UiPath Reviews

We are using Studio, Orchestrator, and bots.

We are a consulting company that is working with one of our clients to automate back-office accounting processes for a logistics company. There are five people in the core team who are working on the implementation.

We run automations in a virtual environment, but I was not responsible for the implementation.

With respect to how easy it is to automate the company's processes, on a scale of one to five, I would rate it four. It's very easy, but it is difficult to explain to our customers who are not as technical. In other words, it is difficult for people who are coming from the business side.

On a scale of one to five, judging how beneficial it is, I would rate the training a five. Without it, I don't think that I could have started the implementation. I completed the developer program just for a general understanding of how everything works, including the Orchestrator and how it all works together. For me, the training was really important. It was very good and I really liked it.

We were working with the Community Edition at first, but from the point that we purchased our UiPath license until we had our first robot was approximately one month.

In terms of eliminating human errors, we expect to see this benefit later. Until this point, we haven't touched the processes where there could be human errors. We just started with the really basic ones, which are so easy that people don't make errors there, and neither do the bots. We plan to get to the more complicated processes next.

With respect to saving time, I can say that this solution has helped, but at this point, I don't know by how much.

While we were implementing this solution, we were empowering people. This solution changed the way people are working because it is so open and everybody can take part in it. It caused them to think about their processes in a different way, with automation in mind and possibilities for the future. Now, when they're having strategy meetings, they have dedicated time slots where they're just talking about processes that could be automated, so the whole mindset is changing now.

The most valuable feature in Orchestrator is that it stores the credentials in a safe way. Our clients were afraid that the credentials would be stored where somebody could see them and being able to schedule bots with the credentials available is very important for them. 

We would like to see Studio made a little easier so that our non-technical customers can also implement the bots. For example, some of the features from the upcoming Studio X should be put into the original Studio, as well.

I have trouble understanding the machine learning and AI components, so I would like it to be easier to understand how and what to do with them.

With respect to the stability, on a scale from one to five, I would rate this solution between three and four. Sometimes there are issues where something is not working, although there are probably times where it happens because we don't know how to use the solution in the best way.

Both the customer support and technical support for this solution are very good.

The technical support has been very helpful. Our team has had many calls with UiPath regarding the virtual machine, which did not work at first. Within two days it was working.

Our clients did not use another RPA solution before this one.

They are undergoing a digital transformation and wanted to give themselves and edge so that the other companies will not get ahead. They just saw the need to change and we told them about RPA and they got very excited. We showed them the first pilot bot and they were ready to implement it.

Our in-house IT department handled the initial setup.

We have seen ROI and performance benefits from using this solution. While I do not have specifics in terms of money or time saved, I think that we could see the benefits after a week. There were processes that the client no longer needed to do, so they had more time available for other things.

For our first customer, we started with Orchestrator, an unattended bot, and a couple of Studio licenses, all of which cost $25,000 USD for the year. It is definitely worth the money.

We had researched Automation Anywhere and Blue Prism, but we didn't look too deeply.

The choice for UiPath was made based on what we read on the Internet, including the Gartner Report. It was very easy to get started after first downloading the Community Edition and then taking the Academy to learn how to do it. It is easy, fast, and the statistics say that it is the best.

Right now, this is a good solution that I would recommend. It is really beneficial for a lot of companies. At the same time, there are things that can improve and they are working on them.

I would rate this solution an eight out of ten.

I'd say our finance applications, like accounts payable, have been our biggest use cases for this solution. 

I would say just the ability to be able to go outside of the IT department in our organization to get things done and have a sort of agile group to do automation. It is difficult to get IT involved in this type of thing in our organization. So being able to have our own agile group is beneficial for us.

Another thing that is valuable is that I think it's just saved a lot of our finance and customer service people a lot of manual time on processes. We are just able to involve a lot more value-added work.

I really liked the insights dashboard. I guess that there is an additional fee for that. Being able to see your return on investment in real-time is definitely beneficial. We spend a lot of time manually calculating how many hours we saved and that would make it a lot easier. The improvement I want is already there. I have to look into implementing it.

The area of the solution that has room for improvement is the stability of the bots. It just seems like we have spent a lot of time trying to fix bots that are down and whether that is our coding or the product. I think there must be a better way to diagnose the issues and avoid them.

On a scale from one to five, five being the most stable, I would rate the stability of the UiPath platform as a three. We've had a lot of issues with bot stability. I don't know if it is how we go about development or if it is the platform itself, but we spend too much time trying to fix all the bots that seem to be breaking.

I have not used technical support personally but our IT group has. Everything I have heard about the customer services group has been positive.

I have used the UiPath Academy RPA training. On a scale from one to five where one is the least beneficial and five is the most, I would rate the UiPath Academy as a four out of five. I'm not an IT person, so would have given it a five if I was. Parts of the training may have been more advanced than I expected.

We had a lot of archaic processes in our company — a lot of paper-based processes — so we knew we needed a better solution. That meant we had to work through a lot of processes and re-engineer what we were doing. We knew that we needed to move in the direction of automation because the processes were just not sustainable. We had processes but we did not actually have an automation solution until we started using UiPath.

The initial setup for the product was something I found to be a bit complicated. At least the first couple were pretty complicated. It was just that we were all new to the technology and we didn't really know necessarily what we were doing. It is getting better. From the time we purchased the UiPath license until we had your first robot in production, I think we took about three months.

We did you use an integrator. It was EY Technologies (Ernest & Young). They helped us out a lot and our experience with them was good.

We have certainly seen a return on investment. As far as how many months it took to see real value, I think we just crossed that threshold. So it was about twelve months in total. We have probably saved — just at our platform — around $100,000. The solution has also helped to eliminate human errors with a couple of the bots that we've deployed for sure. It has also saved our organization time. If I had to estimate, I'd say probably 8,000 hours a year so far.

We looked at Blue Prism, Automation Anywhere, and UiPath. We kind of landed on UiPath because it just seemed like it was a little easier to navigate than the other ones from a user experience.

Currently, we do not run any of our bots in a virtual environment and we use only untended bots so far. Either of those situations could change at any time. We have a couple of processes that we are looking at for attended processes, but we haven't implemented any yet.

We have about five people involved directly in the initiative. On a scale from one to five where one is very difficult and five is very easy, I would rate the ease of use the platform for automating as a four. It is a four because I would say it takes a little time to kind of get up and rolling for a developer, but it is not too bad.

On a scale from one to ten where one is the worst and ten is the best, I would rate this product a seven. We have just had some issues with keeping bots up and running. I feel like the issue is the learning curve.

The advice I would give to a colleague at another company who is researching this solution is to just do it. Make sure you know what processes you are going to want to automate. If you need to do standardized anything in the processes, do that on the front end in the planning stages versus kind of chasing your tail on the back end.

We are in the finance industry, so we use Studio and Orchestrator to automate a lot of Excels and making reports.

The product has given us the opportunity to automate processes for our industry and specifically for our business. We have set up best practices. So we know what description needs to be at the top in the code. We just start there, read what's going on. Automation just makes everything simple and standardized while reducing human error.

I don't know all of the features so the scope of my view is a little limited as to what may be best or most valuable overall. For me, the ease of use is definitely valuable. Assembly of processes is just drag-and-drop and that simplifies a lot of things. Annotation is also very easy to do and it helps to make things clear to understand during development. I can go look at someone else's code and within an hour understand what it's doing without having to consult the other developer. On a scale from one to five where one is very difficult and five is great, I would rate the ease of use of the platform a four. 

Even though there are things I'd like to see, I also know that most or all of them are already being announced for new releases. As a developer, I would probably say the most important thing I would like to see is that the IDE (Integrated Development Environment) a little bit more fleshed out. It could use more debugging capabilities, for example. But again, we've been seeing that they're adding stuff like that. It will be getting in there and playing with it when it is released to make sure that it has got all the stuff I want and I might be able to be more specific after that as to what still needs to be added.

On a scale from one to five where five means the product is very stable, I would rate the stability of the UiPath platform a five. It works and nothing breaks that is directly related to the product itself.

The technical support, communities, and resources are all pretty good. We use the forums and I like the forums a lot. It's crazy how many people actually spend time on it and reply. You get your answer pretty quickly. The guys are really open to work with, so if we need help we just reach out and we get all the help we need.

We also use the UiPath Academy. On a scale from one to five where one is the least beneficial, I would rate the Academy as probably four out of five. It is easy to use. You go in there and you know what training you are looking for and what you need to take. Most of the training is in-depth enough so that when you complete it, you really have a good grip on what's going on. It eliminates barriers to getting the information you need when you need it.

The initial setup and implementation happened before my time at the company.

A lot of our return on investment has to do with time savings. It is definitely amazing to see processes that could take eight days before actually run in ten minutes. Just because of automation. It eliminates Hangouts and just makes the whole process and the people involved in the processes more efficient. As far as how much gets saved exactly, it depends on the complexity of the project and what it resolves. We have to invest in our BA (Business Analyst) work so all together it may take a couple of months for anyone project to pay off.

We use the solution on-premises right now, but I think we are going to move to the cloud because of the advantages. We also do not run our automation in a virtual environment, such as Citrix either. Our bots run on a physical server, but there may be reasons in the future to explore virtual environments for that purpose. 

The approximate number of people in our organization involved in the automation initiative, strictly considering developers would be my team of six. It is harder to say how many are using the bot solutions who are not directly involved in the development.

We currently tend to stick more with attended bots which just helps take a measure of human error out of the way. A lot of problems that we had in the past have come from users not updating their personal machines. That can obviously cause things to break. We try to make bots unattended if we can, but it isn't always practical to deploy in that model.

In any case, the solution has definitely saved our organization time and reduces human error either way.

On a scale from one to ten where one is the worst and ten is the best, I would rate the product as a nine or ten. Beyond just the product, there are tons of resources that we have available. Finding things other people have already made is an additional benefit. There's no point in reinventing the wheel if something's already been built.

My advice to people considering the solution is pretty simple. Buy it.

We are using attended and unattended robots, Orchestrator, and Studio.

We are in the financial services industry. A lot of what we do is background data processing, and we use the unattended robots for a lot of it. We do have some attended robots as well, but most of our processes are unattended.

I am a developer, so I primarily use Studio. I write the instructions for our Orchestrator Application Manager to do everything we need in Orchestrator. 

We are currently operating an on-premises deployment, but we're in the pilot group for Cloud, so as soon as we get a date on that we'll probably be migrating.

One of the primary processes that we've automated is reporting. Prior to automation, our users were only able to run a few of the reports, a few times a week. Now, we're running every single report that there is to run, which is probably four or five times what they were able to do, every single day. Every morning they receive a summary of that work, so they're able to just get on and look at it, rather than during the close of the day. In financial services, the close of the day is crunch time. We work really hard to make sure that everything is done within a set about of time because there is a domino effect. One person has to be done before the next person can finish, and they're not having to dig back and try to figure out when these issues happened. We're providing it to them upfront. We can say exactly what happened, which account they need to look at, and on what date. This means that we're ahead of the issues, rather than trying to backtrack and find them.

We are not currently running in a Citrix environment, but the only reason we're not is that our sister company hosts our Citrix environment, so we can't install any of the services that make those environments much easier to utilize. For example, we can't install the computer vision component because we don't own it, so they won't let us.

Our team is really small, there's only six of us on the actual RPA team. However, we work really hard with the business to get buy-in in every department. We're trying to roll out at least one automation in every single department. Our company's goals for the next year, I believe, every associate of the company is supposed to have proposed a task that they are doing, whether it's daily, monthly, yearly, whatever, that could be automated. Then our team will ingest that, prioritize that, and work through it. But, we're really trying really hard to get our whole company involved, and we're getting ready to kick off this campaign to try and get more attention to it and to try and get people using it. We want it to be more than just a buzzword. We want it to be something that everybody's talking about regularly, and using, and excited about.

When it comes to getting people interested, I think it's probably a combination of education and sharing the experience of those projects that we have rolled out. When people are really seeing that with the projects that we've rolled out, our close is shortening, they become interested. What we say is happening, or will happen when we're rolling these automations out, is happening. Getting that to be shared from process owner to their team, to the teams that they're working with, it acts like word of mouth for those that are affected. We don't like it to just all come from us, the technical team. We don't want to simply tell them that it's going to do something. We want others to talk about what it has done for them and suggest they should take advantage of that too.

With respect to how easy it is to automate our company's processes, on a scale of one to five, I would rate it a five. We don't struggle with it.

I took the UiPath academy training, and I love it. We are looking at an unrelated tool right now, and we found no comparison between their training and the UiPath Academy. We were spoiled with UiPath Academy, and we didn't really realize how good that training really is.

The thing that I love about the developer training; the level one, level two, level three... level one really does walk you through it. It gives you, literally the walkthrough, so when you don't understand, you can go back, you can look at, and see exactly how to do it. But by the time you're in level three, it's not doing that anymore. The requirements are a little bit looser, you have to figure out how to interpret the words or the requirements, and it becomes more challenging, but I think that that's important, because, by the time that you're actually working real projects, it's not a walkthrough anymore. You have to figure it out on your own.

From the point that we purchased our UiPath license until we had our first robot was approximately three months. It did take us a little while, but we knew that we purchased our licenses before we were really ready to hit the ground running. We function out of such a small team, and we were still working with UiPath trying to figure out which partner we wanted to bring in for consultants because we wanted somebody with experience. We didn't want someone who just finished the training just run in and try, and I think we learned a lot working with that consultant.

We did work with a second consulting group, Machina Automation, and we loved working with them. They're great. They're just so supportive, and they really want to make sure things are right. It's never just sending them the requirements and pounding it out to get it into production. We work with them really deeply to try and make sure that they understand the process, we understand the requirements, they express their concerns to us, we express our concerns to them, and we work together. It's not like we just send them the documents and they send it back as a project. The whole way through we touch base with them every single morning. They're always asking what more they can do and how they can help. They ask if we're happy with what we received.

We do time card reviews, so the time that they spend with us we're actually able to go back and validate, based on that, what they've said they did, that indeed it is what they did. We had received some scrum and sprint training from them. We've had actual developer consultants, we've had mentoring hours for our developers. So we've had a lot from them, and they've been able to help us with everything. Anything we ask, they try to accommodate us. For example, we asked if they had any experience with Kibana. They did not but said that they would find somebody who does.

With respect to saving time, I don't actually track that because I am a developer, but I know that our goal for next year is twenty thousand hours. That's the big goal that we're working towards. With one of our processes, I think we're going to hit about thirteen thousand hours if we can just get that one process done. That's a statement review. We sent out tens of thousands of statements, so we'll be able to review every single one of those. This would be a huge saving in time.

I think right now we have about one hundred and thirty-six processes in production, and a lot of what we've done so far is in the finance section of the business. As such, a lot of those are only run on a quarterly, or monthly basis. We have some annual processes, and we have very few daily processes, but those daily processes add up over time.

In addition to the hours that we have saved, one of the big things we're working on is accuracy, control, and staff avoidance. Staff avoidance is the work that couldn't have been done otherwise because we would have had to hire someone to take on all of the work. So, we're able to do more than what our current staff is capable of doing. We add that into our time savings.

But, more than that, we really do focus on accuracy and timeliness. We're able to speed things up. We're able to ensure that things are exactly as expected. We spent a lot of time in the early stages of our planning, really trying to optimize our processes, so we get our original documentation, we take it, and our team works with the business to optimize that. After we get sign-off and we've optimized the manual process and got it documented and signed off, then we do a developer review and discuss ways that it can be made easier. Then we do a review for development and optimize it. Finally, once we get that signed off, we actually start our development.

We spend a lot of time on the front end of the process, making sure that everything is accurate and reliable, and we're going to be able to deliver faster as expected, and it's going to be able to handle all of these different errors or use cases. Following this process has worked well for us, so far.

I think the most valuable feature is being able to run processes in an unattended way where we can schedule them, and then have the report sent to the process owner's inbox in the morning. The is great for us, and we use it a lot. It saves the users a lot of time, and we're able to do a lot more for a user than they were ever able to do on their own.

I would like to see a biweekly scheduling option in Orchestrator. We've actually built into our automations a roundabout way to process every two weeks but it would be really nice to front end a biweekly schedule. Being in the financial services industry, we do have a lot of projects that run on weird schedules. We've kept some of our automations attended just because they're ad-hoc. They might need to re-run them. We don't want to have to wait for Orchestrator managers to kick those processes off. But, outside of that, there is no need for this one to be an attended robot. It's a perfect candidate for unattended automation, just the scheduling is the problem.

With respect to the stability, on a scale of one to five, I would rate this solution a five. We haven't ever had any issues with it.

We did not use another RPA system prior to this one.

When I first started at the company as an intern for my department, it was only myself and my boss, who's now our COE manager. The very first thing that we did was meet with all of the different functional departments of the company, and we explained to them what RPA is. We explained the types of processes that it can help take off your desk and asked for ideas from each department about what could be done to help them.

We took that, and we built this huge backlog of perhaps three hundred different items, prioritized them, and worked with others to explain that it was needed. At this point, we did PoCs with UiPath and Automation Anywhere.

I found the initial setup to be straightforward. They had me sit in on it and I don't work infrastructure, so there were some things that kind of went over my head. They did a lot of planning. After some help from UiPath, it went really fast.

UiPath helped us with the implementation. We worked with them to really figure out what our infrastructure needed to look like. 

We evaluated both Automation Anywhere and Blue Prism in addition to this solution. We ruled out Blue Prism pretty quickly. Our sister company uses Automation Anywhere, but we liked UiPath, primarily for the reason of our experience working with them and the sales team. To me, it was so much more than just working with the sales team, they're our friends now. We still talk to them and we have relationships with these people. We actually just ran into one of our developers for our PoC. It's a culture you want to be a part of.

In comparing with Automation Anywhere, one of the big reasons we went with UiPath was the support that we received. Any question we had was immediately answered. If they didn't know the answer, then they would search to find the right people in the company who did. I think that that's more valuable than just saying that they'll find us an answer. You always got the feeling that they were going to follow through, just by the conversations that we have had with them. I think that really sold us, a lot.

Also, watching the road maps for both companies at the time, initially it seemed like Automation Anywhere was ahead, and that UiPath was catching up. Then, when UiPath started releasing what they were going to be doing, as opposed to only what they were working on right now, we realized they were really going to be moving ahead. I think that kind of sold us too. Just watching what's on the road map, and how it fits in with what we see our company doing in the next few years, they aligned really well. I think that was the point where my boss really realized that it's going to be a good fit for us.

When I was in business school, they taught us that the things that users like the most are the things they didn't know they needed. I think UiPath does a great job of anticipating the users' needs, and they meet them before we knew that it was what we needed. I am excited about the next release.

I recently had a discussion with my father, who works for one of the energy companies in my state. He works at the IT level but on the infrastructure side. When I explained to him our savings in terms of hours that we have had since adopting RPA, he was very excited and is now heading their RPA initiative.

RPA is making a difference and it's really changing the way the workforce works.

My biggest advice for anybody considering this solution is to get their quality improvement, and Six Sigma teams involved because I think it makes a huge difference in terms of understanding processes. When you can get your processes understood, you can get people on board early, at every level.

I think it's really important to have proponents for automation, just in general. You want to have the automation mindset at every single level. Of course, it's important to have your C-level bought in, but it's important to have the people who are doing the work bought in too. If you don't get their buy-in, it's going to be much more difficult because a lot of the work that you're automating is at their levels. You're working with them on a day to day basis to understand their process, to understand all of the rules behind what they're doing. So, buy-in, and process understanding, that's just critical. You can't move fast without those two things.

We have nothing bad to say about UiPath. We have regular communication with them and all of the concerns we have are always addressed. They're addressed quickly and they're addressed well. They really listen to what the customers want.

I would rate this solution a ten out of ten.

We are a pharmaceutical company, producing insulin, primarily for diabetes. We work with other diseases, as well, but our focus is primarily diabetes.

We have automated many processes, at least 20 RPAs across the company.

Automation can be done in many ways, but UiPath is a more simple approach. There, any layman can learn how to program in UiPath, which is its main benefit.

We need them to improve the scalability, as we are still building up.

We have had stability challenges. However, I don't know whether it is product-related programming-related, or if it is our core systems which are failing. So, we have instabilities, and whether or not it is UiPath, that I don't know.

We still need the power of the scalability. We have a few robots, but we are a big company with 45,000 employees. 20 robots will not change the world.

The product is not big enough yet to eliminate human errors.

The initial setup is complex. Technically, we are still implementing the product, as we are doing it in phases.

There's a difference when you start up, you just need to make something work to prove the concept. Proving the concept, that is easy. You hire in some consultants, build the robot, and it works. Building the organizational scalability is more complex: How to combine process knowledge, programming knowledge, and maintenance knowledge, since these are three different types of skills which are needed. It's not straightforward to do in a global company.

If you are a local company with one site, it's one type of challenge. If you have multiple sites across the globe (more than 200 sites), it's another type of challenge. Thus, we haven't nailed it yet. Right now, at this intermediate stage, there are more stages ahead of us.

We would like to see improvement on the ROI, as we need to free up resources. Too many man-hours are being spent on trivial tasks which could be automated.

RPA appears to be working, as a technology, but it is still too immature to say that it is beneficial as many people portray it to be. It is still in the making, but it is not there yet. Right now, we don't have a solid business case on RPA, as a technology. Maybe, in the future, but it has given us a lot of challenges so far.

It is for automating tasks that are not meaningful for people to do, tasks that are menial and repetitive. The University of Copenhagen, where I work, is an old institution and we have a lot of different legacy systems that don't work well together. So, we have a lot of people doing administrative tasks that depend on moving data from one system to another. We use UiPath to automate these repetitive tasks and make the robots carry them out, so our people don't have to.

For example, in the case of our most recent robots, there were a set of tasks where three people had to print out 3000 PDF pages, then sort them into seven different piles, then sort those different piles into three different piles each. Afterwards, scan them and send them to different systems. We made this better. Instead of three different people taking a whole day, we did it in three minutes. This is an example of a very concrete, administrative task based on legacy systems, and we made it simpler. This was a huge improvement and positive thing for our company.

It is very easy to make beautiful, clear, well-documented workflows that clearly reflect the process. This is an achievement that is not always feasible with regular code. Even though each activity in UiPath is like a line of code, the user interface in Studio and the use of states, flowcharts, and sequences make it so easy to understand the overall process and get an overview of what is actually happening.

UiPath is easy to use, and it CAN be used by non-programmers, but it is even better to use for programmers. It allows us to make very robust and effective solutions because we have all the functionality of the powerful .NET Framework library within reach, all while the UI makes it possible to create truly beautiful solutions.

I would like UiPath to have a build-in method which informs the robot's process owner how it has managed its transactions and performed through the night. If the robot had a process that was set up for a 100 transactions, and two of these transactions had an application error, four had a business error, and the rest were fine, I would like a straight up method for the business owner to login somewhere and see what the robot managed to do and not do. There should be a method for accessing and logging into Orchestrator and see the logs for only one process, and this log should be presented in a way that makes sense for non-technical people. 

The stability is good, I've never encountered any major problems. UiPath works with websites and systems which are famously unstable, but it gives you the tools that are necessary to deal with hiccups and if something is not stable. So, if you add proper error handling to your robots, it works.

Out of the robots that I have built, three or four have had to perform on several machines at the same time. I haven't encountered many scalability problems, but then again I haven't built robots to perform on a 100 machines or anything near that. 

The initial setup was quite complex. I was not in charge of the task, but my colleague set up the whole infrastructure and mentioned some problems. He corresponded with the support team, and they did figure it out, but the setup guide was definitely more complexly written than it should have been, and some things were written in the wrong order. So, there were some hiccups in the implementation.

In our company, RPA doesn't necessarily mean less people will be hired or people will be fired. We probably won't see the ROI in cash. It will help with workplace productivity, and job satisfaction, though.

We were looking at Blue Prism and UiPath. 

UiPath is nicer to work with. The developers especially wanted to work with UiPath, but the business team was looking more at Blue Prism. However, UiPath was better for the slightly larger robots, which is good for a lot of Unattended Robots.

From what I have seen of Blue Prism, UiPath is both more aesthetically beautiful and stable. Based on .NET, UiPath makes sense as a solution.

Start small and make time to do things right from the start. The infrastructure and developer culture can vary massively from one RPA team to another, and it is really important to establish healthy code guidelines, test and operation manuals, etc. from the start. At my current company we are just starting up, getting everything right, which is very exciting, and I can see how different (and better) we are doing things that at my previous employer.  

Primary use cases would be within the finance sector. We supply financial services for other government agencies. The main robots that we have in use right now are concerning floating of financial periods, uploading reports, commenting on these reports, and so on. We are starting to look at invoice processing, to a larger degree. Then, we have a few quality and control robots which do checks on data quality, customer information, customer carts, etc. 

We are using approximately 20 robots right now for different uses.

We've opted for professional, traditional developers and programmers to do batch robots. We don't use it in our business units. Possibly because we are a government agency, we don't necessarily get enough IT security around the users applying their own robots. 

It is not easy to use in this way because we do use traditional programming skills. We are considering moving some tasks out into the workforce for Attended Robots, etc. We think that this will be a problem for us in regards to getting it pushed out there and still maintaining good quality. However, we haven't tried it yet.

We are able to smooth out peak workloads. Because with a lot of the period closures, like monthly and yearly closures, we work in peaks. Everything has to be done within a few days. When we can prepare a lot of the data and reports through the night, the employees can start on those in the morning. Therefore, we are leveling out some of the workload features, which is one of the main benefits.

Automation technology for us is mainly a way to get around the long-term IT projects. This is the future for us, when using UiPath, to start moving into the AI part of it. In addition, the bundling of the offerings into UiPath is quite important, so we don't have to go to several different vendors. We can try it out on our own and see if this is something we want to do. Then, we might bring in another partner or vendor to do some specialized training, debug the networks, etc. We're never going to get that capability ourselves. We don't have a large IT department nor do we have data scientists. For us, it's important that one or more of these skills are getting baked into the system.

The ability to integrate between legacy systems is the most valuable feature. We use it mainly to replicate manual processes, where you just have to pull out data or pull down large volumes of customer information, in general. We work across many individual customers, who are individual entities or individual databases in our ERP system. We work across about 220 databases. Therefore, the task of logging onto different databases alone is quite cumbersome.

The main thing is to make data available to the employees when they start working mornings, instead of them starting drawing out reports to see if there is anything that they need to act upon. With these legacy systems, which work on a one-to-one basis, we tried to batch process them a lot more.

We have looked at it with Citrix, and there are problems with it. Some of the new features coming will address it.

We have been looking at Attended Robots, which result in the inability to lock your screen. That is simply a no-go for ever using them in most government agencies, as IT security will prohibit us from using them. If UiPath wants Attended Robots to be used inside a government agency, it needs to be applicable on a virtual desktop.

A lot of what is coming is what we are looking towards: Both on the skill set with computer vision, but especially also on the enhanced identity management and security. The ability to debug and lock at a less complex level for us to look at. 

One to three years.

UiPath's stability is quite good. We don't see any problems with the stability of the platform application. All our problems stem from the basic systems that we operate on, which are quite vulnerable to network problems, time outs in various systems, etc. However, these have nothing to do with UiPath. Perhaps some of the things which are on the road map will help with the debugging of some of these issues.

One of the things that we are lacking right now is not stability, but usability with debugging, e.g., when you can't see what went wrong. We have to look through 50,000 pages of logs or so. 

The scalability is quite good. 

The main problem around scalability is the licensing structure and the inability to dynamically assign licenses across robots. While I know this is coming, this is our main gripe with scalability: the licensing structure. Because we are part of a larger setup with our own IT supplier, who does a multitenancy setup with Orchestrator, to have more flexibility with the use of licenses would be very valuable.

We are using virtual desktops to deploy and run the machines with robots. It is necessary, as we cannot scale it on individual on-premise machines.

We have used the customer support. Our main issue with them is they need to understand the problem that we are writing about, and not reply too soon with a standard answer.

All our developers are using UiPath Academy and are RPA certified. While they like some thing, some of the frameworks which were used in the Academy examples, the developers didn't agree with. This is probably because they are IT professionals themselves and are used to doing things a different way. Whether it's because the use case wasn't good or they were just used to something else, this was the main gripe.

The product has a lot of backing from our director, who has been pushing the agenda. To be able to stay relevant, even as a government agency, we have to reduce our costs every year by two percent. To be able to produce that, we need to be more efficient at what we do. The target is: Not to reduce staff, but keep up with the increased demand for production and costs.

I wasn't part of the very first setup.

We mostly did the deployment ourselves or with our own IT partner, who is not a partner of UiPath. So, it has mainly been done by our own IT people.

On the individual robots, we do have good return on investment. However, once you add in the governance, including when we are scaling up the solution and the maintenance of robots, then I don't think we are at a break-even point. This upcoming year, we are expecting positive ROI. For us, the return on investment is high quality data. 

It has helped us to eliminate human errors. We have a robot that is specifically requested to avoid, for example, uploading reports on the wrong customers because of GDPR cases, where data protection officers will have to get involved, even though, it's not sensitive data. We have seen problematic use cases drop from a couple of incidents from maybe 100 transactions to zero. We are looking to completely eliminate errors in some cases, not just reduce.

It has saved our organization time. We use the robots to try to address some of the peak workloads that we have. They are not there so much to address a certain number of hours that we want to save. We want to be able to use the robots to help address our customers' needs during designated time frames to reduce extra stress on our employees.

We would like to see improvement around the licensing and multitenancy. 

We also evaluated Blue Prism and Kofax Kapow. The reason that we went with UiPath has a lot to do with scalability, as our IT supplier has committed to a multitenancy set up, which was not possible with Blue Prism. 

We are quite happy with UiPath. We are not looking at other vendors at the moment. They are all offering similar solutions, but with a slightly different focus. We could use any other solution, but the development is so fast that even changing now would be no guarantee that we end up with what we want, because everybody is moving at a pace where we can barely keep up with the development of the products.

Try out different vendors and their labs. See how it fits to the processes that you are trying to automate right now. Some applications are better at old mainframe systems, and if that's what you will be focusing your efforts on, then maybe UiPath isn't the best vendor for you. There are others who focus more on that sort of environment. So, be realistic about what you want to automate, and choose your use case initially from that. 

We see the biggest benefit right now from Unattended Robots, but that's all we use. In the very long-term, Unattended versus Attended Robots will be able to generate a greater benefit. However, with the current licensing costs, they will need to change for it to be a positive business model. We have to be able to move licenses from one person to another. If we have to apply a fresh license to each person in the workforce, with our budget, it will not be possible.

The process is for background checks. There are all kinds of checks such as academic, criminal, and work as well. We receive all the volume through the queues. We are using the citizen developer, StudioX, to get the cases and understand what are the fields and what are the requirements for each one of the cases. The bot will process them accordingly. For example, for each university or academic, there is a different process around the world.

The industry we use it for is HR. What we do with the backgrounds is providing a confirmation to our clients that people have the qualifications that they say they have. It is for data accuracy and consistency within the HR and talent acquisition departments.

Our AI-powered automation initiative has not yet changed what our organization is able to achieve because the project is still a pilot. We are still working a little bit on the environment. We are working through VDI, so it is not straightforward. We cannot just install or put UiPath to work. So far, we have not seen all the results, but we are looking forward to that in the next quarter.

UiPath would definitely free up time or resources for other tasks. We are a team of six people. We are estimating that two of them will be free for new projects. There is about 30% of resource savings.

Our usage is very simple. We have been getting the text, parsing it, and trying to categorize and analyze it. We are not using it fully, but the OCR is very important. This is a package from StudioX. With OCR, we will implement document reviews to make sure that whatever the applicant puts in the form is consistent with the document provided. For example, in academics, it will be your bachelor's or master's certificate.

The value proposition of implementing UiPath is that if we use UiPath and the RPA functionality, instead of passing the process to a BPO, we will start understanding the process and automating it as much as possible. We will have hybrid workflows between humans and robots. We will create capacity. We will have the same number of workers but increased capacity. We will start having conversations with our stakeholders on how to reinvest all of this capacity that has been liberated.

We have had some issues with StudioX. In terms of features, for now, I am pretty happy with UiPath. The requirements of the process to be automated are covered with the basic functionality. It is not exactly UiPath, but for security reasons, we are not able to download packages and use the functionality provided by the community with their developments. It is not on the side of UiPath. 

I was certified as a Citizen three years ago. That is the time frame that I have been using it.

Recently, there was a software update of StudioX. We had some bugs. I would rate it a five out of ten in terms of stability.

We are working on moving to the cloud, so scalability will be good.

We have internal support. I do not speak with the vendor. Our internal support system is pretty consistent. They have quick response times.

From my perspective, I do not think we have been using any other solution. We have been with UiPath for about eight years. I cannot confirm the number, but I know that we have been partners for a long time.

We also use AutoHotkey which is something similar but not a replacement. It is a software solution that allows you to reprogram your keyboard and put some functionality in there to automate some of the things, but it is not a replacement.

I was not involved in its deployment. It is on-prem right now. We are migrating the company to the GCP, so there may be some restraints in regard to that. Everything is currently on-prem, but we are working on going to the cloud.

The ROI would be in regard to the capacity. We estimate two FTEs to be free from this project.

We have not yet used UiPath's AI Center and many other features. We are using StudioX, so we are still in the citizen developer mode. We are not using the full functionality with Studio and all that. We have an RPA COE. They have much more complex processes and projects, but we have not used it for that. This UiPath convention has brought a lot of ideas in terms of how to start leveraging it more.

We have also not used UiPath Process Mining and Task Mining. I am working with one of my colleagues who is like a bridge between operations and IT.  We are working together to see how we can better use the technology to improve processes. I have to go team by team, understand the process, and go deeper to see where we can start using this technology. We will have a roadmap of where we need to go.

Overall, I would rate UiPath an eight out of ten.