with UiPath. We consistently achieve better results with UiPath because it eliminates the possibility of human error in our reports.

UiPath saves our staff time by reducing the manual tasks.

UiPath has saved us money by eliminating the need for a person to perform repetitive daily tasks.

The ease of automation using UiPath is valuable.

UiPath should add support for more programming languages, such as Python, in addition to VBScript, to help developers with their coding.

I have been using UiPath for just over one year.

UiPath does sometimes go down, but compared to other automation tools I have used, it is more stable.

The technical support is good. I received a response within one day the last time I contacted them.

Positive

I have used Automation Anywhere for some projects, but UiPath is far better because of its easy-to-access and informative User Community.

The initial deployment is straightforward. All we have to do is publish and grab the data linked to the orchestrator. One person is required for the deployment.

The implementation was completed in-house.

The price is a bit high, but UiPath is worth the cost, given its ease of use and features. We sometimes use Automation Anywhere instead of UiPath to save costs, but UiPath is our preferred choice.

I would rate UiPath nine out of ten.

No real maintenance is required for UiPath.

UiPath is easy to use and automates well. It is also good at identifying errors compared to other solutions.