UiPath Reviews

We can use UiPath for pretty much anything, including document reading, day-to-day processing, or maintenance cases. For pretty much anything that the business comes up with, we can use UiPath. 

It's the only RPA software I've ever used. It's really given us the capability to help automate a ton of slow-moving tasks.

It is helping to automate some finance processes, shared service processes, and items like that to eliminate some tedious tasks that people don't want to deal with.

The Automation Hub helps prioritize things. I'd say using the community edition to get citizen developers on board has been great. Those are probably the two biggest aspects of the solution for me.

The user community is helpful. The forum is really great. I need to build up a bigger community around me; however, for right now, the users are super helpful.

I've used UiPath's Academy courses. It's great for letting people do training at their own pace. It also speeds up training. I don't have to spend hours teaching people how to do stuff. They can do it whenever they want. That's super helpful.

We'd like more onboarding features for new people. I mostly taught myself. It would help if it was more proactive in reaching out and saying, "Here are all of our connectors. Here's the stuff you can do." The program itself is really easy to use, however, to understand the capabilities, it would be nice to have more of a guiding hand.

I've used the solution for probably two years. 

The stability is good. I've never had a feed down and find it to be rather solid. 

The scalability is pretty strong. It seems to be as scalable as you want to make it. It depends on your design. For example, if you make a shady bot, that's not going to work scalability-wise. However, if you build your bot the right way to handle tasks quickly, it'll do it quickly and will scale well.

Technical support is really good. I've only used it twice. However, both times they have been really quick to respond and help.

Positive

We did not previously use any other RPA software.

I am involved in the initial setup process. I started the CoE of my last job, and I'm doing that at this job now.

We used a partner to help with it, so it was pretty straightforward. If I had to do it myself, I'd probably struggle, however, with partners, it's easy.

I have seen an ROI. The first spot I made paid for the license. It's pretty quick to realize a return on investment. 

We've used Automation Hub to track monetary and hourly savings. My last company probably saved to the tune of $300,000 annualized. I just started this job. I will be able to note an ROI pretty soon.

I need to dig into pricing a bit more. It's pretty affordable for what you get. 

We evaluated the whole market before choosing UiPath. However, I wasn't directly a part of the process and, therefore, can't get into specifics. 

I do not yet use UiPath to automate processes that deal with a good cause that our company is involved in. I've only worked at the company for two weeks. I'm a little new.

I have yet to use the AI functionality in our automation program. 

I'd advise others to work with a partner to deploy it at your company. Don't try to do everything at once. Build a list of ideas before you start trying to get into things. Have a funnel of projects to do.

I would rate the solution a nine out of ten. They could improve a couple of things. However, it's really easy to use. You don't really have to learn any code. It is really easy to get people to learn it on their own. It's pretty solid overall.

Our company uses the solution for documentation understanding, email automation, and onboarding. Many of our use cases include AbbVie. 

Our company has saved thousands of hours by automating accounting processes. Staff no longer have to drudge through manual tasks and that is meaningful to them so they do better work. 

The solution provides ease of access for users with limited knowledge. One of our high-level developers can code it for a user who can maintain it with limited coding knowledge. The solution is much easier to use than having an actual coded application. 

For example, a developer can build out a use case that involves emailing invoices and includes labels and documentation. The product can then be handed off to a user who does not have coding knowledge because all needed information is included for maintenance and administration. 

There is a bit of a learning curve to the solution because it is like coding. If you are a coder it will be easy but you cannot dive very deep into the code. The way you go about the architecting process is very different from other tools because you have to lay out the flow in a certain way. 

Reusability is not as great as straight coding where you can recall functions and methods. The solution requires a whole workflow that can become a bit tedious when processes expand too much. 

Features I have wanted such as enhanced process mining and others have been shown in the new preview so are already forthcoming. 

I have been using the solution for four years. 

The stability is pretty good and the solution has not shut down. I have experienced a few crashes, but they are probably caused by my own computer.

The scalability depends on how you develop it. If you develop it to be scalable, then it will be scalable. In terms of Orchestrator, the platform is pretty good at scaling because it allows you to keep deploying it and branching out. 

The Community is great and operates similarly to Stack Overflow's community. Users have their own niche knowledge and you can query them if you ever need anything. This is a good way to expand your own knowledge base. 

I took the Academy's courses when I first started using the solution so haven't learned the new features yet. Over normal coursework, you learn best practices that enable you to pick up the tool faster, such as how to document process flow or how to set up from a high-level perspective. 

I have not needed technical support. 

I have not used other solutions. 

The setup is pretty easy and straightforward. 

We implemented the solution in-house. 

We always hope to see ROI in every process. We have realized a bunch of ROI on deployed items and hopefully will see more. 

For our provisioning process, we save a few hours per person each day. 

Our company did not evaluate other options. 

I advise others to try out the solution. It is really good software and has helped a bunch of people to switch careers. For example, I used to be an actual developer but now I do RPA. The solution is an industry leader so it is a good idea to try it out at least once.

I rate the solution an eight out of ten. 

We generally work on integrating it with our support ticketing system, which is ServiceNow. That way, we can standardize our input and get better results. It has been working really well for those kinds of processes.

A process that we worked on for operations, for example, was the ordering of phones for our new agencies. It accelerates a lot of that process and gets the people onboarded faster, more easily, and with fewer errors.

The most valuable feature is that it can be integrated with almost anything. We use in-house applications and we're able to integrate them through the database using endpoints and APIs. This sharing of information between systems via UiPath means our staff gets results quicker. Normally, we have to put in a request with the database team to go in and input the data. But UiPath already has access and it's really quick. It's really responsive and makes the experience easier for the business.

That is also true for third-party vendors. The vendor that we order our phones from has a UI, a website that we use, and we have been able to use the UI to integrate their application.

We can implement almost any interface that we want, in any way possible. It's really flexible.

And given that healthcare is highly regulated, UiPath works really well for credentialing and that type of security. We see that it has protocols that ensure that our data is not going to be stolen. We use the credential assets to save our passwords and sensitive information such as licensing.

I've been looking into Document Understanding. I've worked with it in previous jobs, things like AI center and OCR for documents. It would be helpful if they made the Document Understanding modules a little more user-friendly. There is a learning curve for using it correctly. It's a little bit hard, but once you get a feel for it it's good and it doesn't delay the automation process.

I've been using UiPath for almost four years.

The stability of UiPath is good. I haven't seen any abrupt occurrences in my time using it. Our production environment is always running. It's well-secured.

In regard to our processes, it's easy to scale. It is not that easy to scale on the business side of things, but the tool itself does provide an easy scaling process.

I haven't had the need to reach out to technical support that often because, with the community, you can find out anything regarding UiPath online. It's the same support team that answers those questions.

I did submit one ticket to support, and it was answered really fast. However, they did take a little long time to get to the root of the problem.

Positive

We did not have a previous RPA solution.

We do calculate ROI in terms of the hours we're saving the business. For example, with the specific processes that we created for phone ordering, we're saving the business a lot of hours. 

Currently, we're just using it for agencies because we want to see how this can impact things. But it's handling the process for more than 40 percent of our employees because most agency employees get phones as soon as they are onboarded.

I have evaluated other automation tools, and I've been asked many times in the different companies where I have worked why I prefer UiPath. It's the best choice because of the community, documentation, and the number of updates they come out with. They're really on top of things.

Other vendors are not on the same level. I have tried Blue Prism but it has poorer documentation and it doesn't have the support that UiPath has.

To get our certificates we had to use the UiPath Academy. The Academy gives you a sense of how UiPath works. It can get really technical, but to get a sense, at least, of how to start the journey of becoming a developer, in my case, it helped a lot.

Overall, it's a great tool to use. It has a lot of benefits documentation-wise and support-wise. It's really stable and it's really easy to use.

My organization is an outsourcing company. We work with various clients. So, we have many use cases. The current use case I'm working on is related to invoice processing.

We don't use attended automation. We use its AI functions a bit. Usually, we work with document understanding.

Currently, I'm using the latest version. It is deployed on the cloud and on-premises. It is the UiPath cloud.

It is easy and fast to build automation using UiPath. All of our automations are created with UiPath. Usually, we do automation for SLA purposes. Most of the time, the clients don't have enough resources or humans to do the job, and they need automation to improve the SLAs.

It enables us to implement end-to-end automation, starting with the process analysis, robot building, and monitoring of automations. It is good for my company. With these benefits, we can implement it and help with the monitoring.

It has reduced a lot of human error. For example, in the project that I'm working on, people were putting the invoice information on a daily basis. There were more than 20 invoices per day, and each invoice had more than 100 line items. Humans would do a lot of mistyping on the number of packages or the number of items in the package. After we applied the document understanding solution there, we can handle around 90% of invoices, and all of them are correct.

It has absolutely saved us time. It has probably saved us more than 20% of the time. People now have more time.

I feel comfortable with UiPath. The thing that I like most is that UiPath has a very large community and a large ecosystem. So, it is easy to connect with other applications or platforms.

UiPath Apps is a great feature, but it still needs time to evolve. They need to add more features. It hasn't increased the number of automations we can create while reducing the time it takes to create them.

I don't like the sequence feature in the UiPath. It is difficult to analyze and read the code.

The variable management is really messy. When I look at the code, I don't know where the variable is and in which scope.

I have been using this solution for around five years.

It is stable.

It is scalable. We have had three enterprises that are really big with more than 1,000 people. The others are small companies.

In our organization, we have 12 people working with it.

I haven't contacted their support. I have been using UiPath's support indirectly. I just put a question on the community forum, and they answer it very fast.

In the previous version of UiPath, it was a nightmare to set it up, but now, it is really comfortable and convenient. Overall, it is fast, but the deployment duration also depends on the solution. If you design a good solution and follow the best practices, it is really fast. It takes a couple of hours at the most.

We always try to split a project into small parts so that we can test each part and apply it easily. I have seen that many people create very big projects, but when you complete them, you cannot test them. It takes a lot of testing from end to end, and we still can't test it completely. That's why we try to split a project into small parts. We can test each part independently, and after the integration, we can deploy with high confidence.

I am not sure how long it takes for our clients to see its benefits after we deploy it for them.

We have a maximum of five people for deployment and maintenance. We sometimes have issues with the infrastructure. In many cases, the infrastructure is handled by the client, and there is no support or cooperation between the RPA department and the IT department. Usually, they will be late, or they did not check our requirements to deploy the bot.

If you use the cloud model of the UiPath, it will reduce a lot of the total cost.

Its AI functionality hasn't enabled us much to automate more processes. Most of the time, when we propose those functions, we don't have an agreement with the client because of the license price. Currently, the license price is the major obstacle.

My advice would be to contact the UiPath sales team directly. I know that they have different license models for different clients and regions.

I would advise following the UiPath Academy and their best practices. That is enough.

They provide very valuable templates for automation purposes. It depends on your purpose, but you can apply the ones that are already there.

I would rate it an eight out of ten.

We are using UiPath for automation processes in an insurance company in the finance department.

The most valuable feature of UiPath is if you set a form and there's an interaction with the user, it's easy and fast to build than the other RPA tools. Additionally, it is simple to use the connectors.

In UiPath they should improve the input and outputs of processes. I found it very complicated.

In a future release of UiPath, they could improve the OCR engine to make it better. All the RPA tools use some OCR engine, while UiPath's is the best but it is hard to configure and set up for your projects.

I have been using UiPath for approximately six months.

The stability of UiPath is highly stable.

We have approximately four people using this solution in my organization.

I have not used the support from UiPath.

We previously used Blue Prism.

UiPath gives a return on investment, it does what it is supposed to do.

UiPath is an expensive solution but it is worth the money. You have a lot of features. 

The licenses need to be improved because when you have to use UiPath on another system, you have to set up the processes manually, and you are not able to change the process the time if you configure a process running at the system. You have to stop it and then run to the other system. It's not too easy to configure it according to the system. If you have a large deployment, for example, 10 to 20 bots, it's hard to configure.

UiPath has a lot of free training and a lot of free processes ready to go. You have to see the best practices in order to receive the best way of development. It is important to see the best practices guide.

I rate UiPath a nine out of ten.

UiPath is great because it's highly stable, it's fast to develop, and easy to configure. However, there are some improvements to be made.

Since we are a healthcare organization with HIPAA rules, we're on-prem. Our use cases boil down to claims testing and membership testing. It'd be institutional professional dental claims and making sure our membership is loaded correctly.

We have to configure our software to pay claims and pay providers. What we're realizing is that, the more claims that we can run through the system, the more accurate we can get, the faster the payment on the claims, and the faster the payment to our providers.

The only features we're actually using are the orchestrator and 32 unattended bots.

The value of that is the power to be able to run our thousands and thousands of claims and membership to make sure that everything looks correct.

The solution has saved costs for our organization. I know it's over a million, however, I haven't done the exact numbers.

UiPath has reduced human error. We’re finding out that what we've built for configuration in the past, we're finding mistakes that we did a year ago. Now, the bots are proving that and we've been able to correct those past mistakes. This way, we don't have inaccurate payments or recaptures.

The product has freed up employee time - and it's not just the employee time. We do have some triggers that run. Some jobs are run that people use to manually do at night and weekends. We also don't have to hire additional people just to learn 80 different types of things in a claim and identify correctness manually. The robots will go through and then they can identify if there are specific things that are wrong. That part will go to our experts and they'll review those exact issues.

This use of bots allows for employees to do higher-value work. We also have been able to up-skill some of those people to sometimes a leadership role or a different role they would normally never get due to the fact that they were always manually looking at the claims and membership. This has definitely affected their level of satisfaction at work.

I don't know if we have an accurate estimate of how much time we are saving. I just know we do volume and we do thousands and thousands of claims a day, and therefore, it really helps.

We use UiPath’s Academy. That's how we learned the system. We actually learned it in six weeks and then started the development after that. It's very powerful and I continue to use it today.

It’s helped employees get up to speed with the product. This is especially useful when we get newer versions or we onboard other people. That's part of our syllabus. The first thing a new user has to do is go to the Academy and take some of the classes that we recommend. Then we identify, “okay, did you like it? Is this for you? Is it not for you?” et cetera. It’s a quick win where we don't have to take our time as we've got other work that we have to get completed. It acts as a filtering system for us. Both us and the employee can see if it’s a good fit very quickly. We can find out at an early stage instead of a year later.

The biggest value of the Academy is just knowing that we can do so much more volume and get in some more accurately without human error, or having people working nights and weekends. That has always been a really big push and we've been able to slowly work away from that.

Obviously, we’re not in a perfect world yet, however, getting rid of the manual aspect has been great. People just get burnt out. You can only look at things manually for so many hours. If you've been doing this for 10 years, it's got to be frustrating for those people who are always afraid they’ll get their job taken away. At the same time, for them, it’s so much easier as they don’t have to look at 80 things. They can look at five things that failed and then enjoy time with family and have a work-life balance. That’s big.

We've coded up to like 80% of what's possible. We really cut our pain points and said "this gives us our value, our bang for our buck." What we're doing now is saying, "okay, well, how do we improve it?" We've got another area or we've got another part of the software that we use our application that UiPath interacts with. Right now, our main concern is what else we can do to make it even more accurate or get more information or test more information to make it a solid pro program.

I'm a developer and I'll move things around and they'll change order, or I'll try to save something and it won't save the first time. I'll have to open something twice, open something three times. I've got a list. I'm working out quirks with UiPath. There are just UX things where if I copy this and put it here, it should look the same as it was, and I don't know why it doesn't. It could be my machine. It could be my local machine and it might just be that conversation with the premium plus to say, "why is this doing this?" Or maybe there could just be a setting, where we didn't check that box when we set it up. 

I've used the solution for two years. 

We actually had to spend about four months of maintenance to make sure that we got the solution to how we wanted it. We brought in a contracting firm and they didn't know the company and they just kind of said, "here's what bots can do." 

What we did is we did an assessment program for two months. During those two months, we looked at what they built, which was great. This got us up and running and showed us what's possible. 

Then, we took those two months to identify, for example, if the database maybe should have been set up a little better to interact with our other databases. Or if the coding should have had different paths of risk that they didn't know about. If you don't know the business, you don't know the risks, and therefore, you don't know how to set it up. That's why we did all of that assessment and then we spent four months fixing it to adjust to what we thought was a better path or a more stable path in order to support the robots.

The scalability potential is astronomical. We've got so many areas in the company, including finance and pharmacy, and there are all kinds of different areas and authorizations that you can actually go down and say, okay, now we have time. Let's put it on our calendar. 

The next piece we're looking into is the citizen developer angle. We know that has some power potential, however, we have to have regulations and audits. We want to be careful if we do start moving in that direction to really understand if it is right for the company and is helping people versus if we build something wrong what that would mean to manually have to correct that. That's time nobody has.

Technical support has been great. We usually get answers within hours of a request. I thought we were on the premium support plan and now we're going to go to the premium plus, I believe they call it. That starts up here for us in November.

We've had some challenging solutions where it has taken us several weeks to work through it. They tell us "here's what we recommended". That said, we know our system. It's just like any other contracting firm. They don't know your system and your solutions, however, they give you the recommendations. At this point, we've been able to work through everything that we've had technical issues with. We decide to do some of them a different way. Technical support has been supportive of this approach. It's like a partnership, and that really makes a big difference.

We started with Rational Robot in 2005. I actually developed that. I've been with the company for over 20 years. I started with Rational Robot and then we moved to some C Sharp and some coded UI.

We tried Test Architect for a little while. We've used different RPA methodologies and UiPath seemed to fit a little better with where we are and the robustness we wanted.

We switched when we moved over to new healthcare software. The old one was just COBOL and green screens, and it was hard to automate it. We did, however, it was very difficult. When we moved to this new application, we needed to make everything more quality controlled, and the only way to do that was with the robots.

I was not a part of the implementation process. 

The deployment process took about eight or nine months via our vendor. 

We brought on some contractors to do our initial setup, including a proof of concept, and they built part of the system and after that, we took it over. They were what we called a vendor tracking firm.

We have definitely seen an ROI.

The biggest ROI was in the configuration. We're realizing we may be setting some things up wrong and that's not how the customer should have been set up. When we see things fail, we ask why is this failing? And then we go upstream and find out that we didn't even build a specific thing and realize that it was a mistake, a key entry, a mistype, et cetera, and the bots catch that on the backend.

We're able to do that quicker. It's manual labor and it's tedious. Now, manual labor's fine if you want to go in and manually check this, that, and the other thing, however, when that's your day job and you're checking the same 80 fields compared to a spreadsheet over and over, it's just got to be frustrating and employees feel it. You hear it on the call.

With UiPath, we can ask the question "what can we do to support you?" We're not going to replace people; we want to get them to a better place. Our employees understand that. It took them a while, however, they do understand that now and think the solution is really cool and are thankful for the support. It's a tool, not a human being's replacement. 

I don't write the checks. I don't know what the actual cost is. That's always on leadership. My understanding is it's a reasonable price for the value that we're getting out of it.

We did look at the Power Automate desktop. It doesn't have the orchestrator to control things, and it has some other limits. When we do formulas and try to validate what the value should be, they are very difficult or impossible to set up on the Power Automate. At some point in time, I'm sure we'll be able to do that. In today's world, what we need right now is UiPath.

We're just a customer and an end-user.

We do not use the solution’s AI functionality in our automation program. We just do some checks and then just make sure via verification that everything matches in the configuration to the actual claims from the inbound files to the outbound.

There's an automation hub, test, capture, process, mining, all of these other features we haven't been able to purchase yet, due to the fact that we want to make sure that our bread and butter, the claims of membership, is solid. Once we have that in a good place, which we're hoping will be in 2022, we've already talked to our sales rep about the next steps. They've talked about the other features and offered recommendations. We'll go down that path next year and it'll be really exciting to see what else we can do to bring on the other areas of the company.

I'd advise potential new users that they definitely want to do some kind of proof of concept against other systems. I have heard other companies here that have said, okay, we're going up against four other automation tools. That's great. However, do your homework. You need to go and present everything to your leadership and showcase the solutions. 

As we get some of the demos of software, we can kind of compare them to what our system's needs are. A new user can say, well, maybe these are our top two. When you get to your top two, that's your time to bring somebody in, an expert to discuss what you're trying to do.  

If you do choose to go with UiPath, that UiPath academy is so valuable. That's a big asset. If you do the premium plus care, they will support you through and help you get things set up and running or make it better. We've been up and running for two years. Their goal and my goal is to see how to make things better to continuously improve the system and make everyone happy.

I'd rate the solution at a nine out of ten. There are just a few system quirks I'm trying to work through. 

Currently, we're doing the digital transformation in finance. I'm more of a functional person who understands the design and the processes but not the programming, coding, and details. 

I am using their automation cloud offering.

One of the best benefits is that instead of just doing their single task, it gets people to think beyond what they're doing and how other things impact them; for instance, for PO distribution, we had to think about where our suppliers' lists are and what do the people do out in the field? I've never been as exposed to that as much as now because we are trying to automate it. What you find is that the challenge isn't just in the robot. It is what you do before you get to the robot that is critical, and if it forces us to fix that, it has been a success. It helps you to realize some efficiencies in your current processes.

The automation cloud offering helps to decrease the total cost of ownership of UiPath by taking care of things such as infrastructure. We have gone and moved many more things to the cloud. We have a Hyperion solution in the cloud that we use for consolidation. We have FCCS cloud from Hyperion.

I anticipate that there would be a reduction in human errors and also time savings within these five processes. Inherently, it has to improve the accuracy. That's because now you're focused on a particular thing, and you're testing it. If it is not a hundred percent accurate, it is not going to production. 

The ability to follow and orchestrate what the robots are doing has been very valuable. I've been working on the automation hub because that's the next step after our test case of five robotic implementations. So, it is orchestrated to see how they're doing.

UiPath Academy is helpful in terms of the ability to connect the software to the processes that you're trying to automate. It has been helpful in understanding the functions, and it is where you would go to get a better understanding. I do find that their online help is very beneficial with examples. In fact, sometimes that's better than the training itself.

I'm learning it for the training for the RPA associate, and I'm about 70% through there. UiPath's academy courses have been helpful in onboarding or being up to speed with UiPath. However, it has been tougher because the programming that I learned in school is very different from the programming done today. I am sure the younger people will pick it up much faster. There is so much out there, and there is so much to learn because it is not one software package. It provides the ability to use all software packages and interconnect with them. So, the opportunities are amazing but also intimidating.

I started with UiPath training in July 2021.

I am not worried about the stability. I may be naive, but if others are using it in the cloud with much more complicated processes than what we are automating, it is not really a concern.

It is being used by accounting and IT. Finance is learning that, and they're taking the same training that I'm taking. They're probably 10% to 15% on that journey.

Currently, we're doing the digital transformation in finance. We expect to expand that out to operations based on our test case of five robotic implementations. In fact, in our naming conventions, we're trying to make sure that we leave room for HR, Operations, IT, etc, but right now, we're just in finance. Payroll processes, HR processes, onboarding, operations, filling in maintenance on equipment, and doing the routine things out in the field that they do every day will take adoption and interest. Raising four kids, I realize you can't get the response that you want until the people in the field decide that they want to change and adopt it. So, that will be the challenge. The challenge is not whether you can automate something. It is more like will they let you automate something.

I have not really had to use the support, but I will. I've gone back and forth, and I've lost some of my training. I'm a tenant who is just in the training phase. So, everyone has had issues with getting in, and it's more whether they're using Google or Explorer, and how they're accessing it. I am getting that standardized and having them do that. I am also a victim of the same thing that I'm teaching them, and what I'm trying to do is be the guinea pig.

Before UiPath, we didn't use any other RPA solution. We went for UiPath because it was really a move from our finance leader, the controller. We had automated many financial processes with planning, reporting, etc, but the accounting group was continually skipped over. We had a controller that came in, and they wanted to take many of our repeated processes. They took Rally and created an agile group to create the digital finance vector. There is a team of five members who went and looked at processes that we were doing and then told us about which ones we can change and do better with. By using his experience in other companies and having discussions with other people, along with the KPMG group, they did an analysis. They wanted to lead in the digital finance transformation. They're doing that by looking forward to five or 10 years and then coming back, which is really nice.

I will learn more about that. The workflow was nice, and the implementations that we have are relatively easy, but it is intimidating to see how much it takes to do some very small processes. It helps you understand more about the decision points and whether they're objective or subjective. With reporting, it will be helpful for us to understand which things are best to automate and which ones are the easiest. That's what I'm hoping to get from five implementations.

We are doing consulting with a collaborative effort with KPMG. So, they actually know more of the technical details, and they're supposed to be transferring data. 

KPMG did a sprint on the implementations. The sprints were such that it was really six week turnaround time, and that involved actually going backward and doing the assessments from those. By doing the cost benefits backward, we can set things upright and see what we do going forward. The key is not how quickly they were able to do it, but how quickly we can do it, and how quickly the people in the field can adopt that and have a robot actually be their assistant. I believe you call that the citizen developers.

Right now, it is way too big for me to even understand it. I feel like it's a universe. I'm just trying to get directions. The area that I'm looking at right now is analytics to make sure that we can properly report on how they're doing, and that's what is going to make management invest further into our idea. I come from a reporting background, and that's what I focus on in other financial packages that we have with PeopleSoft, Hyperion planning, and the FCCS cloud. In many of these automations, the need part of it is that you're not stuck within the software that you had; for example, a macro within Excel can only help you with what you're doing in Excel. It can't help you with an email. It can't help you with a PDF form, but you can bring these together, so the automation opportunities are endless.

So, at this time, it hasn't saved us money because we're just in the investment phase. That's why I want to do reporting so we can see. The decisions you make now affect the next 10 to 20 years. Everyone gets too short-term-focused. You should go to where you want to be five years from now and go backward. What you are doing today is going to make that five years strike. So, it is an investment.

It is pricey at the beginning, but we'll have to see going forward what we get for the tools. It is always expensive to buy a really nice car and not drive it very far and very much. So, it is about utilization.

I believe my company did evaluate other solutions, and they definitely liked UiPath best. The primary differentials were reputation, experience, and the level and quality of the tool.

I would advise others to give it a try. It can't hurt. Even if you didn't use it going forward, with the basic principles, you'll probably fix things and then come back to it. Some people just have bad processes, and it would be very frustrating to use them because they haven't fixed their processes. You have to get your processes aligned first and then take them to the point that they're standardized and understood by different people using them, and then you can automate across different software packages.

In terms of the ease of building automation within UiPath, that's something that I need to discover with the IT team, but what I do like is once you do something, you store it in a library, and then you have plug and play automation that you can add to others. So, you don't have to keep redoing the same work over and over again, and that's going to be a huge benefit.

I would rate it an eight out of 10. I'm learning it, but have to inject experience. I have to learn and understand, and then I have to utilize t. Like many solutions that I've dealt with, there are always three ways to do it, but there is the best way. I always wish you'd just teach the best way, but I understand that you want to make people agile and have an understanding of using it in different ways. However, learning all three ways is very cumbersome. You really want to learn the way you're going to use it.

Most of our use cases come in finance functions, however, we certainly have use cases spread across all sorts of other functions. For example, in HR. We've had a lot recently in IT operations and then also in broader operations. Obviously, that depends on the company we're working with. We're getting more and more customer-facing automation that is running all the way through the organization, from front office through middle office and back, across all different verticals within a company.

UiPath has improved our clients' companies and the way they function. For example, overall, automating the mundane and the repetitive allows people to do people things. Things like invoice processing and using Document Understanding to do that, enable your accounts payable team to look at the exceptions and do exception-based processing, which requires human judgment. Keying an invoice and working out who to send it to for approval should be rules-based. If it's not rules-based, it's probably an error or a miscommunication between the vendor who's sending it. Maybe it's a mismatch to the PO, and that requires human judgment. Therefore, just getting it out to a human to do that at the right time is critically important. If you're giving your people more time to do the exception-based management, you also give them the time and capacity to stop that from being an exception next time. Whether that's expanding the automation to be able to handle that use case, or whether it's educating your vendors when they're sending you invoices.

We work prominently with unattended solutions and larger end-to-end automation. What we're really loving about UiPath is the number of ways we can now inject human intervention at different parts of those larger workflows instead of looking at a big workflow and working out what parts of it we can automate, aiming to automate end-to-end and only working out the bits that we really need the human intervention in.

UiPath is constantly coming up with ways, whether it's through Teams or it's through apps, there are all sorts of different ways to get the human in the loop and get the automation throughput as high as we can.

Our clients use the UI apps feature. We use that for quite a few different functions. It helped to reduce the workload of IT departments by enabling end-users to create apps. That said, we generally work closer to the business than the IT side. We'd like to see it as taking the work away from the backlog that IT is looking to implement. You don't need an IT department that is quiet and doesn't have a big long queue of work. Allowing the business to be able to build their own solutions based on their business process is very powerful.

The UI apps feature has increased the number of automation. It’s certainly increasing the number of things you can automate and also the amount of a given process you can automate.

It has also reduced the time of creation. Certainly with the app creation, having a single platform reduces the time. You no longer need to integrate it with other different web forms or things you create on the front end, which we did a number of years ago. Now, it's one solution. UiPath can do it all.

For clients that use automation cloud offering, it has helped to decrease UiPath's total cost of ownership. It goes a little bit back to the IT side. You don't need to involve them nearly as much. Having a platform that is always on the latest version really, really helps. It also closes down the handoff between business and IT within the COE.

UiPath has saved costs for our client's organizations. The IT costs are different for each organization. We have clients who have an outsourced IT set up where they pay quite large costs to spin up machines and to maintain and upgrade those machines and services. Having the one solution as UiPath and offering the cloud is critically important for that.

In terms of on-prem instances, clients have saved costs there as well. We're very, very excited about the automation speed and the one-button deployment to the whole environment. That's certainly a step in that direction with on-prem. That will certainly save our client and us a lot of time. That way, everyone can spend more time building automation rather than building a platform to put them into.

The product has reduced human errors. On the same note, it also allows humans to spend a little bit more time on those exceptional cases. When the pressure may be on to get an invoice keyed it allows them to spend the right amount of time getting that exception handled. Then, of course, everything that's going through the bot is pretty much zero-error. The way the bots work, if there is an error it's going to let someone know. It's not going to guess and it's not going to fat finger.

We increasingly use UiPath's AI functionality. We certainly do on custom models with Document Understanding. We're just starting a project now to look at pulling entities out of emails. This is an exciting use case and I’m excited to learn about the capabilities that are being expanded.

The ability to automate processes is twofold. One of them is, it allows us to start to create human decisions. The human decision is the bit that you really need to automate around and starting to build that human decision-making into an AI model is critically important. The other side of that is that, when you're running automation, you have the ability to create a huge dataset. Everything that's being done is rules-based and it's data-driven so you can map everything every bot does, every button press if you want. That's a huge amount of data and a huge amount of input to AI models. Having it all in the UiPath platform is critically important for our customers. It's great that UiPath has lots of partners and we use partners, technology partners, to do that when required. However, the more that comes into the UiPath platform, the better.

We’ve utilized Academy courses from UiPath. UiPath's academy is amazing. It's unparalleled in the industry. We traditionally have done a lot of training for our clients over the years. However, we find with UiPath, we just point them in the direction of the Academy. We're always there to support, of course, and supplement any training that's specific to maybe a client environment or a client business system. That said, it's a fantastic resource for partners and for clients of UiPath.

The quality of the training Academy is great. It's also a tool to evangelize UiPath in our customer base. If someone hears about UiPath or they come to one of our demos through our delivery life cycle, and they really want to know something about UiPath, or want to get involved, or want to become a part of the COE or become a developer, it’s very, very easy to send them in the right direction. They can do the training they want to do, and they can get as deep as they want. It’s great and offers a low-effort way to evangelize UiPath.

The time to competency has been lowered with those that go through the Academy. It's not only learning. Learning things off slides. It's getting in there, it's whether it's a community edition or a training install, it's building things. Through the certifications, users can submit those things to get reviewed. This makes sure that people who are certified through the academy really do know their stuff. They've got hands-on experience. There's nothing quite like doing it in a real process. With the UiPath Academy, new users get as close as they can to that.

There should be extra ways for humans to interact with automation.

From what I've seen, and it's very early, however, there's certainly the direction they are headed, which is really, really great to see. It's my belief that Document Understanding will continue to improve. I'd like to see more predictive-type stuff, which again, we are beginning to see.  We'd love to get Document Understanding continually improving and having it more improved by the SMEEs who are performing the processes rather than the data analysts.

We've been implementing UiPath for just over four years.

The stability is amazing. Years have gone by and obviously, the product has changed a lot, however, of late, the last couple of years have been great stability-wise.

The object repository and modern folders have been great for the scalability of the solution. From the platform side, it's certainly easy to scale. We're very, very impressed on the automation suite side. You can deploy everything very quickly and you can scale everything up. 

The focus on reuse from a developer level is great to see. That's really improved in the last little while. On the other side of it, the actual scale through the organization, in terms of evangelizing automation, and making our customers an enterprise that automates first, there are numerous tools that do that really well. Whether it's the workshops that UiPath will come and do, or that we facilitate or it's through the pipeline itself, the scalability has obviously been a focus for the last little while. It's really, truly great.

We very rarely need to reach out to UiPath support. If we do, we know we're going to get a prompt response, and we're going to get a good answer. That said, we rarely need it. It's very, very good in general when we do use it.

We've got a few clients that run multiple solutions. They've been legacy users of another solution for a very long time. Citizen Development through StudioX is unparalleled in UiPath. Attended automation is obviously a strong point and has been for years. There are also things like Document Understanding. Document Understanding is much stronger than any of the solutions on other providers. There are those value adds that come in for that full lifecycle.

The solution is relatively straightforward. We have a dedicated platform team whose role is to implement UiPath for our customers, whether it's integrating them into the cloud or getting their business applications on the cloud. Or, whether it's an on-prem solution where we'll interact with their systems and integrate with their CyberArk or AD groups or whatever they need.

Each deployment is very dependent on the customer. We've had them deployed in a few days and we've had some that have gone on a few months, unfortunately. We find that talking to the risk group, the security group, and the infrastructure group all at the same time on day one of the project will make sure everyone's aligned - and that is the best way to mitigate the risks. 

The last thing you want is someone from the security organization putting their hand up in week four and saying, "Hold on, hold on, start again. This doesn't comply with one of the controls in our organization." It's about educating and keeping everyone, all stakeholders from the IT side involved at all stages.

The ROI that our clients have seen is very process-dependent. We've seen some huge 300 to 600% on particular use cases. Some of them are very easy to calculate due to the fact that we're taking work away from manual users. We've also seen some really good ones recently that are actually increasing revenue. Whether that's giving the capacity to sales-type items or whether it's tasks such as processing refunds and all those sorts of things that shouldn't be taking time away from salespeople, it’s been helpful.

The licensing can get a little confusing. There's been a move recently to create personas around licensing. My feedback from customers is that it hasn't necessarily helped. Some of the new enterprise-type agreements, the per-seat arrangements, are interesting. That's likely the way it'll go. Even then, it's still a little on the confusing side at times. We do a lot of work with clients to get them to understand the licensing model.

We've been aware of other solutions, and in comparison, with UiPath, it's the breadth of the lifecycle that sets it apart. UiPath as a platform, from the moment the first person at an organization thinks about automating, to reaping the benefits of that and improving the day-to-day work of the business, there's a solution for all of that. Whether it's process mining and finding automation candidates, it's the way UiPath brings different users into the automation. Apps and insights make sure we're pulling the right data out to keep generating the business case to grow the UiPath account itself. Also, along with that, is the ability to provide the extra benefit and knowing what benefit we're providing.

We have clients across both on-prem and cloud deployments. We have about 25% cloud, 75% on-prem solutions. We use various versions of the on-premises model. We probably average about 12-month-old versions, however, we do have clients on the most recent as well. We also have a couple of clients who are lagging a little bit.

I'd advise potential new users to get in there and get started. You don't know until you've tried. You don't have to look very hard to get started, however, it's important once you get going to start to think about how you scale and how you build an operating model around it. Maybe start small, and think big, and make sure you plan accordingly.

I'd rate the solution at a nine out of ten.