We use this solution for voice processing, user onboarding, offboarding, marketing, email consolidation, text form generation, text form ingestion, AP, and AR.
We are using UiPath's AI functionality although we have not been able to do much complex configuration. Theoretically, it works but as soon as we start adding different invoices, it's a very cumbersome, long, and human-centric process. Our company is planning to scale our automation efforts.
This solution is easy to use for the end user. The Academy courses make this possible as well as the community forums. I am a senior manager and my role is building the center of excellence. I learned how to write code on UiPath using the Academy and learned from my peers in community forums.
This has been the biggest benefit. With other vendors, you had to pay thousands of dollars to learn how to use their solutions. With UiPath, you can learn on your own and expand your knowledge.
The task capture and task binding features have been most valuable. These features make it easier for a team who are not that familiar with RPA to successfully use UiPath. They generate the PDD the way it's supposed to be and capture the right screenshot.
The stability of the bots could be improved. The bots could be expanded to have more objects already prebuilt. It would be useful if it was clear to the end user that there are objects already built. It should be easily available or there should be a very simple search for objects. Many users don't know that Marketplace exists or that it gives you free bots.
I have been using this solution for eight years.
This is a stable solution and we have not experienced any crashes. The challenge we have experienced is when developers do not document requirements correctly but we have had no issues with the software itself.
This is a scalable solution.
Customer support is provided mostly by a consulting firm. We usually raise a ticket and get an answer. We would like the technical support to be sharper and faster rather than going through the consulting firm as this can take more than a week.
I would rate the support for this solution a six or seven out of ten. This score could be improved if we had a single point of contact.
Neutral
Before UiPath, we used Blue Prism. We switched due to the ease of use of UiPath as I could learn how to use it myself and teach the team. This training is free and also offers free software.
If you are new to UiPath, the initial setup is not that straightforward. It is easier now that I have been working with the solution for a few years. The most challenging part of the setup is getting information on how UiPath connects with other systems. Only 1% of the community actually knows this.
For the setup, our infrastructure team followed the instructions sent by UiPath. At that time, there was no cloud functionality. UiPath could offer better communication around the overall implementation and where data is stored. The instructions are very easy to follow but the security approvals cause a lot of blockers.
We have experienced ROI in two ways. Within the first three to six months, whatever we invested came back to us in terms of time-saving and money-saving. We have also seen an increase in client satisfaction in the sense that we can look up client information using attended bots.
This tool makes it easy to build a team that can manage it because of the availability of the academy and certifications for upskilling. The courses are set up to ensure the user fully understands what the certification is about before they are awarded it.
It's easy to use and the dashboards give me easy access to insights. This is why I always recommend UiPath to others. Some organizations can waste millions of dollars trying to set up other solutions.
I would rate UiPath a seven out of ten.
I use it for automating activities and processes in my company, and for discovering new automation opportunities. UiPath is my main tool for automating every process in business operations.
One of my main use cases for UiPath is around service desk and support center operations. I use it to take tickets from customers and users and automate answers using UiPath's machine learning. It links the questions to documentation where we already have answers.
I also use it for automating invoices with the pricing and other information and sending them to customers when they buy an item.
In addition, when somebody subscribes to a newsletter I have set up a process to send an email in reply.
Using the solution we can do task mining and process mining. The automations make everything easier for my business and for the other businesses where I implement them.
For example, one of my use cases is for a doctor's office to help manage the patients by handling their inquiries and automating the invoices. I have also set up processes to help with research and prescriptions. All these processes are automated and run without any human involvement.
And it has helped my business operations a lot. It's helping us detect all the performance issues and data threats. UiPath Insights helps us to prevent these issues from happening again. It's powering up our operation. We can analyze all our departments in one place and get the best usage from them using Insights.
We fully depend on UiPath for the three departments: sales, marketing, and service. Many of our sales operations are done by UiPath, such as generating invoices, research, and engaging with clients through the help tickets they submit, as well as through the email communication we do.
And one of the most important benefits is the ability to identify new opportunities in my employees' workflows. It is able to record and discover what my employees do and we are able to create automations as a result.
Digital transformation is another main focus. Through the UiPath Marketplace, I can get expert virtual employees who do very expert jobs and tasks without having to hire somebody or bring them into the office as an employee. It's all automated by the software. I can discover, build, manage, and engage with the robots. My employees can easily manage all the robots and the processes, increasing the collaboration among us.
All of this makes it easier to store and move data from Google Sheets to my own sheets or my CMS on WordPress.
It saves a lot of time. It has really transformed my operation from a situation where we were always pressed for time and had slow response times to customers. With UiPath, we have increased our customer satisfaction scores and get tasks done faster than ever. My employees are now using the time they used to spend on certain tasks for things that require more thought. It has transformed business operations 180 degrees, making everything easier, helping the business to grow faster, and improving performance. We have control of the front-end work as well as the back-end processes.
For me, the most valuable feature is the solution's ability to discover automation opportunities.
The Document Understanding feature for extracting information from documents or images helps reduce manual work, saving people from having to scrub data from PDF files or images. UiPath extracts all the information and stores it.
In addition, its AI and machine learning make everything easy, as do the Data Service tools, because they don't require coding to create automations. I can do everything without coding knowledge.
And the UiPath user community is the best. The people there are very friendly and helpful, and engage with each other. UiPath has done a good job building a good forum and a good blog, and making the community members interact with each other. The community is one of the reasons UiPath is my choice. It is a strong community.
I like most of the UiPath tools, but the UiPath Academy, in particular, wasn't my favorite part. It didn't have enough onboarding guidance when I started. The learning curve for the courses in the Academy was very difficult in the beginning. I had to turn to Google and YouTube to learn from other people, experts, and the community. The community was friendly, but the academy wasn't that helpful for me. I think it needs to improve on the information it provides to make it easier for beginners to learn, to help decrease the learning curve.
Also, the user interface needs to be more customizable, and the debugging tool doesn't work well enough. It needs some improvements.
I have been using UiPath for one year and eight months. I have several websites and three startups, and I also implement UiPath and automations for other companies.
It's stable. It has 99 percent uptime.
Sometimes, when we are dealing with a large set of data, it becomes slower. I don't know if it is something to do with UiPath or something else, like the operating system or the connections. It is almost always stable, but when dealing with large data, it becomes a little buggy and slower. Sometimes it freezes and I have to turn everything off and restart it.
Their support staff has good knowledge about whatever I raise, but they are late in responding, at times. I have had to turn to the community more. When I can't find an answer, I turn to them and only after them to support. It should be the other way around. I should be turning to the support group and then, if needed, to the community.
One good thing that I have found is that UiPath responds to the community and the recommendations of users. When we recommend something, they put it on their roadmap and they make plans for it in their app. They are engaging and friendly with users and the community, but they are late in responding.
Positive
I started by using Blue Prism but only for three or four months and then I left it and turned to UiPath. I couldn't find answers to my questions when I was using Blue Prism. I couldn't find a professional community to engage with or to get help from. This was the reason I started turning to UiPath, after reading a few reviews from several websites and some of the community posts. The UiPath community was providing good information about every capability of the solution. In my experience with Blue Prism, I couldn't find any valuable communities out there. With UiPath I found the opposite.
Even now, I find it good to engage with the UiPath community. Whenever I need an answer to something or an explanation about a use case, I always turn to them.
They have to reduce the price a little bit for basic users, startups, and small companies.
Since we are a healthcare organization with HIPAA rules, we're on-prem. Our use cases boil down to claims testing and membership testing. It'd be institutional professional dental claims and making sure our membership is loaded correctly.
We have to configure our software to pay claims and pay providers. What we're realizing is that, the more claims that we can run through the system, the more accurate we can get, the faster the payment on the claims, and the faster the payment to our providers.
The only features we're actually using are the orchestrator and 32 unattended bots.
The value of that is the power to be able to run our thousands and thousands of claims and membership to make sure that everything looks correct.
The solution has saved costs for our organization. I know it's over a million, however, I haven't done the exact numbers.
UiPath has reduced human error. We’re finding out that what we've built for configuration in the past, we're finding mistakes that we did a year ago. Now, the bots are proving that and we've been able to correct those past mistakes. This way, we don't have inaccurate payments or recaptures.
The product has freed up employee time - and it's not just the employee time. We do have some triggers that run. Some jobs are run that people use to manually do at night and weekends. We also don't have to hire additional people just to learn 80 different types of things in a claim and identify correctness manually. The robots will go through and then they can identify if there are specific things that are wrong. That part will go to our experts and they'll review those exact issues.
This use of bots allows for employees to do higher-value work. We also have been able to up-skill some of those people to sometimes a leadership role or a different role they would normally never get due to the fact that they were always manually looking at the claims and membership. This has definitely affected their level of satisfaction at work.
I don't know if we have an accurate estimate of how much time we are saving. I just know we do volume and we do thousands and thousands of claims a day, and therefore, it really helps.
We use UiPath’s Academy. That's how we learned the system. We actually learned it in six weeks and then started the development after that. It's very powerful and I continue to use it today.
It’s helped employees get up to speed with the product. This is especially useful when we get newer versions or we onboard other people. That's part of our syllabus. The first thing a new user has to do is go to the Academy and take some of the classes that we recommend. Then we identify, “okay, did you like it? Is this for you? Is it not for you?” et cetera. It’s a quick win where we don't have to take our time as we've got other work that we have to get completed. It acts as a filtering system for us. Both us and the employee can see if it’s a good fit very quickly. We can find out at an early stage instead of a year later.
The biggest value of the Academy is just knowing that we can do so much more volume and get in some more accurately without human error, or having people working nights and weekends. That has always been a really big push and we've been able to slowly work away from that.
Obviously, we’re not in a perfect world yet, however, getting rid of the manual aspect has been great. People just get burnt out. You can only look at things manually for so many hours. If you've been doing this for 10 years, it's got to be frustrating for those people who are always afraid they’ll get their job taken away. At the same time, for them, it’s so much easier as they don’t have to look at 80 things. They can look at five things that failed and then enjoy time with family and have a work-life balance. That’s big.
We've coded up to like 80% of what's possible. We really cut our pain points and said "this gives us our value, our bang for our buck." What we're doing now is saying, "okay, well, how do we improve it?" We've got another area or we've got another part of the software that we use our application that UiPath interacts with. Right now, our main concern is what else we can do to make it even more accurate or get more information or test more information to make it a solid pro program.
I'm a developer and I'll move things around and they'll change order, or I'll try to save something and it won't save the first time. I'll have to open something twice, open something three times. I've got a list. I'm working out quirks with UiPath. There are just UX things where if I copy this and put it here, it should look the same as it was, and I don't know why it doesn't. It could be my machine. It could be my local machine and it might just be that conversation with the premium plus to say, "why is this doing this?" Or maybe there could just be a setting, where we didn't check that box when we set it up.
I've used the solution for two years.
We actually had to spend about four months of maintenance to make sure that we got the solution to how we wanted it. We brought in a contracting firm and they didn't know the company and they just kind of said, "here's what bots can do."
What we did is we did an assessment program for two months. During those two months, we looked at what they built, which was great. This got us up and running and showed us what's possible.
Then, we took those two months to identify, for example, if the database maybe should have been set up a little better to interact with our other databases. Or if the coding should have had different paths of risk that they didn't know about. If you don't know the business, you don't know the risks, and therefore, you don't know how to set it up. That's why we did all of that assessment and then we spent four months fixing it to adjust to what we thought was a better path or a more stable path in order to support the robots.
The scalability potential is astronomical. We've got so many areas in the company, including finance and pharmacy, and there are all kinds of different areas and authorizations that you can actually go down and say, okay, now we have time. Let's put it on our calendar.
The next piece we're looking into is the citizen developer angle. We know that has some power potential, however, we have to have regulations and audits. We want to be careful if we do start moving in that direction to really understand if it is right for the company and is helping people versus if we build something wrong what that would mean to manually have to correct that. That's time nobody has.
Technical support has been great. We usually get answers within hours of a request. I thought we were on the premium support plan and now we're going to go to the premium plus, I believe they call it. That starts up here for us in November.
We've had some challenging solutions where it has taken us several weeks to work through it. They tell us "here's what we recommended". That said, we know our system. It's just like any other contracting firm. They don't know your system and your solutions, however, they give you the recommendations. At this point, we've been able to work through everything that we've had technical issues with. We decide to do some of them a different way. Technical support has been supportive of this approach. It's like a partnership, and that really makes a big difference.
We started with Rational Robot in 2005. I actually developed that. I've been with the company for over 20 years. I started with Rational Robot and then we moved to some C Sharp and some coded UI.
We tried Test Architect for a little while. We've used different RPA methodologies and UiPath seemed to fit a little better with where we are and the robustness we wanted.
We switched when we moved over to new healthcare software. The old one was just COBOL and green screens, and it was hard to automate it. We did, however, it was very difficult. When we moved to this new application, we needed to make everything more quality controlled, and the only way to do that was with the robots.
I was not a part of the implementation process.
The deployment process took about eight or nine months via our vendor.
We brought on some contractors to do our initial setup, including a proof of concept, and they built part of the system and after that, we took it over. They were what we called a vendor tracking firm.
We have definitely seen an ROI.
The biggest ROI was in the configuration. We're realizing we may be setting some things up wrong and that's not how the customer should have been set up. When we see things fail, we ask why is this failing? And then we go upstream and find out that we didn't even build a specific thing and realize that it was a mistake, a key entry, a mistype, et cetera, and the bots catch that on the backend.
We're able to do that quicker. It's manual labor and it's tedious. Now, manual labor's fine if you want to go in and manually check this, that, and the other thing, however, when that's your day job and you're checking the same 80 fields compared to a spreadsheet over and over, it's just got to be frustrating and employees feel it. You hear it on the call.
With UiPath, we can ask the question "what can we do to support you?" We're not going to replace people; we want to get them to a better place. Our employees understand that. It took them a while, however, they do understand that now and think the solution is really cool and are thankful for the support. It's a tool, not a human being's replacement.
I don't write the checks. I don't know what the actual cost is. That's always on leadership. My understanding is it's a reasonable price for the value that we're getting out of it.
We did look at the Power Automate desktop. It doesn't have the orchestrator to control things, and it has some other limits. When we do formulas and try to validate what the value should be, they are very difficult or impossible to set up on the Power Automate. At some point in time, I'm sure we'll be able to do that. In today's world, what we need right now is UiPath.
We're just a customer and an end-user.
We do not use the solution’s AI functionality in our automation program. We just do some checks and then just make sure via verification that everything matches in the configuration to the actual claims from the inbound files to the outbound.
There's an automation hub, test, capture, process, mining, all of these other features we haven't been able to purchase yet, due to the fact that we want to make sure that our bread and butter, the claims of membership, is solid. Once we have that in a good place, which we're hoping will be in 2022, we've already talked to our sales rep about the next steps. They've talked about the other features and offered recommendations. We'll go down that path next year and it'll be really exciting to see what else we can do to bring on the other areas of the company.
I'd advise potential new users that they definitely want to do some kind of proof of concept against other systems. I have heard other companies here that have said, okay, we're going up against four other automation tools. That's great. However, do your homework. You need to go and present everything to your leadership and showcase the solutions.
As we get some of the demos of software, we can kind of compare them to what our system's needs are. A new user can say, well, maybe these are our top two. When you get to your top two, that's your time to bring somebody in, an expert to discuss what you're trying to do.
If you do choose to go with UiPath, that UiPath academy is so valuable. That's a big asset. If you do the premium plus care, they will support you through and help you get things set up and running or make it better. We've been up and running for two years. Their goal and my goal is to see how to make things better to continuously improve the system and make everyone happy.
I'd rate the solution at a nine out of ten. There are just a few system quirks I'm trying to work through.
UiPath helps us to develop and build a center of excellence for our clients. I do development and technical implementation of the bots, best practices, and teach others how to do the development.
The client that I'm working with now is in the financial services sector. They do banking and life insurance. They do a lot of contracts and billing, backend, data entry-type work. We process all of the return mail that comes in, scan it using Doc Understanding, publish new bills, generate form letters, and all of those tasks that go along with managing the client for life insurance, annuities, 401K, etc.
A lot of the benefits we've seen are from FTE hours saved. We are looking at almost all of our processes, and it saves us at least a thousand or more hours per year before we go into implementation. We have around 20 in production. We're saving between 15,000 and 20,000 hours of process time.
From the user's perspective, people are happy that they don't have to do certain tasks that they didn't like to do. I only have one of those bots where I have a group of people that prefer the way they've always been doing tasks, but that's more of an organizational thing. I'm seeing across the enterprise with other folks that they're very happy to have this. They are putting more use cases in, and the frontline workers are bringing in use cases. Of course, we need to vet a lot of those so that we get enough bang for the buck, but we're finding a lot of adoption across, up, and down the whole scale so far.
There's also been a reduction in human error. There are so many use cases that have been more on the production side of things, like productivity as opposed to risk avoidance. We enter data and we do bank transfers, so it's important to key the data correctly. We use the attended bot to do that. We took a paper form. We push it in, it comes in as an unattended bot in the backend to read an email from a person and put a transfer in place. It gets approved and put in the queue.
When they run the attended bot, it allows them to do an RSA key into their external site, take the data, watch it go in, they see it, we audit it on the backend with a second user, it gets pushed in, saved, and submitted. From that perspective, if you're dealing with 10, 50, or 100 transfers a day, where you could key in the wrong number, it's important.
That's been helping. Employees are happy that they don't have to type it all in, and that they don't have to worry about the errors as well. It offers peace of mind for those folks.
Getting the bots going and working is the most valuable aspect. We have about 20 or so in production. We're building out from there. We've been very focused on Studio and Orchestrator, as opposed to some of the other product lines. Because a lot of what we're dealing with pertains to advanced technical people like myself that are helping them along that journey.
It's easy for me to build automations but I am a computer scientist. I have a deep technical background. A lot of what I've been doing is trying to teach people how to build resilient bots, and how to build processes that will run. To me, one of the big things to meet your ROI is that you need to build things upfront that work. You need to verify them, test them, componentize them, and put them together. Otherwise, you're going to spend too much money on the backend with maintenance.
If you can get people to think about what do to in the event of a failure, even from the developer side of it, then they can create things that we can run, and we don't have to do so many new maintenance and operations tasks on it. That's vitally important.
I have used the UiPath Academy courses. I'm a certified developer. I didn't know UiPath at all. I went through the Academy and trained myself. When I brought in new developers, I had them do modules and I sometimes go visit them.
The Academy is pretty good. It's very helpful to have something like that. Personally, my favorite side of things that UiPath is bringing to the table, is a community edition in the cloud. I can go out and play with the latest and greatest. I have my client's laptop, but I also have my own personal laptop and I go out to the cloud and do tasks out there.
I want to bring what's new, help bring to the forefront what we might want to do in the future, and get a hands-on perspective, without having to go to the client and bug them about bringing in a license for something. That's great and I hope they continue with that.
The fact that they're not charging for training is great. It brings on more developers. The barriers to entry for people are low. And the more developers you have, the more adoption you're going to get.
There's a lot of technological growth that should be done. They need to learn from customers. I talk to people about Doc Understanding which is relatively new. There's a lot of people in the document world that have more experience. They should learn a little bit more about what Kofax has done over the years with their validation actions and those types of things.
There should be more growth, but the platform is there. As they grow those things they should take each piece and make it better. If you start with a good platform and you build it up, it's going to get better. What we have today is very usable, and is only going to get better. I look forward to it.
They should talk to their customers and understand their use cases. Give customers what they need.
I have been using UiPath for two and a half years.
Stability has been quite good. I see technical glitches once in a while in the Studio, but when you're running on Windows, it happens. The glitches don't happen very often.
It seems very scalable, in terms of rolling out new processes. We're more limited by machines and getting things set up than we are by what Orchestrator can handle. We have one attended bot and we're 95% unattended.
We have plans to increase usage. Our clients are growing from two developers, a QA and a VA, to a VA, and a team of two pods of six or seven developer QA types, to implement use cases over the next couple of years. They're on a very high trajectory of growth.
I go out to the community a bit. I Google looking for what everybody else has said and figure it out. We only have a couple of different use cases where we've gone back to UiPath, and the ones that we had the most difficulty with, we went right through the local sales rep to get things going. I found their support to be good.
The initial setup was straightforward and easy.
I set up Orchestrator servers, I put bots out into the systems, and I installed Studio in the client's environment. The only problem I have is with the way the client environment exists. Security gets to be a hassle.
One of the things the company focuses on a lot is employee satisfaction. From a cost perspective, we haven't necessarily gotten to that level. I've been there for two years. I'm a consultant. We have other consultants. We're saving $15,000 a year, while we're displacing certain cost dollars from the people that did those jobs, we get paid more.
Cost-wise we're fairly evening out, and probably bringing an MROI. This is a longer scale process for them, to take them along this journey. It's important for businesses that go under that, to not necessarily focus on year one, year two. We look at this as a longer-term endeavor for them. The key benefit that they see out of it right now is the future. The workers are satisfied not having to do the "bad" work.
I found UiPath to be pretty cost-effective.
I would rate UiPath a seven out of ten. I see it as a maturing product. It's done very well, because it is stable, and it does build real use cases. But I look forward to the future. There's a lot of good going on here.
We do not directly use UiPath in our organization but we do have some use cases. One of those is sending bulletins. These are the notification emails that go to users on their birthdays, on their work anniversaries, sometimes they are sent after some sort of achievement, like if they have a baby. These notifications go via UiPath.
The way it works is that the data is maintained within our tracking sheet, which is sometimes on SharePoint, and UiPath uses this tracking sheet to check the data in addition to the user and will cc everyone within the organization. For example, when we receive birthday emails, it goes to the person whose birthday it is on that day and cc's in everyone within the organization or within the relevant department.
In the case of one of the clients I've worked with, they're working on a process where they need to provide students with a student visa pass. It's within Singapore and every student that has joined this institute needs to apply over a website. 5000 applications are received every year. These applications need to be manually added to the government website.
We automated this process, starting from the beginning to the end. There's a lot of interaction required. The team worked on an Excel sheet. In fact, a number of people work on these Excel sheets. With many people, there's always a chance of misleading data, as I might at one point be doing some more revision on the sheet, and someone at the other point might be doing more revisions. There is the chance that data will clash. In order to make sure that this won't happen, we came up with a SharePoint list where we could add the data, and if anyone changes anything, there's a simple and clear record of who made the changes, and what the change was.
At the same time, the bot can work on the SharePoint list as well - and there is no chance of a clash occurring. We can create a process and a number of steps that involve reading the data and extracting data from an application while swapping or extracting data between two forms.
There's a lot of swapping. We extracted the data via the backend, via the database, and directly put that into the IC application. The processing time for this application previously was somewhere around 20 minutes. Per record now, the time has been reduced to three minutes. Previously, there were 18 people working on any particular application. Right now, there are only two bots working on this website, and they are doing work like magic.
If we look at the development part, UiPath Studio has been great due to its ease of use and its UI. The availability of the UI store helps us understand the complete pre-hierarchy of the UI elements that's available on the browser or website. It's easy to use and it can be manipulated in the way we want it to. It allows us to do more work on the browsers.
The integration aspect is very useful. Right now, I'm working on SharePoint and that integrates nicely with UiPath. The integration model is really, really great, and 99.9% of the time it works. While technology can fail occasionally, UiPath has a great track record.
The ease of building automation using UiPath is quite good. The kind of projects or processes we have been able to automate has been helpful. We need to determine if it's a complex process, which is dictated by the number of steps. We look at the number of steps and work to determine if we can improvise and reduce the number of steps, and, if so, how. We look at if the process ever requires human intervention and where. The type of human intervention might dictate the complexity of the process, as well, for example, the number of applications we are working on. We might have to write some code on the backend or maybe we are working with an API. Everything needs to be assessed before going into an automation process.
UiPath has reduced human errors. Previously, everything was manually tracked with changes noted on the tracking sheet and we would do a copy/paste from one place to another. There was always a chance of human error. However, when this process is automated, there was zero chance for mistakes. While there may be exceptions, it would be only in rare instances the automation itself would make an error.
The product definitely reduces cost. If a company deploys automation within their organization, they need to understand that automation needs some time. One process will not necessarily reduce the cost. They need to see there will be results in the long run. It just takes time and they have to understand automation. They have to implement automation within the organization. Often, organizations will start the automation process, and then they leave it as they believe the cost is going up. They perceive this due to the fact that they need a separate system for development, a separate system for testing, and a separate system for operation, plus they need three servers for the Orchestrator. However, in the long run, automation actually lowers costs. It's just a hard up-front number to look at.
Whether or not the solution has freed an employee's time depends. If you talk about the business level, definitely not, due to the fact that, for them, it might be a burden. To the business, it might be a burden. However, if you talk to the IT department or IT level people who are working differently from users they would say that the best thing is that deployment is easy, debugging is easy, logging is very easy, and tracking is very easy. Anyone from IT can easily track how things are going. Yet, if we are talking about it from the point of view of business, for them it's not their cup of tea.
For example, if the system freezes on a person, they just close the browser, however, if the system freezes on a bot, from that moment everything must be manually re-initiated. For a regular business user, doing that process may go above their head and they may not understand how to fix it.
The Orchestrator portion can be difficult. Previously, the Orchestrator which everyone was using, was quite simple to use. However, the new one is quite complex to understand. Even with developers, they sometimes don't understand it either.
There's a lot of things coming up that need to be learned. They need to put some more information into the academy to help others understand the Orchestrator end-to-end, especially for the new version. The previous one was quite easy. The new one is very inefficient in terms of the user interface. That's the area that I find still needs improvement.
I would suggest that they should provide a more disciplined document where users can see what exactly needs to be done in case of failure. For example, there's a very clever document on the deployment of the setup, but there's no documentation on what happens if there is a failure. Users need to be made aware of what to do if exceptions happen.
UiPath is already aware of these exception scenarios, and when you call support they know what needs to be done. These details need to be on documents somewhere, maybe in the form of knowledge articles. That way, if someone has some issue, they can go to an article and see what's going on.
I've used the solution for about four years now.
Stability-wise, it's really good. When it comes to backend automation, it's amazing. With the UI automation in mind, I would say it's quite stable. However, there is a chance of errors. I would say, if you're doing a process based on a UI interaction, the stability it gives is somewhere around 5% to 10% on each process. Again, it depends on a number of things, such as the start-up package you are working with and/or what is the response of that individual. It's something that somewhat falls outside of UiPath, in terms of stability, however, when it comes to the process, everything counts. Even, for example, electricity counts. If there's system slowness or a system crash, it can affect everything, even if it's not necessarily caused by UiPath.
Attended automation has helped to scale RPA benefits. It is scalable, as, moving forward, there are multiple processes in relation to the same person, and right now it's done manually by a number of users. Probably, in the future, we can help develop a direction for that. Right now, the client is happy with what they got.
The solution is quite scalable. It's easy to scale a process or a UI. With big automation, it depends on the number of people who are going to utilize it. In those cases, we need to make sure that that network is available to scale. If you don't take into account the number of users, or if there are a lot of people using it, then the chances of failure can go up. That said, it depends on how big the organization is and what sort of licenses were bought from UiPath.
I have not really used technical support, and therefore cannot comment. With Studio, we've had maybe a few minor interactions. It's the same with Orchestrator.
I have worked with a number of tools including Automation Anywhere, Blue Prism, WorkFusion, Kryon, and Kofax. I have knowledge of a lot of other tools.
Kryon, for example, has a process discovery feature, and UiPath also started up with this process development. However, what Kryon provides is amazing. The way they capture everything, the way output comes, the way each step is explained with the process, et cetera, makes discovery on Kryon amazing. In comparison to UiPath, UiPath just isn't as good in this area.
WorkFusion integrates well with the part where we have to read documents, especially bot scanned reading. UiPath does not have these capabilities, as of now, on its own. You can integrate Abbyy with UiPath, however, that's a different tool altogether. With Fusion and with Kofax, these features are amazing. On top of that, their invoice capabilities are amazing. There's a vast difference between UiPath and Kofax and Fusion when it comes to reading documents.
That said, when it comes to working on the backend automation, when it comes to working with the UI automation, UiPath stands out from the crowd. It's amazing. The way it writes, the way it provides precision handling, the way it works with the queue, et cetera, is amazing. There is no other tool on the market that offers these capabilities.
The one feature that I believe should be better with UiPath, however, is storing data in an independent manner. With UiPath, even though you store your password on the Orchestrator with the credentials, or even with any credential manager if you get at the end of the day and somebody has not reviewed your quote, you can tell your boss to send his password in a simple text format. This is where the UiPath lacks, and this is where Blue Prism comes into the picture. It's just better at securing data. People prefer Blue Prism for this reason over UiPath.
With my current organization, the department model is quite simple. We have three different environments for this: development, testing (what we call acuity), and production models. We have these three stages of deployment that we deploy robots and the Orchestrator based on the requirement of clients.
The deployment took a maximum of one to two hours from one machine to another machine. A complete department deployment, however, depends on the process type we are working on, as there are some features we need to develop. Apart from publishing these packages, the deployment of the server, or of the Orchestrator, or the deployment of Studio, will take a day or two to do the complete setup on one machine.
In terms of the implementation strategy, the first thing to do is the pre-checks. We need to figure out what sort of system we need. Therefore, we need to first confirm the prerequisites. Once that is done, we need to download a package and install it, and then apply the license. After all of that, we just need to create one small robot just to check that everything is working fine. There are some tools that need to be installed with that. For example, if we are working on UI automation, in that case, we need to install an extension. If we need to install the network load balancer as well, we need to install some of the prerequisite packages on the machine, on the server, to make sure that this runs smoothly.
While the licensing models are quite simple, as a developer, I don't handle details about pricing or cost.
My company does not directly partner with UiPath, however, it's a partner via a client. If anything happens with the client, it goes from my company via one of those stakeholders who take care of these things.
Currently, we use attended automation. The reason being is, it's more about password prediction, as the company does not want to store the passwords. There are a number of options that we have given to users where they can store their passwords in the credential manager. However, the company does not want to do that. The only reason we are using attended is for this, which is that the user has to manually go and insert the credentials.
I have not yet used UiPath's AI functionality in any automation programs. I have done some POCs for this, for documents in this setting. However, we've never practically implemented it within the organization.
With the current organization and with the current client we are not using Orchestrator at all. We only use attended robots and not Studio and Orchestrator. However, with other clients, we have used the cloud-based enterprise Orchestrator and have had the Orchestrator installed within the premises of the organization. I've used both.
I would rate the solution at a nine out of ten.
Most of the time, we work with financial services to automate financial transaction monitoring systems. We go through multiple CRM and financial systems, then query the transactions based on the KYC information. We use OCR operations, using UiPath Robot, to fetch information, such as, identification number, passport number, and their tax information. We extract this information, then validate with our financial data or transactions data to ensure that there is no fraud nor anomalies in the system. If there are any suspicious transactions or potential fraud, we do manual investigations. Those manual investigations are redirected from the robot to a human agent, then the human agent verifies the information. If there are any cost validation requests from other systems, such as Salesforce and PeopleSoft, then another bot will be triggered using UiPath Orchestrator. After that, we do the remaining processing. At the end of the processing, we use the UiPath analytics service. That analytics service uses UiPath logs, which helps us to understand how the bot is performing and how many transactions we have validated. From that, we look at how many were successfully processed and how many were manually handled, i.e., exceptions. We identify business exceptions for any transactions during the initial pre-validation stage, such as the user identification number is not valid or input data validation errors. For example, passport information must be an alphanumeric eight digit. If the bot identifies that the value is not eight digits, but four or five digits, then it is an invalid record straightaway. We can see this from the reporting and performance graphs.
We do automation for our HR processes, such as onboarding processes. On any day, there are five or six people who need to be onboarded. This is one of our standard business cases. We have a UiPath robot design using UiPath Studio and then it deploys in Orchestrator. This robot is being used by the HR admin. They can fill in the key information of the user, e.g., name, level, and their package. So, they import all this information, which includes my identity information, mobile number, email, and IDs on an Excel file, possibly along with a few other associates joining tomorrow. Once those entries are made in the Excel file, then the user can trigger a robot. They also need to keep the file in a designated folder. The robot will read the file from the designated folder. Then, one by one, it will read the records or line items from Excel and open an SAP portal. After logging through the SAP Portal, it inputs the required employee information. After that, it will go to Microsoft Azure Active Directory to QA the user, email, and ID. It will then go to PeopleSoft to create an HR record for the salary information, leave information, and the level at which the associate is joining. At the end of this process, it will update the status to, "The associate has been registered successfully." It will then send the updated final report to HR, saying, "The processing has been completed." The bot triggers information with their newly created email ID. They can then access or receive the onboarding information. This is how it works.
Depending on the client's requirements, we use UiPath AI Center and UiPath Apps for custom requirements. Most of the time, we don't need them. There are some times that we do based on the client's requirements.
I am using UiPath Studio, UiPath Orchestrator, and UiPath Robot.
Initially, I used the on-premises deployment model. For the last two years, we have also been using the cloud deployment option, UiPath Cloud, along with the on-premises. This is based on a client's requirements.
We can use the Process Mining tool to identify opportunities. We can then design the robot using UiPath Studio. After designing it, we can deploy it, using UiPath Studio, to Orchestrator. From Orchestrator, we can manage, monitor, and upgrade all the new patches within the UiPath platform.
If we have one place where we can see the end-to-end journey of our automations, then I do not need to manage multiple licenses. I do not need to spend money and expertise hiring multiple people and training them on multiple platforms. Also, when upgrading the systems, if I have a one place where I can manage all my automations at the same time, including UI and background automations, then we can build low-code apps using UiPath Apps. Therefore, I can manage everything within one platform, which is either a UiPath Intelligent Automation platform or UiPath Cloud. This is very important. Because if I have multiple systems, then I need multiple stakeholders to manage, upgrade, and maintain them. So, we do not need to think about all the things that I am using. There is one place where I can manage everything.
It has enabled us to automate more processes overall. In the initial days, we easily automated the low hanging fruit. As our automation journey matured, we needed to automate processes using more complex methods, like AI, machine learning, and advanced OCR functionalities.
The UiPath package available on UiPath Studio is useful. Compared to other RPA tools, like Automation Anywhere and Blue Prism, we found that this package gives us the opportunity to automate tasks in the shortest amount of time. There are multiple templates available on UiPath Studio. For example, if I need to do multi-setting processing, which means we are going to process multiple records simultaneously, we can use a UiPath Background Process as a template. Using the template, I can run multiple robots on the same system, which will not interact with other systems. It will work in the background. We have found that really valuable. This is not available with other RPA products, such as Automation Anywhere and Blue Prism. This is one of the valuable things that we have found in UiPath.
We use the UiPath recorder. For the latest, modern experience, we have a recorder called App Integrations. Using that particular recorder, I can automate tasks with multiple systems without thinking about having manual integrations between multiple browsers by identifying multiple sessions. Sessions can be used by the same recorder during the entire automation cycle. For example, I have two screens, one called PeopleSoft and another one is SAP. I can do a keystroke, mouse click, and then hit the submit button within PeopleSoft. Then, at the same time, I have another window open being used by the robot. I don't want to think about separating two windows, so the recorder takes care of this.
The UiPath recorder has multiple ways of identifying. For example, it uses UI elements, fuzzy logic, and image recognition at the same time. These three methods are used by only one recorder. Whereas, with other platforms, like Blue Prism and Automation Anywhere, I can use only one method at a time, so one command is one method for selecting or identifying objects. Whereas, with the app recorders, I can use three methods using one command. So, if one fails, another one will back up the scenario. Then, if another one also fails, the third one will help us automate. That is the ease of automation, which is a valuable feature that helps us ensure that automation works flawlessly, without having to look at if one of the methods failed.
One of the 2018 projects was built using version 18.2. We then got a report from users that it was not working. Most of the time, it failed on multiple use cases. When we took the process from the owner to repair and troubleshoot, we found that many packages were not being recognized by the new version, which is 2020. So, we had to upgrade to the latest package, then do a repair. It took a good amount of time for us to repair the package. We had to go back to the UAT environment, then do testing and get approval from the UAT. We then had to sign-off and deploy pre-production and post-production Hypercare. So, the automation cycle being repeated by almost 40% is quite costly to the business, but this is rare.
The vendor had already noticed these things were a big pain for us. With the recent versions, 2019 and onwards, the compatibility between the activity and packages is there. Prior to that, there were some issues. The UI automation package was the one that was mostly affected. Many people who were early adopters of UiPath observed or experienced these kinds of issues.
Sometimes, when we are using Remote Desktop automations, we may need to use a different approach along with the AI functionalities. For example, if I need to recognize the object on the screen, which I cannot do using native methods, then along with the AI functionality, I may need to have a backup method, such as the OCL methods along with AI Computer Visions. This ensures that it works robustly and my solutions deliver 100% results without any manual intervention. In such complex scenarios, we are using AI features along with multiple methods for the backing up of the AI features. We have to ensure that if something goes wrong with the AI features then we have another method which will ensure, if A fails, then B will back up our solution's process as expected.
I have been using it for the past six years.
We use UiPath AI Center, UiPath AI Computer Vision functionalities, and Document Understanding. These AI features came into the picture from 2019 onwards. First, we received updates using UiPath Computer Vision functionalities. Then, we received AI Center, which was not stable in its initial days. However, during the first quarter of 2020, we received version 2, which seems to be more stable. From there, we received general availability versions with integrations on UiPath Studio and UiPath StudioX. These work much better, as compared to the initial versions. So far, all the components of UiPath Computer Vision, Document Understanding, and UiPath AI Center work well.
I appreciate other benefits, such as UiPath community support and UiPath enterprise product support, because if anything goes wrong, we search in Google or the UiPath Forum where we can find the answer. Even if the answer is not available, and I post a question, I am quite certain that within one day that I will get someone to respond to the question. It may be someone from the forum or UiPath. Most of the time, the answers are readily available on the UiPath Forums.
UiPath Forum is the one place where we reach out to research problems, do troubleshooting, or get some help. If we need some help regarding the installations or licensing, we can create a ticket. Typically, we get a response, email notifications, or support calls within four to six hours.
We hire fresh, new graduates that we are going to train. UiPath Academies offers numerous training tutorials and certifications, which helps us to train our newly hired resources who are completely new to RPA and UiPath. So, the training is really useful in terms of video tutorial practice and configuring our multilingual environment. UiPath Academy does support English, Chinese, Malay, and German. So, our associates from multiple offices, who are already working on the global initiative, can learn the same things at the same time. Or, they can get someone from an English background.
I started RPA using UiPath.
Using the tool for the last six years, the initial setup is like having breakfast every day; it is very simple. I can do it much faster than someone new who started two years back or the new guy. I know what to do and how to do it.
Because it is software as a service, the setup and configuration time are very quick. Within an hour or two, we can set up the infrastructure deployment for a starter package. Configurations can be done smoothly. The infrastructure deployment, which typically takes a week's time, can be minimized to an hour. This saves us a lot of time and money for multiple components.
In the initial days of 2016 or 2015, our automation journey was center of excellence (COE) based most of the time. Nowadays, we changed our strategy, and it is more employee involved. So, an employee can go into UiPath Automation Hub and submit their idea. If they have time and are interested, we give them the training to use UiPath StudioX features for automation. If a process is complex based on our assessment, we pick that process and do the automation so the COE and employ-driven automation work hand in hand.
With a simple process, then the employee can automate it and do the PoC. If they need help, we are more than happy to help them. However, we found when the processes are medium to highly complex, this is something professional developers should be working on. If they are interested, they can contribute and learn, but it's less likely that a business user would be involved in a complex automation process.
UiPath has absolutely reduced human error. Infrastructure setup and maintenance are taken care of by the product owner or vendor. So, there is 100% assurance that nothing wrong will happen in the system because they are the people who built and deployed the product. Whenever we deploy, there may be a chance that something might go wrong or configurations went wrong. For example, I need to configure the Internet information services port. If I incorrectly configured the port or use a different method, there is a high chance that I might need to redirect the port to some other router or native firewall. If I use UiPath Cloud, everything is taken care of by UiPath. I just log into assistance, then allocate the license and configure our users.
For small to medium clients, those clients have an investment of about $100,000. We see around six to eight months in, they get something around 40% to 60% ROI being returned to them. Then, within a year to 18 months, they get a 100% to 120% ROI realized.
When we implement a robotics process automation solution using UiPath, and if the client's budget is limited, we mostly encourage the automation journey to be done using UiPath Cloud. UiPath ensures that it works fluidly, performs all upgrade security patches, and has 99.9% uptime.
In the initial days, UiPath was more competitive in terms of the license pricing as compared to Blue Prism and Automation Anywhere; it was much less. Currently, the pricing is quite standard compared to the other two vendors.
We can use UiPath Cloud, which helps us to save a lot of money and infrastructure costs, if the automation journey or project is for a small to medium-sized company. However, if it is a big company, then on-premises is preferred.
I have also used Automation Anywhere and Blue Prism as well as open-source automation platforms, such as TagUI and Selenium.
The main pros to using UiPath are its user interface, user-friendliness, learning platform, and support.
We have been using the UiPath Apps feature for the last four or five months, so it is relatively new for us. Most of our technical people are experimenting with UiPath Apps. We have planned training sessions for business users to upskill them.
If you are starting or in your initial days, I advise you to use the UiPath community version. Try first to do a PoC with the community version, trying out the automation in UiPath Cloud for free. Once you realize that this is something good as well as understand the value of it, then you can start with the initial package. If you think that you can start big from the beginning, then go for on-premises and start a large-scale transformation. However, I would advise doing a PoC first with proper guidance from UiPath and selecting a proper implementation consulting partner who has good experience or a solid past track record of doing automation, RPA, the RPA automation journey, and the transformation journey, as a whole. Not just UiPath automations or building robots, but also transforming their project and processes as well as doing Lean Six Sigma, which is a crucial part of the transformation journey. So, you should consider all these factors for a successful automation journey.
Compared to the top three tools, I rate this solution 10 out of 10.
I have multiple use cases as part of this solution, since I work in different domains with different technologies and applications. We use attended and unattended bots.
One use case was for a credit-based client where we worked on the UI automation of the application. We were using UiPath Automation Cloud because our team is spread across different geographical locations, like the U.S, APAC and EMEA regions. We had different RPA developers who are developing the script simultaneously and putting it on the system, and our business case was that we wanted to automate the UI applications. Since there were different developers in different geographical regions, they created the bots on their system. Due to the cloud offering, we were able to move the bots to production using a click of a button. There is also an Orchestrator offering as part of the cloud, which is hosted. Once we had a thorough peer review of the bots being developed, we pushed it to our production-ready cloud-based Orchestrator. From there, we use it to run the script. That is an unattended bot, which is also one of the features. Since it is a credit-based UI automation, there are some instances where manual intervention is required in order to see whatever data is sent out to the client, if it is in the correct order or not. That is why we use the unattended offering of UiPath. Both these technologies help us a lot in creating our production-ready implementation.
For another use case, we did an implementation in the SAP application. It was a procure-to-payment (P2P) cycle, where a third party sends out the invoices which get fed into the SAP application, then it gets verified and goes out to the payroll team. Once that is verified by the payroll team, the payment is released to the concerned vendors. All these points of entry were being done manually: the third-party invoices entered into the SAP application, SAP verification, and the payroll team verification. Since it involved a lot of financial data, people were very hesitant to get it automated. However, since we had this UiPath offering, that initial hesitation was turned into a very good implementation of whatever we wanted to achieve as part of this UiPath automation. We were using the unattended bot as part of the cloud offering. We ran the processes at night from Orchestrator, so people working from home didn't need to stay up late in order to run the processes. Since we were using the cloud unattended bot service of UiPath, we were able to trigger the whole process in a single click of a button, which is amazing.
As part of the UiPath offering, we have three offerings: Studio, StudioX, and Studio Pro. These three offerings are provided via cloud on a single system and installed on our laptops or desktops.
I am working as a senior analyst. As part of this particular role, I have to cater to the client's needs if they want to get a UiPath implementation. Then, I do the consulting as part of the implementation. I also get involved in the PoC development and how we should use the cloud offering, e.g., what benefits are there.
We were able to move prototypes, which were in PoC stages to production very quickly, which helped us a lot. There has been more collaboration happening because of the cloud implementation. Because we have different geographical locations where in RPA bots are getting developed, at the end of the day, everything is pushed into Orchestrator Cloud. From there, we can execute it. In terms of collaboration, this has been very helpful.
UiPath Automation Cloud has helped us to minimize our on-prem footprint. We were able to get our prototypes into production very quickly. In turn, this helped us to get stuff minimized quickly because we were able to move the prototype as part of the PoC into production faster. We were also able to scale. For example, if we had new people joining the team, we could easily move them into the cloud offering and add a new tenant. We have added two or three new members who could readily go ahead and use the solution to develop RPA bots.
It is a single point of truth. There is no discrepancy or ambiguity. We can go to the leadership team, and say, "This is what it saves us on costs, man-hours, and effort that we used to do manually versus what we are doing now using the bots."
The most valuable feature (as part of the cloud offering) is Orchestrator. Even if we have the RPA developers spread across different geographical locations, we are able to get the bot ready and pushed into Orchestrator, where any non-technical guy can come in and run the process. When I say non-technical guy, I mean any person from the business or leadership who just wants to see how it works. They can go ahead and log into Orchestrator and execute the process.
The Orchestrator portal is very intuitive, so you don't have to run around and talk to anyone. It is so intuitive because it is like using a web-based application. For example, nobody has to train us to go and do whatever they want us to do. It is so intuitive that we can figure out, "Hey, this is what I need to click in order to add new tenants. This is what I need to click in order to change the geography from India to APAC or any other location. In terms of execution, whatever bots are in execution right now will be shown there. Also, whatever bots are not running, they will be displayed as part of the dashboard as well as the failures.
UiPath provides granular, role-based access control and management, which is very important as part of the monitoring. When we want to drill down on why there is a failure, we need to do a root cause analysis as part of understanding on why this particular bot failed and what could be the reason:
We are moving from single sign-on to no password sign-on. As we are moving ahead with technological advancement, maybe that feature can be added. This totally depends on how that technology is accepted by the people. If people in big enterprises are not willing to switch and don't want to move away from the single sign-on, then it will be very difficult to digest this. However, whenever there is a change, it is very difficult to digest. Eventually, people will like it. I believe if it is implemented as part of UiPath, who is a technological leader in terms of RPA and new stuff when they roll out every release, then this would be a good area that they can look into for enhancement.
They could add more features in order to get that dashboard more intuitive, e.g., how easily can we visualize everything being reported. I believe this should be improved as part of our Orchestrator offering. Now, we have different visualization tools being used, like Power BI. The data gets flooded into those kinds of tools and the dashboard is easy to understand. So, someone with a non-technical background can see the dashboard and understand what has happened. However, to provide detailed analysis, there has to be some improvements so we can provide drill-down data to developers showing, "Hey, this has gone wrong." If they could also incorporate that as part of the reports, then it would be very quick to view on the dashboards.
I have been using it for two years.
UiPath has a number of offerings: on-prem Orchestrator, Automation Cloud, Automation Hub, Cloud Orchestrator, Task Mining, Task Capture, etc. Sometimes, it feels like other new areas are getting more focus compared to areas, like dashboard Insights, which should be more relevant. They should focus on these other areas to make the cloud offering more robust. Though, they are working towards it and releasing updates. Therefore, eventually, they will look into it, work on it, and iron out any kind of discrepancy.
It was very easy to scale up. Since we started getting a lot of data from the client which was getting filled as part of the UI-logged application, we were able to push in data as part of the UI. So, we were able to reduce replies to clients significantly.
We find the solution to be scalable. Since this RPA technology is now widely accepted as part of our enterprise solution, businesses are coming in. Once the business team is onboarded, we can easily onboard the people who have technical expertise to create the bots, analyze them, and provide logic on how we need to design the bots. As part of the initial stages, we only have a business person, a solution architect, and a tool expert. First, we create the credentials for them, then we provide the solution to the business as part of a PoC. After that, if we are using any other traditional system, then it will take a lot of time to get 10 or 15 people onboarded in order to develop the solution in a fully-fledged manner. However, since we have the orchestration capabilities, we can just go in that particular Orchestrator dashboard and create our tenant with a few clicks. We can also move in and out between different geographies. For example, if I want to go and look into what is happening in the Indian service line, I can just go and click on that particular service line, which is already configured as part of Orchestrator.
Initially, when we were going with the idea of creating an RPA bot, the first thing was to get a nod from the business to make sure about how scalable the solution is. At times, what happens is once we get the business sign off, then it takes around a month or two in order to get the team onboarded with all the necessary accesses. Once they get all the accesses, they will start working on the solution. However, in this particular case, as part of this Automation Cloud offering, we didn't have to waste any time after we got the business nod, saying, "Hey, you guys can go ahead and implement this full-fledged solution." Since the orchestration capabilities are there, the moment we received an email from the business, we shot out an email, "Hey, we are getting these pieces and have already created the credentials. Tomorrow, you can get the ball rolling in terms of solution development."
There are multiple channels where we can reach out to them. One of those channels is the Community Forum, which is being constantly monitored for any issues. So, if anybody has already faced it, they go ahead and have it answered. Or, if nobody has seen it before, then the forum moderator comes in, and says, "Hey, why don't you go ahead and reach out to the IT support?" So, this is a channel that gets a response and has faster ways to directly approach the support team managing the servers.
The UiPath Community Forum is worldwide. It is being monitored by community moderators. I have seen feedback being put through to the IT support team, then that is put through to the right channels to get addressed. They really listen to the customer feedback, which is what I appreciate about them.
The support is responsive at resolving any kind of tickets or issues when we reach out for help. This is one of the primary factors for going with Automation Cloud versus other cloud offerings, like Automation Anywhere and ElectroNeek. UiPath support is very much available and provides a solution. Even if they don't have the solution, they tell the affiliate, "This is how much time it will take," or "It will be released in the next update."
We don't need any IT support in order to maintain this particular solution. Since it is a cloud offering, everything is taken care of by the URL.
In case of any issues for the setup and updates, we reach out to the UiPath support team.
The initial setup is very easy. It is like installing an app on your iPhone. That is how simple it is. Basically, it is not an installation at all. It is just signing into a cloud account. As part of the cloud offering, we are provided with a URL, which gives us access to the Orchestrator instantly. There is no setup whatsoever. You don't have to go and download any EXP or MSA file on your system, then double click it and a number of forms are popping up. It is nothing of that sort. It is a single URL, where you can log in with your credentials, and that is one time activity. After that, it is a single sign-on the moment that you access that particular URL.
The implementation was frictionless with the single sign-on feature.
By using the Automation Cloud version, when there is a new version pushed out, then I do not have to do a reinstallation again in order to get all the newest features. Since I am using the SaaS offering, the new functionalities being pushed out as part of the newest version will be easily accessible to me without doing an uninstall or installation. This is a good part of the offering.
We are seeing a good ROI.
The maintenance work has been reduced because of the bots. Initially, the time that we invested in order to zero in on this particular product was 60 to 70 percent of the job data. This helped us a lot when we were deploying it.
This solution has reduced business costs. For example, products and bots that we designed for UI automation were also deployed for back-end services.
The setup cost is minimized drastically since it is a cloud-based offering. We don't need to have a dedicated person or team to monitor it. We just subscribe to the services, get the URL, login, and the next moment, we are creating tenants and the service line. Then, "Boom!," we are ready for executing the bots from our test check.
Our license cost is reduced since we don't require any IT support.
I used the free versions of other vendors when we were trying to zero in on the solution that we wanted to use. We used a few other competitors of UiPath as when we were doing the PoC, and the features that we liked the most and made us lean towards UiPath were its intuitiveness and ease of use. We liked how Orchestrator can be used by the business or by anyone with a non-technical background. That is what helped us to make our decision in favor of UiPath.
With other tools, we had some issues with their support where they were frequently not reachable. They were not able to set up any discovery calls, such as, "Hey, this is how it is going to work." They also don't have very active community forums.
Instead of talking to the support or sales teams, we investigated on our own. We went to the UiPath Academy, which is readily available, and looked into its documents, which were highly detailed. We also monitored their Community Forum, which is being moderated properly. Then, we read some reviews on IT Central Station, seeing how people are reviewing it and why they are paying for it. For example, if their whole community is coming out with good words, then there has to be something which they are doing well. That is what made us make the decision to zero in on UiPath Automation Cloud.
When comparing UiPath with different vendors offering RPA,like Automation Anywhere or ElectroNeek, we initially thought that Automation Anywhere was ahead of the game and UiPath was playing a catch-up. A few weeks back, UiPath had a good investor round, then they went all guns blazing out in the market. There is a lot of community awareness in terms of UiPath implementation. So, I believe the road ahead for UiPath is very good.
One of the newest upgrades that we had was in respect to payments getting added. New functionalities are getting added. They also work on the feedback that they get from interviews conducted by sites, like IT Central Station, who take unbiased reviews. They work off this feedback, which is why they are upgrading their products out in the market.
I haven't used the AI Fabric solution as of yet because we don't have a business case for it as of now.
If you are ready with your own business process that you want to get automated, then I would recommend UiPath for its intuitiveness. You should consider the intuitiveness of the UiPath as one of the parameters in your solution decision. For example, if you have the business process ready, then that is half the job done. The other half will be taken care of by your RPA developers or solution architect. So, if you are using UiPath, the learning curve is very small. You don't need to invest a lot of time.
They have their UiPath Academy learning website, where you can go in as well as ask your team members to learn based on their roles. There are different series of educational videos based on job roles and how that particular role should look at UiPath as a solution. For example, as a manager, if I'm going in and looking into the UiPath, I do not want to be bothered about how I'm going to pull in activities and develop the automation bot. As a manager, I am going into Orchestrator to see how many bots have executed successfully or failed. If I was a solution architect, then I need to know how to design the service lines if they are located in different geographical regions.
Everybody is really looking for some kind of solution that eases our life since we are working from home. It takes a toll when we are working from home. When we have these RPA bots coming to our rescue, then it makes a difference in our day-to-day life. Then, we can spend more time with our loved ones rather than spending more time in front of our laptop screens.
I would like to rate it as nine (out of 10) because I believe no one is perfect and all the bots are being developed by humans. Going forward, I read on a forum that UiPath is developing an AI feature where the bot will autoheal itself. Once the autohealing feature is implemented, I would rate the solution as 10 (out of 10) because there would be no manual intervention.
We are using attended automation. I help drive a lot of products in UiPath. Now, we are using their data process mining and document understanding features. We are creating forms, then putting data on the forms, so our attended bots will work.
We use UiPath to resolve customer complaints by creating buttons that link to back-end integrations.
Employees can see information very quickly, reducing a lot of complications.
Uipth gives us as good speed and accuracy to improve all the bot la performance.
I like the document understanding feature. It gives us more accuracy.
The AI and machine learning features are very useful for us.
UI Targets enabled us to quickly build automations within multiple applications, even without the right connectors. For example, we can drag and drop Outlook activities.
We use UiPath selector technology is a wonderful feature, especially compared to other RPA tools.
From mobile applications, we use Orchestrator where we can monitor processes and share them.
Need more AI and Machine learning build technology and integration of 3rd party applications. Need some improvements in orchestrator
We have been using it for around two years.
5,000 people are using UiPath.
Any queries that we have, we can go onto their forums. If there are issues, we can contact their support and they will resolve them.
We have used Automation Anywhere, which is complex to understand.
The initial deployment was not complex.
I will rate the level of expertise is 9(out of ten)
The attended automation has saved us time.
The pricing is average; it is not too high nor too low.
Its speed is better than other RPA solutions. They release more updates, details, and features compared to their competitors.
We can learn from UiPath Academy.
I would rate the solution as a nine (out of 10).
