UiPath Reviews

We're a revenue cycle management company for medical billing. What we've done is we've replaced or reallocated our charge entry employees. We're using bots now to do the charge entry on medical claims and then also payment posting along with eligibility and AR. So we've been able to reallocate just within this last year, probably about eight employees. They've been reassigned to more valuable work, for example, things that the bot can't do and actually requires a human to do. We've been understaffed, therefore, it's actually worked out great.

The ease of building automation using UiPath isn't a problem; it seems to be very easy to do to a point. Our challenge is we work in a live environment. Therefore, we’re not able to use a test environment when we build things out. That’s why we have to go very slowly.

I'm not that familiar with the product, with the solution, however, the UiPath apps feature is great, although we're not using any of the apps currently.

The biggest benefit we've seen would be the accuracy. Even just with employees calling in sick, not having enough staff, we’ve been able to fill those roles.

The robotics piece has been a huge thing. We're doing medical claims. We're always worried about claims not getting paid. This solution has allowed us to been able to capture those claims so that we get paid the first time.

We also now can track how many times we touch a claim. For example, how many clicks. We couldn't do that before. That's been very valuable to us.

We’ve improved our efficiency. Even just our cost analysis has been great. As we do new contracts, we know what it's going to cost exactly.

UiPath has saved costs for our organization. We’ve re-allocated six employees and, for what they do, they're somewhere around $40,000 a year. We've implemented six bots to do those same functions and they're about $8,000 a year. We've almost tripled our ROI.

I don't know if it's UiPath as much as just what we do which is really complicated. Even the consultants that we've used with UiPath had said, "wow, this is very difficult what you guys do." There are a lot of moving parts. It's not as much of a UiPath issue. It's just our own processes.

I cannot recall the solution missing any features. 

We've been using UiPath for about maybe a year and a half tops.

I don't have any problems or concerns about the stability right now. The biggest concern I did have at the time was the fact that we've already invested six people in this in terms of the robotic piece and we're going to have a lot more. Since we've re-allocated these resources, and I have potentially 100 people where I could also reallocate resources, I worry about if something does happen or it doesn't work or there's no backup. If something goes wrong, I don't have employees to backfill as they won't exist. That's my concern. That hasn't happened yet, and I hope it doesn't.

The scalability has been great. It hasn't been a problem at all. We will just continue to add bots every time we need them. So far, it's been easy. We started with two. Three months later, we added another two. Another three months went by and we added another two. From our standpoint, it's great. My UiPath rep was shocked that I keep adding more.

I have not used technical support. 

We have a partner and they take care of it if something comes up. 

We had one issue with UiPath where something didn't work. We talked to them and it was taken care of within a couple of days.

We're working on something that may be called UiPath Insights. It's still not functional and there are some sources that we need. My vendor's working on that. I'm not quite sure what he means by it, however, he's working on it.

We did not use a different solution previous to UiPath.

The initial setup was pretty easy. Yeah. We didn't face any challenges with it.

I contacted one of the vendors and they ran with it. As far as I'm concerned, we didn't have issues at all.

The deployment took us about 30 days. After that, in terms of implementing the bots, the first bot took us about three months. As soon as we did the first one, it just went really quick after that. That's due to the fact that it was a lot of reuse. It was just us internally understanding what information was needed and how it works. In terms of requirements, it was all new to us. Even with the acronyms they use, I'm still learning as we're not IT-based at all.

We had a vendor that helped us implement it. We didn't have any challenges as far as that goes.

It was good. They didn't realize how challenging it was going to be or the person who integrated the solution for us, at last, didn't. At the same time, they know almost everything about my business now, however, I'm a little concerned about having to bring on more people as they're not in this industry. We're going to have to start them over from the kind of the ground up, which takes time.

We had a problem before with the pricing, however, for the most part, it's fine where it is now. My ROI is fine and it works great. I have no complaints.

The issue is you have to do a package at a time. That's my only challenge. Sometimes I don't need that much. I don't need that many licenses. The first time you sign up, it's a package of five every year. I don't necessarily need that.

We chose UiPath based on a referral. Somebody we heard speaking at a neurological healthcare conference about four years ago, who was not from  UiPath suggested that we needed to talk with UiPath.

I actually didn't know of any other company until after we were on UiPath.

This person was in our same space and he said it's fantastic. He had actually used two other solutions, however, he told us to go with UiPath and I trusted him. I've talked to other people since and they have said the same thing. We've made the right choice.

We started using the on-premise deployment for the first six months and then we actually moved to the cloud.

We're mostly using unattended bots. 

We haven't really reduced human error for sure. We haven't calculated that. We're just moving on to our Insights app. We're just getting ready to launch that. Therefore, we’re not there yet. We don't know what that turnaround is going to look like.

We do not yet use UiPath's AI functionality in our automation program.

We have not yet used any UiPath Academy courses.

When we first got involved, we just wanted to know if it would work. We just decided on a certain budget and decided to try it. Once it worked, we realized we actually had to step back. We started really looking at where we could implement it. We should have done that earlier. That's what I would tell people. It's an automation hub. You need to go through and find your best scenarios, your best ROI. I would definitely tell people to look at that first.

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

We are using the solution to create application reports. What we've done is take all of that information, where somebody was initially doing everything as it happened, and create templates that work in another application. Due to our business model, we have multiple applications that are similar but very different. Rather than have somebody go into this application and update it and then go to another application and put in the same information, we've developed bots. We'd go to the template, input the information one time, and let the bots go in and open up the other applications.

The solution has improved the organization just by freeing up the resources to do that MBA work so that the bots can actually do things for you.

We use the solution's UiPath app feature. It has helped to reduce the workload of our IT department by enabling end-users to create apps. That said, I myself am in IT and not a developer.

The UiPath’s apps feature has increased the number of automation created while reducing the time it takes to create them. We're just now starting with that. We’ve only got 10 bots in production. We've got another eight in development right now.

Likely, the automation we’ve created has saved us probably in the neighborhood of one full-time person.

The solution’s ease of use and the UI is great, specifically for the users. Not necessarily the developers. The people actually using it find it very easy to use.

In terms of the ease of building automation, from what I've seen, I'm very impressed. We're using a partner. We built the COE and everything that they're developing right now. Obviously, we're just starting down this path. This means we're going to go work with a partner while we're developing our own guys. We can get to market quicker.

We've got our own VA. The next step will be looking into building our own developers.

The solution has reduced human error. There are still errors in the templates. People still have errors with bigger things, however, we're able to catch it before it gets into any of the applications. Reading the information across the other applications, you can stop it before it gets synchronized into the applications due to the fact that it is the same source. It doesn't go into "A" if it's not going into “B”, for example.

This has had a big impact on our business. In our model, it's a little complex as our customers are our clients. For example, in the ATM business, they charge us a fee, so we partner with a large retailer like Walgreens or CVS and we share the revenue. We actually pay our customers as they use our services. With the help of UiPath, we’re able to keep everything synchronized. We’re not sending stuff to the wrong site, or to the wrong corporate headquarters.

The solution has freed up employee time due to the amount of work that it's doing. We’ve got just one bot and it can do triple the work, covering three full-time employees in a week. Likely, existing employees now can focus on higher-value work, including more customer-facing tasks. We're getting a lot of financial requests and maintenance. They require human interfacing rather than doing manual transactions.

I can’t think of any direct places where improvements need to happen. Whatever I need, it appears to be there. That said, any app could use some form of improvement.

I've been using the solution for a year now.

The stability is very good.

I don't see an issue with scalability. We are nowhere near capacity yet.

While I have not dealt with technical support directly, I have not heard anything bad from anyone.

We did not use a different RPA solution beforehand. About two years ago, in the second quarter, that's when we started opening our eyes to the possibility of automation.

The initial setup was pretty straightforward. We have a partner that assisted in the implementation. 

From the time we signed up until the time of setting up the COE and then getting going, it might have been a few days to deploy the solution.

We have a partner that has assisted us in the implementation process. 

Everything that we've done so far, due to the fact that we run everything through COE and then submit semi-annual budgets, has been good. From the perspective of everything we submitted so far, we've been pleased.

Over and above the subscription fees, we're paying probably $51,000 a year right now.

The pricing is okay. It's not out of balance with what it offers. We are definitely getting value for it. 

We didn't really evaluate other options. We were new to it, and we had a partner that steered us towards UiPath.

At this time, we do not use the solution's AI functionality in our automation program. We also have not yet used UiPath’s Academy courses. We may in the future.

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

We're using UiPath on the customer side, where we have lots of data and PPs on the customer information. We're trying to put in what the customer is including, and then using machine learning. We created a Python type of UiPath to do machine learning and automatically build that so that items can be automated. That was our POC. That said, we're exploring more, to get into the finance area, where we can take invoicing and general revenues and the closing worksheets and automate those processes.

The biggest improvement has been in the ROI we've seen, which has been $55,000 in six months' time. 

The whole bot process and the way scheduling is done is a very valuable aspect of the solution and it's really cool.

In terms of the ease of building automation using the solution, we’re very near achieving that. It's taking more time than what it's supposed to be taking, however, I don't see any complexity in building the code nicely.

So far, the solution has saved costs for our organization.

I’m not sure if the solution has reduced human error. It’s hard to tell at this point. We’re in the early stages. However, simply by looking at the way it’s built, it will.

The solution has freed up employee time. Once again, it’s too early to say too much, however, we are saving approximately 130 hours per month. This additional time has enabled employees to focus on higher-value work. They don't need to just go to the system to click here and there, they're spending more time with the customer.

The management team is more satisfied as it’s much cleaner, with less human error. Management reporting shows definite improvement. In terms of overall employee satisfaction, employees are still not quite trusting the bot. The bot does something and they will go and still validate that. They don't have a hundred percent trust yet. That's what we are trying to build right now.

We have used UiPath Academy courses. It's taking time due to the fact that we have a consulting partner who's helping us. The majority of the workload is being handled by the consulting partner. We're trying to play just the B role of supporting. We're not doing too much development.

That said, with UiPath Academy, just the ease of accessing the material has been great. It's simple.

The only thing which I see is missing, is it does not have an inbuilt machine learning. You have to teach the bot. The bot is not self-learning.

For example, right now, we are using a description. Based on the fields or the description, we're trying to identify what is the category to be used. I have data for the last five years. The bot should be able to go and learn by itself tasks such as "These are the five things which I need to add," instead of me manually maintaining it.

I've been using the solution for six months.

The solution is stable. I don't see any problems.

The scalability I still need to figure out. Right now, with the licenses we have, I don't think we're going to scale it out to where we want it to be. It's my understanding that it just involves increasing the number of parts or number of processes which we can run. It will probably be scalable, however, we have not tested that, and therefore I cannot say either way.

We have close to 30 users on the solution right now. It's mostly our customers' manager and their team.

We do plan to increase usage in the future.

Technical support is okay. I have not really invested a lot of time in getting support from UiPath, however, I get a response.

We did not previously use a different RPA. We had a CIO who'd used it before and based on their experience, we went to UiPath.

In terms of the initial setup, the system side is straightforward. It's the business side that took us a lot of time to understand the concept.

The deployment itself took three months.

The company is probably going to need to negotiate. It's competitive right now, however, once we scale it out, there's going to be some room for negotiation. Likely, UiPath will be responsive to negotiations.

We did not evaluate other options before choosing UiPath.

We're likely using the most up-to-date version of the solution, however, I don't know the version number.

We don’t use the solution's AI functionality in our automation program yet.

I'd advise potential new users to go slow. Always create the roadmap first. Take smaller pieces and then implement those. Don't wait too long, however. Otherwise, you will lose user interest.

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

I am an automation consultant and most of the robots that I work on are unattended.

Some of our use cases involve end-to-end automation. One of them is an SAP system where the transaction data, material numbers, and other things are used for T-codes. Based on the value of data in the T-code, it opens other T-codes in the process and updates those registries accordingly. This may include, for example, T-codes one and two. Then, from T-code one, I need to get input with regard to my material numbers. This might be a materials invoice or the invoice numbers of material orders. With those, you have to put it in one T-code and get output.

Based on the output of the T-code one, you need to do the rest of the operations in T-code two and T-code three. Once the job is completed, update all the information about the different T-codes in an Excel sheet and then update it back to the system.

UiPath saves time both from the perspective of a developer and an end-user. I can talk about the two positions because I have been involved in both roles. On the development side, the features make it very easy and tasks that normally take half an hour can be completed in a minute or two.

With respect to the end-user, assume that a process normally takes an hour a day to complete. Once the automation is in place, the whole process will be done in a minute or two. Importantly, the user does not have to monitor the process because it runs in the back end or on a server in a remote location. The entire process will run without monitoring.

At the same time, the user will be informed. Let's say that you have to get some data out of it; most of the time, the data available every few days. Personally, given that I am not normally in the role of the end-user, I have to log in to all of the systems and look for the data. However, if UiPath is configured and developed properly then it will inform you in an email that the data is now available. Similarly, if there is no data available then it can be configured in such a way that the user will be informed of that. This would give the user the opportunity to save and plan to utilize their time for other purposes.

In our company, we have a lot of use cases where we were able to implement unattended automation. This meant that we saved a lot of time and we were able to reutilize the employees for more useful engagements. 

An additional thing that we are able to achieve through using an RPA like UiPath is a reduction in errors. When we are performing any kind of activity, such as a recalculation in Excel, or calculations in a step-by-step process that involves manually copying data between two places, there is a high chance that an error will occur. This is a human error that can be avoided once we implement the automation and move it to production. Ultimately, all of these types of errors will be eliminated.

It is difficult to estimate the total number of errors that we avoid, but I can say that we were able to save time and with each process, the number of errors is reduced.

The most valuable feature is the set of data scraping tools. You can scrape data into your tables, then easily transform it or convert it between formats. If UiPath or another similar automation tool was not there, it would be very difficult to automate something that is a UI- based application. There is no other option to get that back-end data out of it. If we were not able to convert the formatting, or if for whatever reasons we cannot extract the data into a table format, it would be very difficult for us to convert and get the data that we want. The data would be difficult to format and we would spend a lot of time on it.

UiPath provides the data in a table format and in a structured manner, which means that we are able to get the required value from the table and do the necessary calculations on it. It saves us a lot of time in this process.

We have started using the AI functionality but so far, not to any great extent. For example, we were able to identify different types of images while reading an invoice. Prior to using the AI capabilities, we were not able to read them. This is our only use case for AI at the moment, but we plan to explore other activities and possibilities.

We have used the UiPath Academy courses and by doing so, we were able to learn a lot of things. They had examples of use cases that can occur in different scenarios and instead of getting that from a live environment, or during development, we were able to learn it from the Academy and a live example.

With the Studio, we can do basic troubleshooting in the production machine or VM, in case any error occurs. This is helpful because we don't have to move the data back to the development machine.

The integration with APA should be improved with respect to adding data from external sources and being able to bring in data from third-party applications. Also, it should be better the other way around, where UiPath is providing APA data to other applications.

I have been using UiPath for the past four years.

If the application is working fine, without making any updates or changes, then the bot will work as expected about 95% of the time. However, if there are any changes to the end-application made by the developers, or there is a content change, then we definitely have to align to those changes and it will take time.

Generally speaking, we move a process to production once it is stable.

We can easily scale this solution so the scalability is quite good.

We have between 15 and 20 developers in my team who work with UiPath. I am not sure about the number of people on the other teams. In terms of end-users, there are more than 100.

I have developed 30 processes personally, and my team has created more than 200. We plan to continue using UiPath in the future.

We have used technical support and the UiPath technical team is good. Whenever there is help required, and we are not able to find the solution for that from the UiPath documentation, we get a ticket with the support team. Based on the criticality of the process, they help us.

We did not use another RPA solution prior to UiPath.

The initial setup is straightforward and very easy. The main component is called Orchestrator and then there are two more components called Studio and Development Robot. These two are connected to Orchestrator, and once the development is complete, you can do the unit testing on the same machine. After this, you publish the package.

Once the item is published, it will be pushed to the Orchestrator and then connected to the bot. This is where you're going to run the process. Once it is complete the bot will start running. The whole process will take approximately 10 minutes and you can move the data to production.

When the process is running in production, Studio allows you to troubleshoot from there, without having to move it back to the development machine.

I deployed UiPath on my own. They have provided enough documentation.

The pricing and licensing costs seem okay to me, although it is a little bit on the high side.

In the past, you needed to install the Studio license if you wanted to be able to troubleshoot in production. However, that has changed and you no longer need to buy it separately.

My advice for others who are implementing or using UiPath is to ensure that they test the robots and processes thoroughly before moving them to production.

I would rate this solution an eight out of ten.

We use Studio, attended robots, and Orchestrator.

Our primary use case is automating support services for accounts payable and accounts receivable. We are still implementing and our robots are not live in a production environment yet. For the time being, we are using attended robots but we are looking into unattended robots as well.

We run automations in a virtual environment using VMware, and the implementation was straightforward. It was easy to set up.

With respect to how easy it is to automate our company's processes, on a scale of one to five, I would rate this solution a four. You don't need any programming skills to be able to leverage the tools. We have used other tools such as Blue Prism and Automation Anywhere, and this solution was easier than those.

On a scale of one to five, judging how beneficial it is, I would rate the training a five. It is very simple and can be easily demonstrated.

From the point that we purchased our UiPath license until we had our first robot was approximately six months. 

In terms of eliminating human errors, this is the expectation once our robots are live in production.

Once our robots are live, we expect to see a fifty percent reduction in time for certain tasks. It will save thousands of hours.

We leverage all of the components in this solution.

The most valuable feature is Studio, which is a very powerful tool.

I am looking forward to new cognitive and artificial intelligence capabilities.

I would like to see voice recognition and better OCR capabilities. Today, we have to leverage other tools for this, so we are hoping that UiPath matures in this area.

This product is very stable, but we have some issues with security.

We have about five people working on automation in our organization.

We have a CSM and they are awesome. On a scale of one to five, I would rate our support from the CSM a five.

Before using this solution, we used to leverage our internal tools.

The initial setup of this application was straightforward. It was easy, and like other applications that use a Windows installer.

We used an integrator to assist us with deployment. I would rate them a three out of five.

We have not seen any ROI because our bots are not yet live. However, we have done a calculation and expect fifty percent savings in time.

The licensing fees for this solution are approximately $100,000 USD annually.

Before choosing this solution we evaluated Blue Prism and Automation Anywhere. UiPath seemed to be the easiest one to implement.

Blue Prism seemed to be too technical for some of our business users, while Automation Anywhere did not have attractive pricing.

This is definitely a solution that I would recommend. From my experience, this is a technology that is easy to leverage among users that do not have a technical background.

This is a good solution, but there are still gaps and the product could be more mature. The OCR capabilities definitely need to be improved.

I would rate this solution a seven out of ten.

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

Our primary use for this solution started with automating processes in finance, procurement, and HR. Now, we are researching various directions in logistics.

We do not run our automations in a virtual environment. This is something that we are trying to avoid.

With respect to how easy it is to automate our company's processes, on a scale of one to five, I would rate this solution a four. I'm an IT-based person, and for IT people it is easy to learn. UiPath claims that it is easy to learn and it's for everybody, but it's not true. For business people, it is hard to learn and hard to understand how to code to make things work. They need a lot of help with things like exception handling. If somebody lacks technical or programming skills then it makes it much more difficult to use. Although UiPath is getting closer to business users, there are still some basic skills that they need to have to make it work.

On a scale of one to five, judging how beneficial it is, I would rate the training a five. When I get new hires it doesn't matter whether they have previous experience in RPA or development, they have to go through all of the basic training from the Academy. This includes the Orchestrator and I've been recommending SAP training because we are experiencing growth in the use of SAP. Going to my team, this is the base, and then we have created our internal framework and standards that also require training. Some people may already have experience with UiPath or Blue Prism, but they still need to take the training from the Academy.

Before I arrived at the company, there were already some automations running. However, fifteen months ago we shut down a couple of robots because they were failing terribly. From that time, it took us five months to create the first robot.

We have a project that combines UiPath with OCR and our integration tool. This allows us to automate processes we use in different projects that are coming from different vendors in different countries. Apart from gathering the information, we are template invoicing. The robots take invoice information and post the results into our SAP and other systems. It is much faster than our original process. This has been implemented in Spain, and we are now releasing it to other countries, one by one.

Using this solution is not just about saving time or reducing the number of staff. It is also for improving stability and decreasing the number of errors that we have. In Spain, where we were implementing a pilot project for purchase orders, we saw a decrease in the number of human errors. When they started, there was an error rate of ten percent. After three months in production, the error rate decreased to five or six percent, and after six months it was one or two percent. Also, even though there was still an error rate, it was consistent and it is something that we can account for.

In terms of money savings, we are talking about hundreds of thousands of dollars annually.

The most valuable feature is Studio, which allows developers to specifically focus on development. Orchestrator allows us to connect those things together.

I would like to see some use cases and additional information on the process mining and the OCR features that are being released. There are other products that offer OCR features, and at this point, it is hard for me to determine the benefit of using UiPath for OCR rather than integrating it with another solution. This is not just from a business perspective, but from a development perspective as well. For example, I would like to see how you can connect UiPath to all of the applications to collect the logs and the data. Then, how we can put that information together. If there is a thirty-minute delay then how do you identify whether it was because the person went to lunch, or rather that they were working and thinking.

With respect to the stability, on a scale from one to five, I would rate this solution a three.

The stability of this solution really depends on the developer or the execution. It's not always a UiPath issue. If the process is unstable, it's the issue of the business case and not the actual execution of any development. So it really depends on how you use the platform and how you understand it. We will use a more stable technology, such as alerting through an API, before we go to the UI path.

We have about one hundred licenses for production and four Orchestrators.

Both customer support and technical support are really good. Whenever I have a question, whether it is business, Studio, or Orchestrator related, I usually get an answer. We have our own customer success manager who helps us on a daily basis. I also have connections to the lab and to the production team so I can ask questions there as well.

At this company, they did not have an RPA solution in place before this one.

Personally, I have also used Automation Anywhere and Blue Prism. From my perspective, it's about how you use the tool, and not about which tool you use. Personally, I don't like Automation Anywhere, and I used to be a Blue Prism guy.

I feel that Blue Prism is easier to learn because you can do things in terms of processes or objects. Logically, it is easier. In UiPath there are more options, but it's also harder to learn because you need to create a logical structure on your own. It doesn't show you how to do that in an easier way. UiPath has more connections and more inbuilt stuff than Blue Prism, but on the other hand, the navigation between the types of variables is slightly different. It's not a disadvantage, but it is something that takes time to learn.

I find that Automation Anywhere is not that user-friendly. For example, in Blue Prism you have loops that you can put a component into. In Automation Anywhere, you have to copy all of those stages, one-by-one. You cannot create a loop, which is basic.

We have not been tracking ROI yet, although we are working on it. It is difficult to calculate because to collect the information for each process it requires a logging system. Each project will require a specific logging system so that we can collect the same information to compare and evaluate it. We have to consider our development costs, maintenance costs, licensing costs, etc. At this point, we do not have enough people to work on this, so it is a work in progress.

They ran a selection process here and my understanding is that Blue Prism was not able to provide a free Studio license, unlike the policy they now have in place. This is the reason that UiPath was selected. 

The majority of our use cases are unattended, and that is the way that you should go. We do use attended bots as digital assistants, where you have small automations that are triggered by the users on their own to direct the robot. These are two separate products.

My advice to anybody who is researching this solution is not to be scared to use it. Play with it as much as possible and see if it brings value. There are different applications that can bring more value in certain cases.

Overall, this is a good solution, but there are always ways to improve a product.

I would rate this solution an eight out of ten.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

We're specializing in law and local government, so that's our target market at the moment. Obviously it's usable everywhere, but that's our market, and we find that that's where there's a lot of opportunity for sale.

In one of our legal scenarios, we had a situation where they were trying to deduplicate their database. They worked out that the man-hour cost for deduplicating that database was 11 man-years. We got that down to 30 days with a saving of 3.89 million pounds in what they would've expected their cost of that process to be.

As a sales-based operation, we get a lot of inquiries through our own website. We were finding that we were extrapolating that information, putting it into an email, I think into a spreadsheet, putting it into Salesforce, whatever. We've now got our own robot, which we've built, which opens up the backend of Wix, which is our website building tool. It receives all those inbound inquiries. It then goes out and looks at the public domain. We'll use that email address, or use a name against LinkedIn, against Facebook, against Twitter, to find out any more information we can find about job titles, maybe phone numbers or email addresses if they're missing. Get all that data out, build up a real case for that client, then the robot would enter that data into Salesforce, it will send them a welcome email to say, "Thanks for you inquiry, please find attached the information you've requested." Bring them straight into Salesforce, set up a reminder, and then send me an email to say, "Follow up this client, they've downloaded some information from our website." We've automated that whole process, and we can then use that for events, and seminars, and webinars, everything else that we hold, because they're genuinely interested clients, and we get around that GDPR issue.

For us, it's the ability to offer as a subscription model. We looked at the other competitors to UiPath, and we found that the way of delivery that we offer is a subscription model. It's a very, very small upfront fee and a monthly cost, and UiPath gives us the flexibility to do that. Some of the other vendors don't do that because they sign you up for ten licenses over three years, and it's just not practical for us.

From a cost perspective, it's not really relevant. It's really about the processes they're trying to automate. A lot of people are doing data deduplication and data onboarding, so an attended robot is absolutely fine. Whereas when we're trying to do things like answering an email, an inbound email, set up a process, respond to that client, then a 24/7 unattended robot is the way to go. We use a mix of that with our client base.

We've had some serious issues with clients that are running in Citrix environments, and we've got a couple clients that have moved away from other competitors to UiPath and to us because they just cannot do that screen scraping technology. Yeah, we're finding a lot of it in a Citrix environment, and a Citrix environment, on an Azure cloud, on a virtual machine. So there's various steps, and UiPath's the only one we've found at the moment that will actually enable us to deliver that.

I think the AI question is being raised everywhere, and there certainly needs to be a lot more intelligence involved in that. The ability for the robots to start thinking for themselves is coming out in the later versions. There are very few limitations at the moment, because we tend to pick relatively mundane, tedious, repetitive tasks, and it's all about number crunching. Really, RPA globally is all about number crunching. But in the next six to 12 months, there'll be more intelligence added, and there'll be more stuff going on that brings it closer to the AI environment that everyone's spouting about at the moment.

We've been involved in automation for ten years or so, and UiPath for about two or three. We've had no major issues from a stability perspective.

Very much so, and more so with the later revisions of the software. But we tend to start off with one project, one workflow, and then we're all about scale. But it's a land and expand approach for us.

We always say that any idiot can build a robot. In reality, it's working out the workflow, working out what's involved, making that process lean that takes all the time. That's where we get involved. Actually setting the robot up itself is very simple. Some of the discussions we've had today talk about clients setting up their own robots. It is a relatively simple, drag and drop, point and click type setup for us.

We're averaging three to six months ROI, because we offer this subscription based model. There's no massive upfront cost. I think the biggest ROI we've seen is the one I mentioned with the law firm, where we estimated 3.9 million pounds of saving, and we actually realized 3.899 million pounds of saving. That was by far the biggest ROI, but as we start working with bigger councils and bigger law firms, those ROIs can only increase.

Not sure about percentages, but one of the anecdotes I always say to my clients is we've all managed to write our own name incorrectly on a web form, so if we cannot spell our own name correctly, what chance have we got of spelling the name of a client that may be from overseas? The reduction of errors is phenomenal, especially in that mundane, workaround environment that everyone seems to be in.

The model that we offer, as I say, is a subscription model. The idea is that we land and expand. We charge a very small fixed setup fee with a monthly subscription, and a minimum commitment to us is three months. We believe that we have to prove to the client that robotics is the way forward. If you go to one of the competitors, such as Blue Prism, they will insist you buy ten licenses, you sign up for a three year deal, you do a 50,000 pound proof of concept, and then at the end of the proof of concept, they build you a live, working robot. Our argument is that we've already built you a live, working robot to do that trial with real data, with real cases and scenarios, and with real workflows, and we just make it from a dumb environment to a live environment. Yeah, we absolutely compete with those on a very different level.

We're very, very happy with the product. It does exactly what we want it to do, and it allows us to sell UiPath, or sell RPA in the way that we want to. We're not being dictated by the manufacturers to how we have to sell their product. We know our customers best, and we believe that our methodology is the way forward. That's the flexibility we get with UiPath.