UiPath Reviews

My domain and expertise are in life sciences. In life sciences there is a process called pharmacovigilance, which involves monitoring the effects of medical drugs after they have been licensed for use. I create end-to-end automations, for case processing and full data entry. The customer will store details in an Oracle-based pharmacovigilance platform called Argus, where clinical data from the client and the product are stored. The UiPath bot has to capture the cases from Argus. Once a case has been input into UiPath, a mandatory status check, duplicate search, and case processing have to be done.

It then needs to perform full data entry in Argus. The full data entry consists of more details like patient information, product information, event information, and so on. The bot needs to validate and input those details into Argus and save the case. 

Some days there will be 1k records and on other days, there will be 2k records. On average the bot will process 12k to 13k records.

Pharmacovigilance is a big process. It would take almost 45 minutes for a human to complete a single case. By implementing UiPath robots in the customer's environment, the case processing time has been drastically reduced. The bot processes cases, end-to-end, within 20 to 25 minutes, depending on the case complexity, so that the customer is saving 20 minutes per case. The savings are equivalent to nine or 10 FTEs, which is huge. As a result of those savings, they have requested us to build more bots for them, for other processes.

The most valuable feature in UiPath is the UI interaction with UI Explorer. I have worked with other automation tools and UI Explorer is the standout feature of UiPath. For web-based applications, we can interact with every HTML element, from head to tail. UI Explorer is a valuable addition to UiPath for creating complex, web-based automation.

The AI Computer Vision and Orchestrator are also outstanding features. They make it very easy for developers.

In addition, the introduction of drag-and-drop APIs to UiPath enhances the development processes and decreases the time it takes, as well as the processing time. For example, if you wanted to read an email from Microsoft Outlook using UiPath two years ago, it would take about five steps or activities. Now, with the Graph API within UiPath, you can read an email message from Outlook within a span of five to six seconds, maximum. This API functionality is pretty easy for us to handle.

Along with this, UiPath also introduced Orchestrator access via API. It's not mandatory to log in to Orchestrator to create an asset manually in UiPath. Rather, you can use the Orchestrator API to call a bot process and the assets. This API functionality helps developers to develop components effectively, as well as reduces bot processing time drastically.

I have been into RPA for almost six years and I have worked in the three major tools: UiPath, Automation Anywhere, and Blue Prism. I have been using UiPath for four to five years. I'm an RPA developer and do development for my clients. That includes designing and deploying bots in the clients' environments, and making sure the bots are running well.

It is stable. We are using the 2019 version. The versions are continually upgraded with the latest being the 2021 version. There are frequent updates but the version we are using is stable. We don't have any errors or bot crashes or other unexpected system exceptions during development. The stability is good across all versions.

It's pretty scalable. It can be used across all major providers. If you want to automate Windows, web-based or PDF-based interactions, or do email or Excel automation, you can. We can also do terminal automation, mainframe automation, and Citrix automation. It covers almost every possible scenario for real-time data handling. 

We only have a couple of challenges, when a customer says we need to do this or that and UiPath doesn't have built-in functionality for that. We need to think differently and add some additional .NET components, for example. 

But UiPath is pretty scalable, and we can use it across all technologies for automation.

If you don't find a solution in the Community Forum, you can raise a technical support ticket with UiPath. The support team works 24 hours a day, and we can get a resolution immediately. Both the Community Forum and the technical support play a major role and both help developers.

UiPath also has partners. Cognizant is a high-priority partner and they have their own SLAs for everything. If I raise a ticket regarding UiPath, if something is not working, the response time is very quick and the resolutions they provide are pretty standard. We haven't faced any difficulties in raising a ticket. Everything has met our expectations with respect to the technical support.

Positive

The main thing that could be improved is the cost. I have worked with other tools and the licensing cost of UiPath is slightly higher than the others.

Also, UiPath has a built-in functionality called Computer Vision to extract values from a PDF. If we want to use Computer Vision, UiPath has one drawback. The cost is based on how many documents we are using Computer Vision on. That makes it difficult to estimate ROI. Computer Vision has a dynamic cost. To propose a project to a client, a project that includes Computer Vision, we need to have some kind of standard cost so that they can calculate the ROI effectively. Computer Vision should not be based on usage.

This is one of the main drawbacks that I have seen in real-life situations, when quoting a price for a client. If UiPath improved in this area, they might have many more customers who want to automate PDF interactions based on Computer Vision, because it has huge scope.

The advantage of using UiPath over Automation Anywhere is the UI interaction. Automation Anywhere doesn't have a specialized feature like UI Explorer, or any other options to click on an image or interact with UI elements. Automation Anywhere has a Capture command and we have to work with that one command to interact with all the UI-based elements. But it's completely different in UiPath. UI Explorer enables multiple clicks and interactive activities. You can mimic the HTML per your project's needs. You can't work in the same way in Automation Anywhere. With respect to web-based automation, UiPath stands tall. AA has limited functionality.

The disadvantage of UiPath is in the PDF interaction. Automation Anywhere has a bot called IQ Bot, which is included in the licensing of Automation Anywhere. It's pretty easy to train it for a PDF document within the span of a few seconds. UiPath's Computer Vision has the same functionality as IQ Bot, but Computer Vision is pretty costly.

Other than that, Automation Anywhere is cloud-hosted and it has multiple ways for a developer to code. If you want to code RPA, or you want to code in a flow-based manner, you can do so with Automation Anywhere. But UiPath has only one mode, a flow-based automation. UiPath doesn't have code-based automation.

From the developer's point of view, if you have a code-based structure then what AA offers is as good as UiPath. 

A major advantage of UiPath is that since it is a .NET-based application, you can use all the methods and the properties that are available in .NET. You don't have that functionality in Automation Anywhere. If you want to read or manipulate a string, you need to use separate activities in Automation Anywhere, but with UiPath you can use the built-in .NET methods to read a string in a single line. The complexity of the code is smaller in UiPath.  

Because I have worked in all the major RPA tools, I can say confidently that UiPath is very developer-friendly. If you are coming from a non-technical background, or you don't know coding, they have a separate portal for you to develop in, called StudioX. It's a low-code platform, a "citizen-developer" platform. Anyone who wants to use UiPath can use it without any background.

From the development, design, and testing points of view, I rate UiPath higher than other RPA tools for automation. Go directly to UiPath, rather than trying all the other tools. UiPath is number-one for development and testing.

It is mandatory in our company to use the UiPath Academy to do RPA certification. Almost everyone has completed advanced professional certification in UiPath. The Academy covers every topic extensively, as far as what developers need. I don't come from an IT background but I learned it. UiPath teaches everything from scratch. With a little bit of coding knowledge, it's very easy to learn development using the Academy portal. The major advantage is that, since it is a video-based series, you get a clear idea of the modern-day functionality. They explain everything with an example and they give you use cases for practice. 

If you want to be an architect, they have a course for that. If you want a developer diploma, they have a course for that. And if you want to learn a specific topic, like deployment or testing, they have courses for them.

For anyone with experience in another technology who wants to learn UiPath, or wants to do RPA projects, it's a matter of 10 to 15 days to go through all the videos and you can start working. That's a big advantage of UiPath. The Academy makes learning easy.

They also have a Community Forum. If we have any doubt, we can interact with other developers around the globe. It's very interactive and we can learn what things are intended to do. About 90 percent of the time, you can find a solution using the forum.

Other than the Computer Vision cost model, the features of UiPath are pretty awesome to use. As a developer, there aren't any drawbacks or difficulties when using UiPath.

I own the robotics process automation program for our life safety segment. I also own the mergers and acquisitions project management for our life safety segment. We've started out by using UiPath specifically for mergers and acquisitions when migrating customer data from the acquired companies to our standard ERP. We're also implementing sales and use tax, filings, and things like that as well.

With our most recent robot, we transfer information from acquired companies to our ERP. Typically, it would take about six temp associates for about four to six weeks to clean the data and move it into the ERP. About three weeks of that would be actual data entry. With this product, we took that three weeks of data entry, times six people, and rolled it down to 12 hours of robot running. It was a pretty significant amount of savings for us.

Citizen development is great. With it, it's easy to develop or have self-developed robot intelligence. For example, instead of having to hire a developer, you can make the robots do what you need using the UAPs studio tool. This has been the most valuable aspect. StudioX specifically for our newer citizen developer is useful and I really like using Studio for myself.

We have seen a reduction in, for example, time, and not necessarily in human error. For example, we did an interesting analysis. We wanted to see what the human error rate was for entering data, and, due to the fact that our ERP is Microsoft Dynamics 2012, capturing some of that data is a little bit harder. We structured error rates based on entry. What we did was we created a robot to go back and check all their entries to see if they were missing anything. Oddly, the errors that people were making were nominal. I don't see any data that showed that we necessarily reduced error rates. It was really the people aspect of the process where there were time-savings based on the needed amount of human input. We've been able to reassign workers to more valuable tasks where we can't assign robots yet.

We do about four to five acquisitions a year and those are typically six-week processes for each one of them. We could say that we save about 25 weeks of labor in a year, and that robot will be about a week's worth of labor. Therefore, we save about 24 weeks of labor.

We've been taking some UiPath Academy courses. We've actually found it more helpful if we chose UiPath South American Developers to teach us to build as we're building. For my team specifically, it's been really helpful to have an expert involved to say "this is the use case that we want to do" and have them walk us through building a specific robot. That way, it's real-life experience versus a video-based session. While the academy is helpful, hands-on experience is just much more valuable.

UiPath Academy courses affected the process of getting employees up to speed. It affected it a little bit. It probably more affected our decision to use UiPath over Automation Anywhere, or even the Microsoft RPA program. Just the fact that there was so much available content that we could lean on if we needed to was huge. The others had content, however, not anything close to UiPath's capacity.

The on-prem orchestrator was an issue for us. When we bought it, it was a mistake. Our IT team thought it would be the best option for us, however, it's way more complicated to use. Out of the box, it feels more complicated. That said, once you get to know it, it's fine, however, it was incredibly hard to set up on our enterprise systems. Whereas, with the cloud deployment, we were live and up and running in an hour.  The initial setup took us about two weeks. That was a little bit of heartburn. It would be helpful if UiPath could offer some sort of support outside of a ticketing system.

I've been using the solution for about three months.

I've been pretty impressed with the stability. We've had a couple of minor issues that our developers helped us figure out. It's programming and nobody on my team are programmers. Some of it could be just user error, however, overall it seems like a very stable platform.

The scalability is really unlimited. It boils down to the organization's ability to implement a governance model quickly and successfully. I know UiPath has a governance tool or some kind of a framework, however, it is one of those pieces where it's way more expensive than us using our regular service channel tool that we already have implemented to do those submissions and approvals, et cetera.

In our organization, the users include two developers - me and then one of my assistants.

The only interaction we've had with technical support was during installation. The ticketing system and not being able to physically talk to somebody were difficult to deal with during the implementation process.

The on-premises implementation was a bit difficult. We knew that we were going to have to pay developers to help us develop the robots, however, getting stuff installed, our only method of support was submitting a ticket and the turnaround time on that took a while. Our UiPath rep helped escalate what she could. It would be ideal if there was a setup hotline or something that we could call right away. Sometimes it's just easier to talk to somebody than emailing back and forth. That's probably the biggest area for improvement.

We handled the initial setup ourselves. We do almost everything internally. We have our own IT team, including myself. Our solutions architects set it up with us. What we ran into in terms of problems was that the instructions were really not very good. We weren't able to appropriately install it as the instructions that came with it just weren't comprehensive enough. In terms of the instructions that were published online, we found a couple of instances where they were saying to use functions that didn't exist. These might have been a little out of date. Eventually, the ticket team was able to help identify that. I would grade the setup probably a C-minus, and everything else an A-plus.

We're so early into the implementation, the ROI is a wash right now. That said, our one robot has paid for our development time, and then someone will be able to use it on future acquisitions. We will likely see ROI within a year.

You can buy enhanced support, however, it's an additional $30,000 USD a year or thereabouts. That's just too expensive, honestly. The competition didn't charge for that. We also felt pretty confident in our IT team's ability to be able to dissect the instructions and install it. However, the instructions just weren't that good. We had one of our top engineers working on it and it took a lot of effort to get it installed correctly.

The pricing, in general, is fair. It's a little bit more than some of the competitors, however, it's a little bit more flexible than some of the others. There's value there. The OCR pricing is out of market. We need it, however, we're actually going to use some third-party bolt-ons due to the fact that UiPath is way too expensive.

We looked at Microsoft and Automation Anywhere. We also looked at help systems and Brick is one that we currently use and one of our segments, however, they're only a five-person company, which is pretty small. I wouldn't even put them on the same level. We were looking for shared services. We were looking for the best in class so we could take a solution enterprise-wide. In the end, we boiled the options down to Automation Anywhere, UiPath, and Microsoft, and UiPath was the winner.

In terms of Brick, they don't have a citizen developer model at all, so their developers have to do it. They are less expensive and they're a little bit more turnkey where they do it for you, however, they're really novice. The methodology that we've really bought into it was the community developer, as we want to empower our associates to figure out what works for them to improve their work-life balance. Using a service like theirs takes that away as we have to do the due diligence and figure out what fits in the bucket, what doesn't, as opposed to just empowering the person to do it. That was the key to why we chose UiPath.

The sales process was way better with UiPath. Our UiPath rep was far more knowledgeable about the product than the other options in that we ultimately had more confidence, knowing that whatever we needed, UiPath would help take care of, which was huge. My organization's a little bit disjointed. We try to go after what we feel is going to be impactful without a whole lot of due diligence. That's why, with UiPath, having that resource to lean on was helpful.

We use attended automation right now. Primarily this is due to the fact that the ERP system that we have really can't function unintended. It's a Citrix space environment and it has some odd security protocols where it'll shut down or refresh out for so many hours and it's not planned refreshes. It's hard for us. It's almost random. It's hard for us to build an unattended robot to deal with that. I'm sure we could, however, right now, we want to start with attended robots as we know what functions we need. We decided to go that route and eventually we'll add unattended.

I'd advise new users to make sure they have team buy-in for the concept. That doesn't mean necessarily getting the team to know exactly what they're going to be automating. You just need to make sure that they understand it's not about replacing people. Rather, it's about making their jobs easier. That was key for us. That said, most of my team was overworked, and they were glad to take on the project of lightening their load. Most organizations would benefit from making sure the communication is solid in that regard, however. 

I'd rate the solution at a nine out of ten. With better technical support, I would give them a perfect ten.

For a current client, we have around 22 to 25 use cases, and it's all based on the financial side of things. The client is in finance, and we have use cases all of which are comprised of different tools, including SAP and their in-house CRMs. It's about automating the process where we take some data from the CRM tool and upload it to SAP. It also involves uploading the files to the FTP server. 

For example, one use case is where the applications used are Oracle, and SAP, and STP. We just download the data from Oracle. There are different files that we download from Oracle and upload to the FTP server. From that FTP server, there is a different team that takes those files and creates a Tableau dashboard. 

UiPath Studio helped us automate many processes that have helped us save money. Even though the tool price is there and the license costs are there, it has given good ROI. For example, automating a process can reduce the work to half or maybe 60%. We divert efforts to different work. Therefore, it has been pretty useful in terms of savings and quality control.

For example, one client had a focus on quality control. There are instances where employees make some minor errors that could lead to major losses to the organization from the department's point of view. We automated that process and it gave us more return in terms of quality control. Fewer errors ultimately were made which saved the company from losses.

UiPath has a full suite of capabilities. It has, for example, an end-to-end automation suite. From a development point of view, it is pretty helpful to have access to all of the activities on offer that anyone can understand. 

The Studio as well as the process mining are great. Document understanding is another useful feature. It has eliminated the business analyst side where you have to go through each department and find out which processes are there, and take a different tool to get those all processes in one place and create a process workflow. All of this can be done with process mining. 

With document understanding, we have the capabilities of having UiPath understand and create documents, which previously was quite a lengthy endeavor. You just have to install it and follow the steps. It will automatically take a screenshot and create a document for you and then create a brief description of it. 

It’s easy to build automation using UiPath Studio. From a developer's point of view, it is easy due to the fact that you don't need much of a coding language or coding background. You just should have a clear logic behind it. If you're clear with the logic, a layman can handle the task. They do have Studio X features, which is for the layman who doesn't have any background, who doesn't have any coding or developer's background. They can automate their own work. Even an SME who doesn't know anything about automation could automate small tasks.

It’s great that we can scale automation without having to pay attention to infrastructure. That is very important actually. For example, scaling automation plus giving attention to the infrastructure can be a little hectic and time-consuming. If there is any way where we could reduce this work or optimize it, it would be great from the implementation point of view.

UiPath enables us to implement end-to-end automation. Right from the start, you have document understanding and process mining as well as the Orchestrator, which helps you with getting an overall view of the bots in our organization.

End-to-end coverage is the most important thing, due to the fact that, if it is end-to-end, we don't need to go to the market and look for any other application. If you can get end-to-end, you don't need to go for other products which simplifies everything. It's easy for us to maintain and work with it instead of having to integrate and manage multiple systems, multiple products, and multiple applications.

UiPath has helped minimize our on-premise footprint. It has helped us with quality control savings. We have saved many efforts previously requiring full-time employees. It’s one of the most important factors when we work for clients. If a client is hiring us to automate many processes, there are different intentions of doing it. If we are able to help them reduce cost, reduce and do some quality control, it is important for them. For example, previously, if work required ten employees, we have been able to reduce that down to six or sometimes four personnel maybe.

The UiPath Studio has reduced human error. It has helped us with quality control very often. In the past, mistakes have cost us. It has saved costs as well as saving us money related to fines or penalties.

The solution has freed up employee time. Instead of doing the same mundane work every day, we have just automated that part and now the employees have more free time to do more meaningful work. In terms of hours, from a department's point of view, we have saved around half, that is four hours per day, maybe about 80 hours per month. The additional time enabled employees to focus on more important work.

We have found that the product has reduced the costs of our client’s automation operations. With my previous client, we calculated an average of 40% in reduction of personnel and 40% in cost savings. UiPath has saved us money across the organization. The average saving is likely around 40% to 45%.

I'm pretty much happy with all of those tools. I don't have anything in mind that I could see improvement.

While UiPath Studio helps speed up the cost of digital transformation, in a way, it requires expensive or complex application upgrades or IT support, as it needs an entire setup. That setup requires support from different departments, and that comes with a cost.

I came across one problem while upgrading. We were upgrading from the 2019 version to the 2020. There was one thing that was not mentioned either on the website or documentation, and we had to take support from UiPath. The documentation needs to contain each of the scenarios which could occur while upgrading the solutions. As it is now, this is not the case. That said, when we ran into issues, UiPath Support helped us through it.

I've been using UiPath for five years now.

We've had outages once or twice. For that, they have a workaround. If a server goes down, we should have a backup server for it. If that's the case, it is just a few steps needed to migrate or we can take the setup from another server. That's it. It's pretty good in general. 

The scalability is fine. For example, if the bot count is about zero to 100, we have the capacity. And if it goes beyond that, then we have to increase the features of the systems and servers. It could take time if we scale beyond the limits, however, it's still possible. It just requires an upgrade. 

What's required is managing all the infrastructure and getting all the permissions from the client which is what could take time. Scalability can be an issue when it goes beyond the mentioned limit.

In the current organization we're working with, it's totally unattended bots where no user is actually using this tool. That said, the bots are in production, which works 24/7. No user is having this access to the tool. It is all unattended bots.

In the previous organization, there were 58 to 70 users as we had attended bots. They were using bots in their daily routine.

It's a routine for us to use this product every day and deploy this solution. We are definitely looking at increasing it and scaling. We have a lot of work in the pipeline.

I've contacted technical support many times and they are very helpful. Based on the severity and priority, they do help us on priority and they are very helpful in terms of responding, supporting, and maintaining. If they can't help us by email, even after giving clear instructions, they'll bump you to a different level and help. It can be just like spoon-feeding us. They are very patient and try to be very clear.

We were doing automation, however, it was just .com and .net. We used to write five lines of code just to click on one button, which is just an activity right now we have in UiPath. We switched to UiPath to do end-to-end processes which would require large amounts of code if we kept doing what we were doing.  

I've implemented UiPath from scratch many times. 

The process is quite straightforward. You just have to have the installer and just click install, and then after a few steps, it is done.

Setting up just UiPath Studio hardly takes ten to 20 minutes or maybe one hour if you're facing some complexity. Setting up an Orchestrator with all the robots could take a while.

Our implementation strategy is based on whatever the customer's requirements are. Different clients have different requirements. My previous client, for example, didn't want the cloud as they were pretty concerned about the security as they deal with financial data and they don't want the data to go to the cloud at all.

Clients have the option of on-premises or cloud. Based on that, we just go with the requirements. Some clients want attended bots due to the cost, and some want unattended bots due to the features. 

In terms of maintenance and deployment, how many people you need depends on how many processes you have with the client. Right now, with the current client, we have 22 to 25 processes that we have automated. We are just three users who are developing, testing, maintaining, and supporting this project. However, it varies and often depends on the process and client and how many bots.

For maintenance and support, you don't need many people. For development, if they're at 10 people, five or four could do the work in terms of support and maintenance.

We handle the deployments for our clients. 

While the clients might have released some reports, I don't have much knowledge about ROI. 

I do know about the prices of attended and unattended bots as well as Orchestrator. 

There are costs related to Orchestrator, Studio, and attended bots. There are also infrastructure costs, and, while implementing this tool in any organization, there are different costs attached to it.

The price for the attended bot is between $1,800 and $3,000. The unattended bot was $8,000 last year.

Orchestrator is around $20,000.

We looked at Automation Anywhere and Blue Prism, however, about five years back, where UiPath, Blue Prism, and Automation Anywhere were the leaders in the market, at that time, just UiPath had the free training and Intuit training for their tool. The other tools didn't have any training, or if they had, it was paid. That's why we chose UiPath, which ended up being the best out of the three anyway.

The company I work for is a UiPath partner.

There have been multiple companies that I've been working with. Two remain the same. I've been using different tools as well. It's been on and off with UiPath.

We are not using the latest version of UiPath. The latest version is 2021. We are using 2020. This is due to the fact that the client that I'm working with has a stated policy as to using a minus one version. They believe it could not be a more stable version for any product. 

At this time, we don't use the SaaS solution or the AI functionality. However, I have enrolled in AI training to better understand it. We do not yet use the automation cloud or UiPath apps either.

In terms of employee satisfaction, from the experience I had from interacting with the client and different users, they are happy as well as sad. They are happy in terms of moving away from the mundane work that has been taken off from their hands. They are, however, both sad and afraid that they could lose their job.

I'd advise users, if they're a layman, to go with the training. Just start with the training from the UiPath website itself, in the RPA Academy. That is sufficient for anyone to start with. They have all the courses that start right from scratch for every role, be it business analyst, solution or product developer, et cetera. In six months, even starting from scratch, you can excel on this product.

With UiPath, it really is possible to optimize so many things. 

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

We currently have 150 bots in production. It is used the most where there are repetitive, cumbersome tasks. Where we do need to have somewhat of a decision made, we put it into a decision tree. This is our primary use case. 

We are looking into other use cases, such as:

• How do we use it as a platform for pretotyping?
• How do we use it as a platform to drive forward machine learning and artificial intelligence usage in our company? 

We have automated assignments where we previously used employees. The outcome of this has been a greater customer experience achievement. We simply are solving tasks faster, and at the same time, we have been scaling down employees. 

We have started to do tasks more often and faster than we have ever done them before. For instance, some of the things in finance, we only did that once per quarter. Now, we have started doing them once a week. This gives us greater insight into those areas. 

The most important outcome here is the amount of insight which you receive when you put power to a process. It gives you the insight that you wouldn't have had when you had 20 employees working. With two bots doing the work, you suddenly get a data foundation that you didn't have before. Then, you can build upon the bots, instead of thinking you know what is happening.

The platform is object-orientated. You can create and reuse objects, which is a great feature. 

UiPath has decided that people who are great at what they do can be invited into the platform and utilize services on the platform. This is another great feature, and one of the reasons that we initially chose the product as our platform.

The solution is easy to use. When you put it together with the UiPath Academy, it's easy to get it going and understand. The drag and drop feature makes it simple and easy to use. The UiPath Academy is great and helpful.

We tried utilizing the virtual environment, but we had some issues in that area. It's one of the areas that we haven't revisited over the last half year because our volume is that high for us. Thus, it is one of those things that we have sort of left on the side for now, but I do hear there is some great stuff coming with it.

We haven't had instability issues.

It can scale.

The customer and technical support are great. We have received fast, sufficient responses. There is easy access. 

We did not have a previous RPA solution.

We were in a place where we needed to do something differently. At the time, RPA was something different. So, we needed to sort of examine, "Could this help us?"

The initial setup was straightforward.

We saw ROI in eight or nine weeks, so it was fairly fast. We have seen a lot of performance benefits, which I would rate as a ten out of ten.

The solution has helped to eliminate many human errors.

Our licensing costs are roughly 1.1 million Danish krones a year. 

We see some elements in the license model that we're trying to figure out how to utilize. There have been some elements in the license model where UiPath has helped us solve them commercially, and having a license model which is more focused on scalability would be a great feature.

If UiPath really wants to put Attended Robots out to everyone, there will be a cost issue. We have some that we are testing now and what their effect will be. However, these are the robots where the license model needs to change before we go full throttle in that direction.

We also looked at Blue Prism and Automation Anywhere. We selected UiPath based on its object-oriented approach.

There is something off in UiPath's licensing model. Their competitors have started targeting us now because they know that we have a lot of bots. They have different types of licensing models, and say, "Because you are having so many jobs with so many job bots, you can save money on the platform by using us instead." 

Play with it and have a playful nature. Acknowledge that you don't know what you're doing with it, then just acknowledge that you're going to make mistakes. The only difference between being good or great at this solution is your ability to learn from your mistakes, because you will be making mistakes. Also, you will be overpromising when working with this solution.

For automation technology, in general, the system landscape is quite wide. We are just starting to put RPA on the shelf for automation. We are pushing a machine-first approach. RPA is the sort of tool on the shelf now helping us become a more efficient customer-oriented company. It is a tool in the landscape with plenty of existing tools, but this is the one that is the most easily accessible for the business people.

We built ourselves some automated documentation, and it was fairly easy to copy. One of the things that people start doing is documenting what they're doing in an organization and updating the documents, then freely sharing them. We would like some sort of automated documentation, as this would be helpful.

We are primarily automating business processes from SAP applications and a few from a web-based application. 

UiPath reduces the number of human employees needed to do repetitive tasks. A person can only work during normal business hours, whereas a bot can work 24/7 without making mistakes.

UiPath is user-friendly. Building automations isn't complex, and it doesn't take many days to learn. If you have basic knowledge of any programming language, you can start building small projects in 30 to 45 days. 

If it is a fixed process instead of a dynamic process, we can do end-to-end automation. Automating this kind of process is easier. If it's a dynamic process, we need some kind of external integration. 

UiPath's community forums were helpful in my early stages, when I was learning the product. When I got errors, I was sometimes unsure what they meant, so I could go onto the forum and find answers easily. 

They also have these UiPath Academy courses. I've taken the foundational course and the advanced courses on Document Understanding and data manipulation. I still haven't had a chance to work on Document Understanding, but the data manipulation course has been helpful. I learned to do some queries that simplify the workflow and make it faster. 

I have fewer issues with the user interface when I'm using Blue Prism or Automation Anywhere. For example, if you want to perform an action in  UiPath, it's a little tricky because you must click on a particular icon. When you click on that, some selectors are generated. That will change whenever the application updates, so you must change the selector again after the update. When we are dealing with Automation Anywhere, we'll not get any selectors if we are using that action once. 

I have used UiPath for more than two years. 

I had an activity crash once when the permissions failed. When we were using that activity, it automatically created multiple activities. Even though we dragged it and used it only once, it created multiple activities. That only happened once.

I have tried Blue Prism and Automation Anywhere. 

UiPath is deployed on-premises. We only needed to download UiPath Studio off the website and install it. It took about 30 minutes. 

I rate UiPath eight out of ten. I recommend taking the UiPath Academy courses first. Take the foundational course. It has some hands-on exercises with small automation processes. Later, they can complete the advanced course. 

I use UiPath for a variety of tasks, including automating user interfaces, processing documents, utilizing process mining, performing test automation, and even handling natural language processing.

It contributed to revenue growth by enabling us to maintain a consistent headcount and resource level while expanding our business.

Unattended automation, particularly in the realm of UI automation, is the most valuable aspect. 

Its ability to swiftly create automation in UiPath Studio is highly beneficial. It's highly effective in pinpointing areas within the organization where assistance is required.

There are several areas where I see room for improvement in the tool. One of these areas would be a more solutions-oriented pricing structure. This is because the platform requires a multitude of building blocks even for the simplest use cases and when dealing with newer clients, this can be challenging. One area where I'd appreciate additional or new features is in the realm of insights.

I have been using UiPath for seven years.

It offers good stability features with minor bugs from time to time.

When it comes to scalability, UiPath exhibits a high degree of proficiency.

The customer support is quite commendable and we often make use of TAM when needed. I would rate it around an eight out of ten because there is room for improvement.

Positive

I've previously used a variety of automation tools, including Blue Prism, OpenSpan, Automation Anywhere, WorkFusion, and Microsoft Power Automate.

The initial setup was straightforward.

I collaborated with my IT teams to establish high-availability virtual machines in Azure, whether on-premises or in a semi-private environment. I also partnered with my security team to formulate our digital worker strategy, which essentially involved managing identities, and I integrated all these components into a cohesive system.

It comes with a high cost, but the value it delivers justifies the expense.

We conducted evaluations of various automation platforms, including Automation Anywhere, Kofax, Pega, and Blue Prism. There were several notable distinctions. Firstly, UiPath stood out because it offered a free starting point, which was not the case with the others. Secondly, UiPath's integration with Visual Studio was more seamless compared to the other platforms. Their open and free-for-all community is an enormous advantage.

My advice would be to keep your problem-solving approach simple and avoid the urge to plan every detail. One common issue I've observed is people tend to overcomplicate the deployment, strategy, and overall decision-making process when adopting a new software platform. Instead, I'd recommend that if you can identify one or two use cases where the tool's benefits outweigh its costs, you have a solid starting point. Keep it straightforward, and you'll be on the right track. 

Overall, I would rate it ten out of ten.

Our company uses the solution to activate machine learning and automate processes for clients in the banking, supply chain, healthcare, and pharmaceutical industries.

For one use case, we instruct a bot to pull data from various sources to Excel where we manipulate it and run macros to produce output that is uploaded to other target systems. 

For another use case, we automate report downloads from Salesforce and SAP.

For a third use case, we automate invoice and purchase order processing by combining machine learning with OCR to extract information, output it to a CSC file, and upload it to the SAP finance system. 

A fourth use case involves scientific analysis for a pharmaceutical company. We collect research and clinical trial data, use a bot to conduct analysis, and produce a final report for scientists to inform their next steps. Before automation, scientists would spend four hours manually pulling and analyzing data before moving to lab work. Now, the bot does all the groundwork so data is immediately available to scientists. 

A fifth use case focuses on leveraging image analysis to study molecule or protein structures and produce predictions. We train bots in a third-party machine learning model to understand the science and then integrate it with the solution. 

For a sixth use case, we use bots to translate clinical data that is common across multiple countries. A thousand pages of data used to take three months to manually translate in 30 languages, but now bots can complete the task in four hours. This also removes the expense and security risk of a third-party translator who would need to have access to sensitive data. 

Our goal across all use cases is to speed up operations with bots that work 24/7/365 so that staff can focus on other important work. In the last three years, we have built 100 bots with 80% unattended and 20% attended. 

An important company goal is to speed up clinical research processes that have an urgent social impact to ensure treatments become available to patients. 

COVID is an example of urgent social impact. When the virus hit, it moved fast and kept changing while scientists were still trying to understand its dynamic. 

Pharmaceutical companies have a responsibility to invent products and push them to market as fast as possible. Delays cause patients to suffer. Fast results will allow pharmaceutical companies to push treatments that save lives. 

The solution connects with different services via a plug-and-play model that includes Microsoft, Amazon, and Google. We do not need to go directly to vendors for services or write custom code to integrate applications. In most cases, connectors need minimal or no code at all. 

Integration services, cloud testing, and the AI center are easy to leverage. 

The solution should offer more AI-driven services that are outside of the finance industry. For example, we work in the pharmaceutical and healthcare industries so would like to see scientific-related components. 

Technical support is good but there is room for improvement because some staff are not knowledgeable enough to assist with senior-level issues. 

I have been using the solution for five years. 

The solution is stable and services 40% of enterprise customers with no issues. We feel we are in good hands with the solution. 

The solution is very easy to scale for both infrastructure and bots. 

Our company purchased premium support so we have a dedicated technician available whenever we need help. Responses are usually quick and received within one hour. 

The solution's community forum includes a huge pool of talented programmers. If we get stuck on an issue, we post it in the forum and quickly receive ten to twenty solutions. 

The Academy offers video-based training modules that are helpful and straightforward. We can easily upgrade our skills with minimum time investment. 

Freelancers also post very useful plug-and-play components in the marketplace community.

I rate the support an eight out of ten because some support staff are not as experienced as needed. We cannot expect everyone to have senior-level skills, so are understanding with staff because the product evolves every day and that requires learning new skills. 

Positive

I previously used Kofax and Automation Anywhere. 

Automation Anywhere has issues with user-friendliness because it is not a drag-and-drop model and there are times when a lot of scripting is required for complex automations.  

The solution is easy to set up and deploy both on-premises and in the cloud. 

As a solution architect, I am involved in all phases of deployment including discovery, development, implementation, and post-production. 

The deployment process includes exporting workflows as a package, saving and loading the package in the source control tool, and pushing the code to the orchestrator. The process is very simple and there is no real maintenance after deployment. 

Our company implements the solution for customers. 

I do not have exact numbers, but for every automation there is at least a 200% savings in time and cost.

The solution's pricing is reasonable and lower than its competitors. 

We selected the solution because it offers more services with lower code requirements than any other automation tool. 

Companies that adopted other automation products and built 100-200 bots are moving to the solution because of the services offered and its simplicity. With so many companies moving to the solution, the market impact is clear.

The solution has exceeded our expectations and I rate it a nine out of ten. 

We use it for admissions policy and also for other financial items such as 1099 reporting from the IRS and things of that nature. There are some manual refreshes of systems and Excel documents that we have automated.

It is currently deployed on-prem, but we are looking at the cloud option. We are using version 2019, which is probably one of the oldest ones. It's pretty old. We're looking from a perspective of whether we upgrade it before we move to the cloud or whether we move to the cloud and upgrade.

We have seen quite a bit of benefit. We used to hire temp staff labor in order to do our admission policy, and now, we don't have to hire them. That would be five part-time people that would come in seasonally. For three or four months, we would have five people just cranking away the admission work. We don't need that anymore because of automation.

There have been time and financial savings. On the other side of the house, some of them are attended bots. We've saved the organization about 140,000 clicks. People don't have to click 140,000 times anymore. As a small estimate, we saved the organization about 250 hours last year. If everything goes to plan, this year, we're looking to save about 450 hours from the financial side of the house. We're only scratching the surface of it, and there is always room to grow.

We're still working through it. We recently stood up our system developer space. We have about 16 processes. We're still new at it and still in the beginning phases. We're really looking forward to pushing that envelope. Currently, we have a hybrid of attended and unattended automations. It's about an even split.

The GUI is valuable, and it's extremely stable. I've had six or seven Studios open at the same time working on different things and nothing has crashed on it. It's very stable software.

I love the community. The community is awesome. That has been very helpful. It provides value in terms of just being able to bounce ideas and understand. Sometimes, I try to do one thing, and I just want to know how to do one thing, but that's where the community can help broaden and look at it from a different perspective.

They say that everybody can do it, but not everybody can do it. You need to have some form of technological understanding about it, and just because we can automate something doesn't mean we should automate something. That's where I think there's a marketing thing. I understand where they're going with it, but it's not necessarily how real life is in my perspective.

I am not looking for any additional features. I haven't even used all the features. I'm still learning the platform as it stands and figuring out what's still available. 

I have been using it since 2019.

From a system perspective, it's stable on my end. It just works. That's the best part about it. It just works.

Scalability gets a little bit sticky. That could be just because of where we sit in the organization, I don't manage that relationship of licenses. I only get so many licenses and I'm like, "Well, can I get more?" It's definitely a limiting factor, but I don't know if it's us limiting it from a cost perspective. 

I haven't had to use their support. I go to the UiPath community for most of my questions. 

We used Microsoft Power Automate. It was okay. I totally prefer UiPath.

I was involved in its initial setup. UiPath was not complex, but we, as an organization, made it complex. 

We used a partner AKOA that got bought out by Roboyo not too long ago. So, we did use a partner to implement it. In terms of whether it was smooth or not, it was okay. Our school made it hard.

Our experience with them was good and helpful. It was a good way to go through it. Now that we know more, I would've changed the engagement slightly to get a little bit more consulting in the sense of the COE, governance, and other similar things around it. That's because for the most part, getting the system up and running was relatively simple, but now, with the whole other pieces of it, we're starting to feel some of that effect. It's now about how do we look at it from a different angle.

We definitely have a return on investment in terms of hours and soft cost perspective. We are saving 250 hours and don't have to hire five temps. I can't give the metrics for ROI, but from a time savings perspective, ROI is definitely huge.

We did evaluate other options. We evaluated Automation Anywhere, Blue Prism, and UiPath. It was about a year-long evaluation period between all of them, and UiPath was clearly the winner. It was clearly out there as the leader in that space, and that's why we chose them. 

From our perspective, the GUI was really helpful and very different from the others. Automation Anywhere touted more of just invoicing, but we didn't want it for invoicing. We wanted it for multiple things. UiPath really showed the breadth of what you can expand across.

To someone evaluating UiPath, I would definitely advise finding a partner. Find a partner with whom you can partner and who understands the use cases of what you're trying to do and achieve from an organizational perspective. Without that, you're not going to get an ROI. 

I would also advise managing expectations. It's fairly easy to use, but it still requires technical abilities. Don't think that it's something that you can just plug and play and do whatever you want. It's not going to work that way. It's more about the person and the change in mindset. If a person is open to an automation mindset, RPA is a really cool function, and UiPath solves that particular mindset. Without it, it's an uphill battle. Even from our perspective, from an education side of the house, getting our educators to be okay with automation is tricky.

We haven't yet used UiPath's AI functionality. We are definitely looking into it to see how we can start taking advantage of the AI pieces of it and advance that side of the house. Currently, we are trying to change the automation mindset. I'm a big RPA evangelist in our organization, and I am trying to promote things like automation. People are on board with the thought of it but not necessarily on board with the action of it. So, we really have to understand their process when we get into their process, and some people are apprehensive to share that information. It's the other parts of the piece that we have to deal with.

We have used UiPath Academy courses. It was useful to know the use of the product, the use of the GUI, understand how things move and change, where the checkmark boxes you need to check are, and all other uses. Now with the new versioning, it looks like a more curated function. It's a lot nicer. Previously, UiPath Academy was just a bunch of courses, and you didn't know where to start. The curation for developers or users is going to help people navigate through the UiPath Academy.

Overall, I would rate UiPath a nine out of ten.