UiPath Reviews

We have implemented a couple of use cases. One is with our creative collection scenario. We are also working on order automation. That will go live in October.

Since we are fairly new, I will say we have only two scenarios running right now, and they've been going on for almost a year. It's definitely saved us a lot of time. We haven't rolled out too many scenarios yet. When we'll be rolling out our order automation for 15 countries, I will see more benefits in the uses as we go.

The most valuable feature is definitely the document understanding. We have started using it for the order automation project that I'm working on. It definitely has some challenges also, especially dealing with other languages. However, so far, it's good.

We only have our Cash App or our credit collection scenario. We save around one-tenth of the time we typically spend where a lot of transactions happen. We save around 60 hours every month, at least for now.

UiPath's user community is definitely helpful. Usually, I'd look it up there first when we run into a problem.

Our team has used UiPath Academy courses. Academy courses were really helpful in giving us a good start to have a good foundation. Although we use UiPath to develop our scenarios, having that Academy access and going through the training definitely helped us get up to speed very quickly.

I definitely want some improvement on the documentation of the understanding side.

Maybe they should build more out-of-the-box apps rather than companies building their own implementation from scratch and maybe build them as a product on top of the platform. That would save time in implementation.

We're a SAP shop, so I'm looking more at what scenarios can be pre-booked using UiPath. I know there are some escalators that are there in SAP. However, they are not production ready, in my view. That area definitely can be improved since they're all Excel-based, and they're more proof of concept rather than production ready.

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

Stability is one area where I'm really concerned. Sometimes it does behave erratically and I have to stop everything, and deploy it again, and it works fine. Therefore, I have some concerns about how it's going to scale out when there is a very high volume.

I'm concerned that we may have issues with scalability as it can behave erratically, and I have to stop and redeploy it.

For example, right now, we have a very small implementation. We will be implementing this order automation for 15 countries with a lot of customers. So I have concerns about how UiPath will scale out to these countries plus even more countries that I am planning to implement as well. What will be the process, what will the performance impact, and how is it going to behave? I do have concerns there right now.

I have dealt with technical support a few times. That said, most of the time, I could figure out the problem myself. There is one problem that I'm still dealing with in terms of technical support, and it's been ongoing. They have involved the product team to help resolve that particular issue. I have to say that I'm not thrilled with the support that I got.

Neutral

We did not previously use a different solution. We used to do everything manually.

I lead our automation implementation. For our treasury, it was easy; however, for the automation we are going live with in October, the process is a bit more complex. 

Our implementation strategy involved starting small and starting with a couple of use cases. I decided to use UiPath as our partner to cover our bases since I wanted to ensure we have a good foundation with best practices before we start doing anything in-house.

We had UiPath assist us with the initial implementation. The experience was pretty good. There were some challenges to deal with in terms of having a robust solution with good logging and notifications. That definitely didn't happen right off the bat. That said, overall, it was an okay process. 

We are definitely seeing an ROI. For example, we are saving 60 hours every month, and it's a small implementation. With order automation, we are going to save a lot of time. I don't have the exact numbers yet. However, we are positive about the outcomes we expect.

I was quite surprised at the pricing. We decided to implement action forms, and at that time, I was not aware that there is a separate licensing. It's difficult sometimes when you have to go back to your finance team or the sponsor and tell them that you need more money. Any licensing requirement has to be clear up front rather than being revealed later. I'm not worried about the cost, it's more about knowing what license we need, and in my implementation, we had quite a few mishaps related to licenses.

We looked at a couple of other products.

I don't want to go into what products we looked at. However, I can definitely say the main criterion behind selecting UiPath was its ease of use. We did a proof of concept in-house without any help. That was my main criterion for making a decision. 

Also, there's a good product path in terms of what they're doing next. UiPath is a market leader. We wanted to go with a solution that not only meets our needs for now but also is taking the effort, time, and money in building the product and bringing new capabilities.

We're fairly new to the process and have yet to get into using UiPath for a good cause.

We aren't using the AI functionality yet.

I'd advise potential users to do their homework. Look at other products and make the decision based on what capabilities you are looking at. I will say don't look at only one scenario. Look at the overall picture. Look at what your future plans are. I still believe UiPath is the best product when it comes to RPA. However, you have got to look at the whole picture at the outset.

I would rate the solution an eight out of ten. There are a lot of good things happening. It's very easy to use, and UiPath has a very good product roadmap. That's the key for me. Especially with AI, process mining, cost mining, et cetera, they're really going to help any company that signs on.

We have a lot of use cases. A lot of them are based on SAP transactions. From SAP to SAP, or SAP to local documents, or local documents to transfer information to SAP.

The main benefit is to save manpower in-house. The second benefit for me is avoiding printing on paper. That is the second KPI that I am working to reduce in the company, reducing paper usage. In one project, for example, we managed to save more than 1,000 pieces of paper daily.

The UiPath Studio has been very necessary for us. 

Orchestrator is a vital feature. We have a sizable infrastructure, so it is necessary to have Orchestrator deploy all of the robots in all of our servers. It is not possible to work only with one computer. Therefore, that is an essential feature for me.

We've been able to save on man hours. We save around 60 manhours daily per department. For example, the maintenance department works with many people, and we can save on labor.

All departments use automation; however, mainly the logistics department benefits. The finance department comes in second, and after that, production. We've created more than 40 automation so far. We use both attended and unattended robots. 

Even if you are just on a laptop, you can have UiPath. 

I've used the UiPath Academy. It's necessary to have credentials for the infrastructure. It helps us understand the features of UiPath properly.

I use the UiPath community a lot. When I have a job, I can write a question about it and get a response from an expert. It's quite a valuable service. With the community, we can reduce the time to resolve issues. We can learn from other people who have faced similar challenges. 

Setting up automation can be easy or complex, depending on the project. 

All documentation and transaction areas can always be improved. 

We'd like to see mobile robots in the future. We have a lot of cell phone tasks, and it would be ideal to replicate automation from the iPhone, for example. If you were at a certain location, you maybe could set up an automation that could send a message or open a cart. 

I've been using UiPath for four years. My company has worked with the solution for longer. 

The solution has been 95% stable. 

It's a very good tool, and it's easy to expand in terms of infrastructure. If we need more space or more servers, it's easy to just deploy more. 

I have no experience with direct UiPath support, however, getting help from the community has been great.

I did previously use Auto ITX. It's a library from C# Program. It was only local. I don't know if was a standardization. I'm not sure why the company ultimately decided to begin using UiPath. This product is easy. It's drag-and-drop and very simple to use. 

I have developed automation and uploaded Orchestrator. That's it. I didn't handle the initial implementation. 

I'm a developer and therefore do not handle the licensing aspects of the product.

We're UiPath customers. 

I'm not sure which version we are using. I know it is not the last one. 

I do not use the AI functionality just yet. That's new to me and very interesting. 

While I would recommend the solution to others, it is necessary to have a good developer who understands the tool's value. Technical knowledge is necessary.

I'd rate the solution ten out of ten.

We use it mostly for reconciliation, automatic emails, and monthly, quarterly, and yearly reports and extractions. Document Understanding is another big use case for us.

The AI functionality cuts down development time. The out-of-the-box models are pretty good at extracting and do account for variations. We don't have to do it template by template, at least for invoices and purchase orders. Thus, it's a huge time saver.

We have more than a hundred unattended automated processes and hope to scale as well. We have a healthy pipeline, and our COE just prioritizes them and chooses the ones with the most impact.

The core RPA is the best feature because of how easily we can get started. The other most valuable feature is DU or Document Understanding. It doesn't require huge setup and implementation times. When you look at a pure machine learning model, it requires a lot of expertise. Though UiPath is not purely plug-and-play, it's almost like plug-and-play because it can be up and running very quickly.

UiPath has definitely helped us with productivity. It has helped us to grow because as we bring in more companies, we don't have to add more people or train new people. The existing staff can handle the growth. Also, the team no longer has to do some of the manual, repetitive activities and can focus on more value-added work. We're looking at how to move analytics and data into the department and use the time saved to upskill the employees.

I connect with local customers and find it very beneficial to share best practices. My team tells me that the UiPath user community forums are pretty active and that if they're stuck and post a question they get a response pretty quickly. I only hear good things about the forums.

I took the UiPath Academy basic certification training before I rolled it out to the others. It's pretty good, but you still need to be technical. You cannot pick an analyst and then put them through the full certification. However, the training is self-explanatory. The Automation Academy is good as well. The biggest value I've gained from UiPath Academy is the self-learning methodology. Having free self-learning material makes sense when you don't know whether you are committing to the solution.

I would like to know more about the product features and real use cases. Sometimes, all I hear is how quickly the solution can be up and running, and I don't hear about all the work that goes into it. Because everybody has a choice with bots and process improvements, unlike that with ERP systems, I would like to have more information on how to constantly evangelize.

In the UiPath Academy, there's not much documentation for Document Understanding and Process Mining. Documentation for some of the newer tools needs to be added to the UiPath Academy.

I've been using UiPath for three years.

I haven't seen any degradation in terms of performance.

It scales well.

UiPath's technical support is pretty good. If their level one support is unable to take care of an issue, they will then escalate it to product managers. I would give technical support a rating of eight on a scale from one to ten because they are not as good at supporting some of the newer technologies.

Positive

The initial deployment is straightforward. It took a few months to set up everything, and we scaled slowly. It's easier now that we've moved to the cloud.

We did it all ourselves. We tested everything in UiPath Academy first to see if it would work for us.

UiPath has reduced the number of hours spent on manual work, and that is our ROI.

The cost could be lower. The pricing is not transparent, so we don't always know if we really are getting a good price.

We evaluated Automation Anywhere and Blue Prism. When we looked at the total cost of ownership, UiPath felt better for our situation.

Compared to other solutions, UiPath offers a lot of products in its portfolio. The customer success manager attends to our needs, gives access, answers our queries, and takes care of us. Also, UiPath has a robust community, so it pays to be with the leader to get all of these benefits. Thus, I rate UiPath at nine on a scale from one to ten.

We're currently rolling out some of our first few automations. So far, it's been in finance and procurement. We're just automating some of their inventory processing workflows.

The automation will be unattended. We have three that are in active development and another six in backlog awaiting development.

The first few automations have definitely had an impact already. One that we're rolling out, we anticipate having a great impact. One that I'm currently working on should probably have the biggest impact so far on one of our departments. It will save us time and therefore cost. It's a very manual process with lots of human error opportunities. Between how much faster it's going to happen now and how it will be 100% accurate, we anticipate seeing a huge benefit from that.

I appreciate the infrastructure. There are numerous platforms through which we can perform automation. We are in the Microsoft sphere, and so we have the opportunity to use the Power Platform to do lots of automation. However, I've been impressed with the infrastructure that UiPath provides in developing, publishing, and rolling out these automations and then being able to monitor and manage them effectively.

The community can be helpful. In the public forums, I have seen some forum threads that are very active with lots of people that respond with great answers and great context, and multiple options. That said, there are just as many cases where no answer is ever provided, and it just disappears into obscurity. I've had multiple of those types of approaches myself, where I've posted questions and gotten no response. The community can be helpful. For somebody like me that wants to get something out of it, I would also need to be willing to put something into it and help others answer their questions, as that's how the community works.

For the most part, I was impressed with the Academy courses. They did a great job of introducing me to a new piece of software I hadn't seen before and establishing some familiarity with it. The instructor-led training from UiPath, allowed me to put into practice some of the things that I had learned in the Academy. 

The biggest pain point we've seen so far is that we have trouble identifying best practices in certain areas and circumstances. There is no shortage of resources in the Academy and on the forums that have great information. That said, a lot of them are specific to use cases, or they're too generalized, which makes it difficult to know exactly how we should be handling a certain scenario or just some basic things about how to best set up the folder structure for our given environment.

It's been difficult to navigate that as it is still so early in our implementation of RPA. We want to ensure we're doing it right to establish a good foundation from which we will build all of our future automation. We are constantly concerned that we're not doing something the right way.

During a UiPath conference attendance, I really appreciated having access to experts directly. I can just ask them, "Here's our scenario. In this context, what's the best practice?" And I can get a straightforward answer. We don't have access to them outside of this conference. I don't always have the time to watch the videos or go through the multi-hour-long training to get to the one best practice that might be nested inside a larger training.

Finding some of the answers ourselves is difficult since they are contingent upon our scenario and the context we're building. There's not a one size fits all. To that end, it's no surprise that there's not going always to be a single solution that can just be published to say, "Always do this, this way." Without that context, we really do need to be able to talk to somebody, and we haven't had that yet.

In terms of the UiPath community, I probably can't answer a whole lot of questions since I'm so new; however, for a community like that to function and succeed, there have to be enough people with the expertise that are willing to put in that time for free. In a realm of automation that touts itself as a solution for people who have no time, it's no surprise that there are not always people that are willing to sacrifice what time they don't already have to begin with to give out free service.

Once I have automation ready for production, I don't see a way to deploy that to a production tenant environment without manually recreating everything. In a typical development environment in software development, you develop in one area, and then when it's ready for deployment, it's packaged up with all of the assets and everything that it needs, and then you deploy it to the production environment. You do some final testing to ensure the deployment takes, and you're done. Whereas here, it seems like I'm having to recreate everything manually. I can import the automation, yet I need the whole structure and orchestrator and all of the assets (75), and I have to recreate everything manually. It seems something is missing. 

I just started using the solution three months ago. 

The solution is pretty stable. That said, that'll be a question better suited for me in about three months after we've had our bots live. Since we're only in development and testing them in pretty controlled environments, it's harder to tell. It seems like it would be pretty stable. However, I can't answer that fully.

From what I understand, it scales well. I understand that's one of the directions that we see ourselves going. We'll be taking on more and more automation and scaling up quickly.

I haven't had any technical support directly from UiPath yet. I've only learned that we can request a technical account manager, and I understand that we don't have one right now. I'm not sure what additional cost that may incur, either. It's always that question of the cost versus the benefit. That's what we need - that technical expertise from somebody that can have a short conversation with us and help steer us in the right direction.

I have worked in the Power Platform with Microsoft. That is not specifically for RPA, per se. However, I've worked in it and have familiarity with it. 

One of the biggest pros for sticking with Microsoft would be that we're a Microsoft shop, so it would keep all of our solutions in the same realm. We wouldn't have to export and import data across services and databases. It would just all be under the same umbrella. That's a huge benefit of sticking with Microsoft.

With UiPath, there's a stronger infrastructure that supports the development, maintenance, and scale of automation versus Microsoft. However, Microsoft is still pretty new and young to the RPA development environment, and they move very quickly. I would expect that they are not done developing their RPA suite either. I imagine that we'll see future iterations where they become a stronger contender to what UiPath provides.

I was not involved in the initial setup. That happened before me. 

We have yet to see an ROI since we don't have any of our automation fully live. We anticipate an immediate return as soon as these are in production based on the countless hours that will be saved from people's workdays.

The licensing is a headache. Luckily, I don't have to deal with it directly. That's above me. As a developer, I have to deal with the licensing just in trying to build new automation and ensure that there are licenses available to be allocated at runtime. That alone is just obscure enough to make it complicated and leave me unsure as to if I've set it up correctly.

I'm an RPA developer.

We do not yet use the AI functionality. 

I would advise potential new users to make sure they know what it is that they want. In our case, we need to choose between the options of sticking with the Microsoft Power Platform or going in a new direction with UiPath. Even though the Power Platform could potentially do everything we need to automate, it's not apples to apples against UiPath. If what your need is better suited to one or the other, don't force your solution into one product.

I'd rate the solution eight out of ten. I'd rate it higher. However, there are technical issues that I've encountered and a steep learning curve. We've had difficulty in finding the specific answers we're looking for and lack access to technical experts that can answer complex questions, pricing, the ambiguous nature of the licensing, and how those get provisioned. There are some core features still missing.

Our company uses the solution to process state reporting uploads for clients. 

For one use case, we automated the process of dragging forms, filling in fields, capturing confirmations, logging information, and moving files for upload. 

For another use case, we automated the process of manipulating data, setting filters, and generating reports in Excel. 

We are now moving to another department that uploads yearly tax reporting files to websites. 

We do not yet use AI but have many possible use cases for reading invoices and PDFs so we will try these processes first. 

We have saved a lot of time on uploads. For example, our state reporting uploads now take only two to four minutes and that saved us 7,500 hours for January alone. We anticipate similar time savings for the automations we are currently doing in another department. 

As we continue to automate our uploads, we will not need as many seasonal workers so that is a big cost savings. 

The solution includes preset activities but allows integration of code and expressions that make it more powerful and dynamic. In nine month's time I have barely scratched the surface, but it feels like it integrates to so many things that finding new use cases is easy. 

The automations allow us to better catch errors because data is always transcribed correctly.

The upgrade process could be improved so that it does not require download and reinstall. It would be nice to have an upgrade option that talks directly to the orchestrator. 

Some documentation can be improved. For example, documentation for integrations and activities tells you what it does but does not tell you how to fill in variables or fields. I had issues finding some things I needed for new activities or integrations. 

I have been using the solution for nine months. 

The solution is pretty stable. You may have version issues because there are a lot of updates, but that is not a stability issue. It is always important to make sure you have the latest updates. 

The solution is definitely scalable but it takes time to learn how to best scale. There are many routes you can take which depend on different things. 

The Community is super helpful because they share information that is of great benefit. Forums have been useful when I have needed help. 

I gained my experience through the Academy's courses. I was in a different role at my company but they needed another UiPath developer. For three months, I did a rotation with the RPA foundations course. After that, I was able to start working in the full time developer role. The Academy was very helpful and allowed me to jump in with no UiPath experience. 

Technical support is very helpful. I only contacted them once for an issue with the Salesforce API package that would not run with attended users. They responded in a timely fashion and helped me quickly resolve the issue. I rate support a ten out of ten. 

Positive

Our company previously did not use an RPA tool but rather used command line scripts and tools with Python. 

One of our developers had been writing scripts and came across the solution. He showed our company how much time it saves while improving accuracy. 

The setup is pretty straightforward. 

It is amazing how easy it is to automate some things. Once you learn the interface, everything is straightforward. 

I assisted our department in implementing the solution in-house. I helped build and run things for our big rollout in January of 2022. 

Since then, I have automated fourteen processes with attended bots. 

There is a big learning curve to ensure you get everything invested in the solution to realize ROI. 

For example, my department only had two developer licenses but still managed to save 1,300 hours in the first year. Another department was scaling a much bigger deployment, so it took longer for them to hit returns.

The solution is affordable enough to get a good return on your investment. We get ROI over the cost of licenses. 

We started out on-premises because we did not have attended licenses. Now, we are moving to attended for bots and trying to publish more things to the cloud so others can run them. 

I looked at Blue Prism but have not spent time using it. 

Start with a couple of solid use cases that would realize time and ROI benefits so you can see how the solution works. 

Do not go too wide or too fast with deployments. Focus on a few things first until you are clear how you want to expand. It is important to decide whether you want more citizen or RPA developers and whether your bots will be attended. Just take it slowly unless you are working with someone who has high-level knowledge. 

I rate the solution a nine out of ten. 

We use this solution for finance, HR, and for handling invoice reconciliation. We also make use of donation approvals.

I find that UiPath's user community was more helpful a few years ago. When I go to use the UiPath forum, a lot of the answers are copied and pasted from old answers and they don't make a lot of sense. That being said, I do still occasionally get some value from it. 

We also make use of the academy courses. We have put all contractors through the basic courses to make sure that they've got a basic level of competence. The academy courses are useful to test that people know what they should. The architecture courses have been most beneficial to us.  

We are saving approximately three and a half million annually based on the number of hours saved multiplied by a salary base rate. That ends up being approximately 60,000 hours a year that's being replaced by bots and this is a big deal for us.

The Orchestrator really stands out as the most valuable feature. We don't have to train anyone. They can usually pick it up really quickly. It is easy to use and intuitive.

A lot of the packages are very easy to work with. There are some challenges when updating a package that you've built or a library that you've built in UiPath. Overall, the extensibility is really nice. 

I would really like to see the package deployment updated. As it is right now, if you want to update something, you have to take down the latest code, sync the packages and re-upload everything back through the dev test to prod. It's a big hassle when we've tested the library ourselves. 

I have been using this solution for seven years. 

This solution is very stable. Any complaints I have come back down to package management and custom issues with custom libraries. Outside of that, upgrades are really quick and really easy. We have bots disconnect so frequently that it is easy for us to catch issues manually.

This is a scalable solution but UiPath could use some better visualization tools for bot utilization. They do have insights but they are a little bit rough to work with. I wouldn't want to put on a hundred bots at a time, but loading in a few here and there is really easy.

I used Automation Anywhere and Blue Prism for a while. The UiPath Orchestrator far exceeds the functionality of Blue Prism and Automation Anywhere. As far as the bot setup goes, UiPath is very easy to install, especially compared to Blue Prism. UiPath is more business user-friendly than Blue Prism. Sometimes it's nice to work with Blue Prism because it has such low-level code that it gives you a little bit more flexibility.

We keep it pretty agile by necessity. We use a lot of contractors to get a lot of different approaches. We have 168 processes on 27 machines. We have some restrictions based on the company requirements but internally we move as fast as we can because we have to.

It is really easy for us to set up a VM and get UiPath installed. It is a five or six-step process. UiPath is significantly bug-free compared to what I'm used to with other products. I haven't had to raise a support ticket yet for UiPath.

Initially, we had a customer success manager from UiPath who showed our admin how to run the installation. At this point, we take care of all of it ourselves. 

We've replaced the equivalent of 20 to 30 employees who have all been moved to more valuable positions. We've taken processes that were supposed to take months and reduced this to days which has improved our customer experience. 

I would like to see a few more options for developer licenses because we end up swapping them so often. We've tried going through floating robots and a few options that have been not exactly what we're looking for. Price-wise, the cloud offerings are good. 

I'd certainly say UiPath is worth it to save time and effort. The product is really stable compared to what I've worked with before. 

I would rate this solution a nine out of ten. 

Currently, we're doing digital transformation in finance. We expect to expand that out to operations based on our test case of five robotic implementations and to get those in the center of excellence and understanding, and then go further. In fact, in our naming conventions, we're trying to make sure that we leave room for HR, Operations, IT, et cetera. Right now, we're just in finance.

One of the best benefits is that it just gets people to think beyond what they're doing and how other things impact them. Instead of just their single task.

For instance, with PO distribution, we can ask larger questions, such as: Where are our suppliers lists? What do the people do out in the field? I've never been as exposed to that as I am now due to the fact that I’m trying to automate it. What you find is the challenges aren't just in the robot. It's what you do before you get to the robot that is critical. If it forces us to fix other exterior items, we've been a success. However, if you can add to the task, what the robot does and then pull it through, that's where things get interesting. My job is just going to expand and I foresee I’ll be so busy with so many ideas.

We do use the UI apps feature. We are working with consultants. They actually know more of the technical details and they're supposed to be transferring data. I'm more of a functional person that understands the design and the processes, not the programming, coding, or details. I'm learning that as I’m in training for the RPA. I'm about 70% through training. I've been taking that through UiPath

Getting up to speed with UiPath has been tougher due to the fact that the programming that I learned in school is very different from the programming done today. The younger people, I'm sure, pick it up much faster.

It is helping our onboarding process and is useful in getting me up to speed.

The biggest value I get from the UiPath Academy is the ability to connect the software to the processes that we’re trying to automate and being able to understand the functions in terms of where you would go to get an even better understanding. I do find that their online help is very beneficial as it offers solid examples. In fact, sometimes that's better than the training itself.

There's so much out there and there's so much to learn as it's not one software package. UiPath Academy provides us with the ability to use all software packages and interconnect with them. The opportunities are amazing and also intimidating.

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.

The most valuable aspect of the solution is the ability to follow what the robots are doing. Currently, I've been working on the automation hub. That's the next step. You can use the orchestrator to see how they're doing, for example.

We’ve realized some efficiencies in our current processes due to UiPath. That said, I'm a novice. We've just begun with these five processes. That's why I want to do the reporting and figure out the analysis as I want it to basically sell itself.

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

In terms of reducing human error, inherently, it has to improve accuracy. Now that we’re focused on it, we’re testing it, and if it's not a hundred percent accurate, it's not going to production. We absolutely anticipate a great reduction in human error.

In terms of payroll processes, HR processes, onboarding, operations, filling in maintenance on equipment, and doing the routine things out in the field will require adoption and interest. You can't get the response that you want until the people in the field decide that they want to change and adopt it. That will be the challenge. Managing the change is huge for us. It's always an obstacle. It's not that, can you automate something, it's more of a question of, internally, will they let you automate something?

I'm looking for more of the analytics to make sure that we can properly report on how they're doing. That's what's going to make management invest further into this. I actually come from a reporting background. That's what I focus on in the other financial packages that we have.

I've been using UiPath since I started training in July of 2021.

I'm not worried about the stability of the product. If others are using it in the cloud with much more complicated processes than we are automating, it's not really a concern of mine.

In terms of scalability, right now, it's way too big for me to even understand it. It's like I'm in a county and you're asking me about the universe. I'm just trying to get directions. I still need time to absorb the entire scope.

Right now, just accounting and IT use the solution. Finance is learning it as well. They're taking the same training that I'm taking. They're probably 10% to 15% the way through that journey.

I have not really had to use the support. I will, due to my training. I've gone back and forth and I've lost some of my training. I have the diplomas and different things and the degrees that I kept, however, I've lost some of that initial training. It all has to do with version release. I'm a tenant I'm just in the training phase. What I'm trying to do is be the guinea pig and learn the systems and get comfortable with everything.

We didn't use any other RPA solution previously.

The reason we adopted UiPath was due to a move from our finance leader, the controller. We had automated many financial processes with planning and reporting, et cetera. However, the accounting group was continually skipped over. We had a controller that came in and they wanted to take many of our repeated processes and really took and created an agile group to create the digital finance vector. 

There's a team of five members that went and looked at the processes that we were doing and said, which ones can we change or do better? Between the controller and the consultants, there was an analysis performed. They wanted to lead in the digital finance transformation. They looked forward five to ten years and what they were projecting looked really nice.

I didn't directly handle the implementation. I will learn that more as we go. From what I saw, the workflow was nice. The implementations that we have are being done in baby steps, and so far, the steps are relatively easy. 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. That will help us with the reporting. We'll be better able to understand what things are best to automate and what is easiest. That's what I'm hoping to get from these five implementations.

Our consultant assisted us with the implementation process, and they really did a sprint on the implementations.

The sprints were such that it was really a six-week turnaround time. We actually had to go backward and do the assessments from those implementations. I wasn't in this role at that time. Therefore, I'm now doing the cost benefits backward to see if we can set them up correctly and then see what we can do ourselves going forward. The key will be not how quickly they were able to do it, but how quickly we can do it ourselves. 

Also, we'll have to assess how quickly the people in the field can adopt the product and have a robot actually be their assistant. We want to figure out how quickly we can deploy citizen developers. 

The solution is pricey at the beginning, however, we'll have to see going forward with what we get for the tools. It's always expensive to buy a really nice car and then not drive it very far, very much. It's all about the utilization. If we use it fully, the cost won't be as high.

The company did evaluate other solutions, however, they liked UiPath the best due to its differentiating reputation, experience, and level and quality of tools.

UiPath has not yet saved costs for our company. However, we're just in the investment phase. That's why I want to do that reporting so that we can see the savings if any. The decisions we make now affect the next 10 to 20 years. Everyone gets too short-term-focused. We need to instead think about where we want to be five years from now and go backward. We need to ask: what are we doing today that's going to make a difference in five years? It's an investment in the future right now.

I'd advise those considering the solution to give it a try. It can't hurt. Even if they didn't go forward, the basic principles that are revealed can probably fix other things. Some people just have bad processes. Once you get your processes aligned and make them to the point that they're standardized and understood across the different units using them, it will become easier to automate.

I'd rate the solution at an eight out of ten. In order to rate it higher, I need more experience. I've got to learn, got to understand it better. Then I've got to utilize it. Like many software that I've dealt with, there are always three ways to do it, however, there's the best way. I always wish we'd just teach the best way. That said, I understand that you want to make people agile and to understand fully by exploring different ways. When you learn, learning all the different ways is very cumbersome, and yet, better in the long run.

We are using it to automate various tasks of mortgage onboarding.

We use UiPath Assistant and Studio. We are using the cloud version. 

We do a lot of mortgage onboarding. To make that opening process of a loan easier, we're automating various tasks or tests during the creation of loans, such as running driver for approval letters and things like that. So far, we're getting good feedback from the business. We have 60 bots now.

It has reduced human error. I don't know the exact impact, but currently, we have about a thousand transactions a day between all of our bots. A lot of those are critical where you don't want errors on it. So, knowing that those are error-free is really good for the business.

The Orchestrator is most valuable because we get work periodically throughout the day. It'll ebb and flow. We have a really tight SLA, so we're able to have bots on demand. As soon as work shows up, the bots are picking it up.

In terms of ease of building automation, it is pretty straightforward. Once you learn the tool, it is pretty easy to use. 

I have used UiPath's Academy courses. They have helped a lot in getting up to speed with the solution. I came from Blue Prism. Once you know a system, you try to map another one with the way you did things in the first one. I was able to figure it out pretty quickly by just going through the courses. The content is pretty good. They have everything you need to know to get started. 

It is a little confusing at first. I came from Blue Prism where you have one dashboard and very little jumping back and forth. In Orchestrator, you have menus, and there is a lot of jumping between tabs and subtabs to get to the specific information, but once you learn that, it is pretty intuitive. There is just that initial learning curve if you're coming from another system. Blue Prism does everything in the one pane, and even though UiPath is neatly laid out, you just got to learn how they laid it out.

They started using it before I joined. I joined the company in April, and I believe they started with the concepts back in January of this year.

We've had only one outage, and that might've been our internal issue. Otherwise, it has been rock solid.

In our use case, it is a little difficult to scale because we have to create accounts for each robot. We do want to explore the feature where you can scroll up bots on demand and shut them off on demand, but we don't have the resources. So, we can't use that yet based on our internal limitations. If you're able to use that, then that's great.

In terms of the number of users, we don't have any attended people. It is just our development team.

They've been fairly responsive to everything we've reached out for.

I don't think they used any other solution.

It was all set up before I came in, but I had to onboard new stuff. It is pretty straightforward and easy once you figure it out.

In terms of cost savings, I don't know the numbers exactly, but I've heard good things.

The automation cloud offerings help to decrease the solution's total cost of ownership by taking care of things such as infrastructure maintenance and updates. However, I'm not 100% in tune with that side.

The pricing for the robots is fair. One thing that annoys us a little bit is that we have to pay for each developer. With Blue Prism, you can have 20 developers and not incur any additional costs. We don't like having to piecemeal all these different licenses. It is providing value, but it is not in the sense of a robot. You're paying for the tools, whereas other people just give you the tools, and then you pay for the bots.

I'm sure they did because that's a part of their bidding processes.

It has not helped to reduce the workload of our IT department by enabling end-users to create apps because we're not utilizing or doing user-created stuff. We are also not using its AI functionality in our automation program.

It, as such, hasn't freed up employee time because we're still in the baby steps. We're still trying to figure out how RPA fits in with everything. We're piloting a bunch of things, and we'll automate one part, but we haven't been able to downsize or reallocate people yet.

I'd rate UiPath an eight out of 10.