UiPath Reviews

My major use case with UiPath is to create automation applications that reduce manual work. At the same time, we use it to record and update our processes. 

UiPath has helped us elevate our automation process and reduce silos in our businesses. We have been able to deliver better results by using UiPath.

UiPath has improved efficiency with its end-to-end automation process. For example, we do data transfer using UiPath automation. Right from the insertion of data to the transfer of data to the end-user, everything is completely automated now. It's very apt as end-to-end automation software. End-to-end automation is very important because there is no manual intervention needed, once it has been set up. A lot of time and a lot of effort has been saved because of end-to-end automation.

Because no manual intervention is needed, 80 percent of our time, overall, is being saved right now. For example, tasks that required around 10 employees to do only require two employees. The remaining eight employees can focus on something else, to improve sales or our product feature list, et cetera. And invariably, overhead costs and employee costs have been drastically reduced with UiPath.

We are using the cloud version of UiPath, and it has definitely helped us to reduce our on-premises footprint. There is absolutely no on-premises maintenance because everything is on the cloud for us. Server updates and the like happen on the cloud. Currently, we just have a couple of systems on-premises for manual work, but apart from that, our on-premises footprint is almost zero.

Another benefit is that UiPath has reduced the cost of digital transformation because it's complete, end-to-end automation software on the cloud. Everything is digital for us now. There is no paperwork or manual intervention needed. Employees who work remotely can get easily connected and download and process data, as well, with UiPath. This digital transformation didn't require expensive or complex application upgrades or IT application support. UiPath is very straightforward software. It's one of the easiest-to-understand RPA platforms. So we have not used any third-party applications or anything else to do our tasks.

We deal with a lot of data and UiPath has definitely reduced human error. Previously, while transferring data, data loss would happen here and there, and that consumed a lot of time. But since the end-to-end automation with UiPath, there are zero errors. It's very useful and has greatly improved our efficiency. We have seen about a 25 percent improvement in overall efficiency since we started using UiPath. It has saved us three hours per day out of an eight-hour workday.

The most valuable features for me are the Automation Hub and Studio. I engage with the Studio functionality in UiPath, as that is where most of the design happens. I'm from a non-technical background, so for me, it's very easy to just drag and drop the fields using the Studio functionality and place them in my workflow module. That is my favorite aspect of UiPath.

The option in Studio of the drag-and-drop functionality makes it very easy to design certain applications. One project that I have been working on is building security automation for our organization. For example, if anybody plugs malicious devices into a laptop or our system, a notification pops up. And if somebody logs in to our system from a different account, a notification pops up. It has been very straightforward to do that. It's not rocket science. Just drag and drop and proceed from there.

Also, the user community is fantastic. I just post whatever queries I have on the user community and I get a lot of responses immediately. That has been very helpful for me. It's one of the premium communities out there for any software. I'm enjoying the user community.

In terms of the product, I don't have any complaints. Here and there, small server downtime happens, but that is expected with any cloud-based software.

I've been using UiPath for about a year.

Being cloud software, it's stable. They just need to make sure that it's up to date.

Initially, we started out with 15 users and now we have 25. In that way, it's scalable, but any automation software is scalable.

They could provide much more premium, quicker customer service. I'm from India and the customer support team is elsewhere. There's a time difference and, whenever I post a query or ask them for help, the response is delayed. That is one way they could improve.

In terms of their product knowledge and quality, I'd rate their technical support very highly, but it's their response where they could be much more efficient.

Neutral

Before this, we were actually trying to develop an in-house application ourselves, but things didn't pan out for us. That's why we switched to UiPath. We didn't use any other software.

I was partially involved in the initial setup. I wouldn't say it was complex; it was a smooth process for us. It took around 25 days for us to get it up and running in our organization. We expected the process to go on for two months at least, but that didn't happen. It was quicker.

A couple of our guys, along with two employees from the UiPath team, worked together on the implementation. They gave us initial training on how to go about things.

We are a very small startup company. We have three teams in our organization and the platform is deployed across all three teams.

UiPath has resulted in a greater return on investment in terms of profits. We have seen a 20 percent increase in our overall revenue for the last financial year. We have seen a good return on investment from UiPath.

For the features and the quality of features that they provide, it's a very reasonably priced product.

We didn't evaluate any other options before going with UiPath because we knew it was one of the market leaders. It was just a matter of whether it fit our budget or not. Luckily, it fit our budget, so we purchased it.

The biggest lesson I've learned from using UiPath so far is that, in the current digital age, automation is everything. Automation is going to be the future. I would definitely urge others to start using at least the Community Edition of UiPath. That is the free edition. Try using that edition first, to get a handle on things, before going for the paid edition.

We are partners with UiPath and Automation Anywhere. We use this solution for IT services and for the education sector.

OCR Tesseract, by default, is the good OCR search engine to extract data from a digital PDF. For any Unstructured document with a normal noise, background letters, either UiPath Document Understanding or AbbyyReader fails to extract the exact values. Very difficult to depend on Computer Vision too as a third party tool for small to mid-range business purpose. Hence, a combination of AI/ML with a good OCR Engine is required for UiPath to go forward.

UiPath Orchestrator is definitely a plus point in the product. This helps in all formats of UiPath version ranging from PoC till Product Deployment.

The OCR functionality for this solution could be improved. It should have a better capability to read unstructured documents. The next generation of OCR is ICR and UiPath does not have this. This would enable us to read and search through documents.

We have used this solution for two years. 

This is a stable solution. 

This is a scalable solution. 

The technical support is not that satisfactory. We have to find the answers by ourselves through non-community groups. 

Neutral

The initial setup is straightforward and the deployment was easy. 

It was implemented in-house. 

The return on investment is really good. I would rate it a three out of five.

We're an official partner of both AA and UiPath and both of them carry the same weight with a very marginal difference but there is a difference in cost. Currently our clients are looking for cost optimization post-pandemic and UiPath comes at a high price point. 

I would rate this solution a six out of ten.

We primarily use the solution for automation of the back office. When speaking about our customers and use cases, I wouldn't highlight one specifically, however, mainly, we are using UiPath to build a center of excellence. The aim is to automate a majority of the processes in the company, and that includes Order-to-Cash, HR, supply chain, and even IT, among others. We are not approaching needs for one or another specific process. We want to automate the enterprise end to end.

There are many great features in UiPath that our clients consider valuable. I definitely like Studio. The Studio's a very powerful product, which helps very easily to build automations. Nowadays, there's also a StudioX for citizen developers, which doesn't require coding.

Orchestrator, which helps users monitor and schedule robots, manage assets, credentials, et cetera, is also very useful.

The third feature worth mentioning, I would say, is Insights. It is reporting and dashboards. Once the robots are running, it is quite valuable to see how those robots are performing. You can see KPIs and other aspects of both robots and processes.

Worth mentioning is the Automation app, which helps to manage the automation initiative end to end, especially building the pipeline and collecting the ideas.

It is quite easy to build automations with UiPath, especially now that they are segregated depending on seniority, meaning that you have the regular Studio and Studio Pro, which are truly for developers, however, you also have StudioX, which is more for people without a previous coding background. That makes it quite easy to use. People with a business background find it quite easy to pick a tool up and use it in daily automation. They didn't have any previous experience with programming or making macros or whatever else, and still, they have no problem with UiPath.

UiPath enables users to build end-to-end automation, and this is what we are doing on a daily basis. UiPath enables mainly our clients (through us) to build end-to-end automation in their processes. When I mean end to end, I mean that we help them to automate the chain of processes and do not focus on the single practice itself.

End to end coverage within UiPath is a great advantage and offers great possibilities. It is really important to have the ability to do end to end. Though it is not applicable all the time, it still is a nice option to have and use when needed.

Very soon after starting the RPA journey, customers realize much more important benefits than time-saving itself and FTE saving or FTE reduction. There are things that happen, like quality improvement. Whenever the work is done by robots, it is running in a much more stable manner and without any human mistakes and errors. It is also sustainable, predictable work, meaning that robots do not get sick or have a bad day, or face conflicts with each other, et cetera. They just do their work. They also can’t get viruses, such as COVID which means that we don’t have to worry about losing staff.

We have a customer speech workload that was growing dramatically in relation to COVID and having processes already automated, it was very easy to sustain and even upscale the delivery. The customer experience is better as well. It is not only important to spend less time or fewer resources in delivering the service to the customer, it is also important that the customer gets a quick response. Overall, the customer experience can be much improved when using robots in the processes.

In terms of the Automation Cloud offering, UiPath handles infrastructure maintenance and updates to save time for our client's IT department. Having UiPath in a cloud enables enterprises and customers to focus more on the automation initiative itself, instead of managing all the hardware and dealing with all their hardware problems and having more or giving more time to the IT department. Instead, you can use everything out of the box from day one and focus on bringing benefits to your end customer or end employee.

The Automation Cloud offering has helped to decrease time to value from UiPath. I would say that Automation Cloud increases time to value dramatically in the sense that you can start from day one. Literally day one, you can go and start automating the processes without bothering with all the infrastructure topics. The time required to deliver the first benefits is reduced dramatically.

Automation Cloud’s offering helps to decrease the solution's total cost of ownership by taking care of things such as infrastructure maintenance and updates. It helps to reduce the cost of infrastructure maintenance, especially in the early stages of the projects, as well as on small and medium projects (for the long term). Not all customers or enterprises have strong IT departments or strong infrastructure in-house nowadays. Even large enterprises are moving more and more towards cloud services, even though they have strong IT infrastructure teams in place.

Automation Cloud is able to scale well due to the fact that we can, in a matter of minutes, or, in the worst case, hours, double the capacity. I would say that it positively and dramatically affects the scaling factor.

UiPath is a SaaS offering. It enables our customers to really quickly adapt and start using the technology almost from day one. It is very easy to start developing. It is very easy to start.

We are using UiPath Apps for our customers. However, this feature has not yet helped to reduce the workload on our IT department, or on our client's IT department by enabling end-users to create apps. Mainly, we are still involved as a service provider in the creation of the apps for the end-users. That said, where it brings added value is it reduces the limitations or the need to have an additional user interface, as you can create this app or user interface directly in UiPath to have an even better user, employee, or even customer interaction.

UiPath apps definitely increased the number of automations created. You can take more into the scope, what wasn't there before, with just attended or unattended automation, considering the fact that you can build a better user interface or any user interface from the very beginning. Before, there were only simple message boxes and prompts. Now, you can build really nice forms to interact with your end-users. It helps to accelerate initiatives.

Our teams have used UiPath’s Academy courses. Every team member of our company went through UiPath Academy. We always start with and actively involve UiPath academy.

UiPath Academy courses are a part of our standard onboarding procedure in the company, especially if we onboard junior developers. The very first thing we direct them to is UiPath Academy. Everyone starts with a basic foundation and goes through to a diploma and certification, and only then will we build on top of that more specifics about our standards, of our delivery approach, et cetera. I would say that UiPath Academy is a core and basic start for each and every employee in the company. Based on that education, we will later elaborate on different topics.

The biggest value I see behind UiPath Academy is its simplicity in terms of delivering the information. Even if you don't have any previous development experience and coding experience, all the explanations, videos, practical tasks, and reading material is formed in a way that is really easy to understand. The biggest value I see is its ability to bring people up to speed from really different levels, including very, very junior people with no previous experience in coding, programming, or the creation of robots.

UiPath's user community is excellent. Being an MVP, for me, the community has huge value in the whole end-to-end journey of RPA. Meaning that, at the very beginning, whenever you need to learn new things, you can always find a lot of useful hints in the forum and in the community. Later, when you already have delivered some solutions, you might face some problems. Luckily, very likely, you are not the first person to face those problems. There is always someone who already has had this problem and may have even raised it in a forum or on YouTube, et cetera. Even when you are already deep in delivery, sooner or later, there will be a point where you reach out for help to the community. The community, therefore, plays a crucial role for developers and automation specialists - be it business analysts, developer architects, et cetera. Having a strong community is definitely one of the most important factors that sets UiPath apart.

I'm not actively involved in other communities, and therefore wouldn't be able to compare UiPath to other similar communities. I can only say that the UiPath community is very supportive and very active in responding to any queries. The way it’s organized, it’s inspiring the next generation of forum members to help others and pay forward with insights based on the help they receive. UiPath’s community is really responsible and supportive.

In terms of reducing human error, at the very beginning, almost every company when starting the RPA and automation in Germany thinks of FTE saving as the main benefit. However, very quickly they recognize how huge the value is behind the quality improvements that happen after automation. It is quite obvious that robots are not doing human-like mistakes that may be caused by, for example, not paying attention or not getting enough sleep et cetera. Robots also cannot get bored. Very often, and whenever you have to process 1,000 or 10,000 records in more or less the same manner, it just becomes super repetitive. A mistake can appear in manual work as humans can lose focus on redundant tasks. This is not so when robots are involved.

In terms of time savings and error reduction, usually in our initiatives, we can see not higher than 5% of error rates when executed by robots. Even in those cases, I wouldn't say they are errors and more likely exceptions, which are documented and later handed over with specific explanations. A good KPI for our robots is to have less than a 5% exception rate. Related to this is that, by improving quality, we still save a lot of time as it can reduce the number of reworks which we might have afterward. For example, in one of the projects we were delivering, it reduced by eight times the amount of reworks or fixes, which the customer needed to process due to human-directed errors. Mistakes and fixes, therefore, were reduced by eight times.

What I would improve in UiPath, or I would just say, keep on improving, is the other products in end-to-end automation. UiPath started with Studio and Orchestrator as a core product, and still, we are actively co-operating UiPath and suggesting improvements for the other products. 

One of the products where I would definitely see a need for improvement would be a Task Capture. It is already good, however, there are many aspects and many ideas, which, for example, our business analysts have, which can be improved.

I've been using UiPath since 2016. It is already over five years. I'm familiar with the product.

Both on-prem and cloud solutions are very stable. The cloud is stable thanks to the UiPath team and on-prem, in our case, is stable thanks to our customer IT infrastructure team. Between the product itself and the infrastructure, be it Azure Cloud or on-site infrastructure, the stability is good. If there's any instability, it could be related to the people involved in using it as I've had a good experience with both cloud and on-premises stability.

The scalability of UiPath is one of the main competitive advantages, compared to other products. The software and the solution give you the opportunity to stably run it and scale it. With stable operations, you can focus on the new automation instead of maintaining already existing solutions. UiPath is very good at scaling in a friendly way and has good support that can help too.

I'd rate the solution at an eight out of ten. I never give ten, just to keep the motivation to improve high. I still believe that there are areas of improvement, though I really rate UiPath's support very high. The response time can always be shorter, the specification on solving problems can always be better, et cetera. Overall, I am extremely happy with the support UiPath provides in over 95% of the cases. For the remaining 5%, we still received the needed support, it only takes another iteration to move through another team and have a look at the problem.

Comparing the initial setup on cloud versus on-premise, the cloud configuration is much easier. This is one of the purposes of the cloud solution. It's meant to be easy to deploy and easy to scale. Documentation for the cloud is definitely straightforward. In terms of on-premise deployments, it is also quite straightforward, especially at the start, however, the complexity grows with the demands and requirements from the customer. If we have to get into the area of high availability and more of a complex server setup, it takes some effort to establish everything.

The simplest deployment on the cloud would take a matter of 15 minutes or maybe even as little as five. After five minutes you are ready to go and can use Studio and the cloud Orchestrator. It is very fast. You still need to have your admin rights available on your PC, however, that's the only prerequisite. 

For deploying on-prem, it's nearly the same for a simple deployment. If you only want to use the Studio and attend the job, it is very easy to configure in a matter of 15 minutes. Whenever you get into Orchestration, it will require more complex setups. It might take one or two days to set up, depending on how good of an infrastructure team you have to onboard.

The strategy in implementation remains the same no matter which deployment. In the end, you still have the same setup of products, be it Studio, Orchestrator, Task Capture, or whatever else. You have the same configuration of the products. It is only on the backend that is slightly different as it is hosted in another place. You don't really recognize the difference between cloud and on-prem hosted services.

At the very beginning, when we started the RPA journey, we were always tasked with understanding and looking at the potential return of investments. Therefore, we don't start automating the process before understanding the savings. For each and every process which we automate, we start with understanding what it will bring to the end customer. Even if we see minimal savings in the processes, we automate these. The biggest processes which we were automating were saving more than 20 FTEs (Full Time Equivalents). We are speaking to just about one process.

For us, FTE saving and time-saving are the same thing. It’s just different units of measure. You can measure it in people equivalent or in an hours per year equivalent.

The good thing about UiPath is that they are very active when it comes to listening to feedback. Every release incorporates some of this feedback into the product life cycle.

We are using both UiPath's Automation Cloud offering and the on-premise solution. We have customers, which need on-premise as well as customers which are running it in the cloud. On-premise, we have clients using different versions, however, it's my understanding that we are using version 2020.10.

I would definitely recommend, when starting the RPA journey, to start to use UiPath. Think about RPA as a robot factory, as a strategic thing, however, do not focus on one or another process. Think big and aim for automating all the manual processes in the corporation and from day one, and work to adjust all your procedures and infrastructure, the way that you've been able to get to this point. Do not get stuck at some point and feel you need to rework anything. Rather, change your standards in order to scale. In fact, aim for scalability from day one.

I'd rate the solution at a ten out of ten. We are a happy partner of UiPath and we have had many successful implementations with our customers. I can confidently say, after five years of experience using UiPath, that I've been happy with it. I still believe that there is always space for improvement. However, I really do have an appreciation for the tools. They're making a really good product and they should keep on improving at the same great pace. We plan to keep on using this product to deliver the same great services to our customers.

I'm using the product primarily for building automation projects for shared services users. It's for internal customers. It's a shared services center for finance, HR, IT, and all processes like that.

UiPath enables you to implement end-to-end automation starting with process analysis, then robot building, and finally the monitoring of automation.

I use UiPath mainly for building a robot. I always use unattended bots. However, I also use it for task capture. I use the Task Capture feature a lot. It's pretty much a game-changer since Task Capture has become available, as creating documentation takes a lot less time than before. As for UiPath, I'm using it for building a solution and then testing using not only UiPath but also Orchestrator. In the end, we also use some document templates from UiPath. It's pretty much present all the way through the life of a project.

UiPath has sped up or reduced the cost of digital transformation in our organization.

For me as a professional developer, this is an obvious fact, however, people can notice that the robot can do their job a lot faster and they can concentrate on completely different things. They don't have to do simple tasks, repetitive tasks, and that's when they realize that this transformation is happening. Some people did not believe that it would happen so fast, yet, by using UiPath, we can prove to user that a process can be transformed into an automated one in a really short time.

It's reduced human errors in our company as well. I can use an example as a VAT declaration. That's one error that would cause some financial consequence for our business. After creating an automated project process, it is impossible for a declaration to be submitted with an error. It's basically eliminated typos or human errors in the case of VAT declarations and financial consequences.

The solution has freed up employee time. It's difficult to estimate how much as there are a lot of projects and I'm not the only developer on. However, thanks to my bots, we could free up, so far in half a year in this company, two FTEs, two full-time employees. Obviously, it doesn't mean that these people were let off. They are doing their job, however, they've just got different tasks, more complex tasks to do.

Mostly I'm using Studio. This is my main tool for work, and, for Studio, I can say that this is my favorite out of all the automation platforms. 

I like the fact that you can use and customize activities from the marketplace. The fact that even though the built-in activity sometimes cannot cope with some tasks, you can still find solutions outside of UiPath, internal kinds of built-in functions. You can use the third-party package marketplace. 

I like the way it handles debugging as it's very comfortable and it keeps the project under control. 

I'm also using Orchestrator. The newer version of Orchestrator is really very user-friendly and it's easy to manage projects there.

For basic automation, it's very easy to learn and it's easy to use. It's intuitive for basic functions. However, for more complicated automation, it gets more complicated. This is expected. The more advanced the project, the more advanced the skills you need. That said, as a basic product for simple automation, it's very easy to use.

The solution is user-friendly and has great training materials available.

I use the solution for automating my own work sometimes. I work at building small robots to make work go faster. For example, I'll create a robot that will help to create documentation. For example, analyzing arguments and workflows inside a project and outputting them in a DXC file or things like that. It's small ad hoc automation that makes life easier.

At the moment, I'm pretty satisfied with it. Thinking about UiPath, I can't see any downsides and the downsides are in like companies' infrastructure.

At this point, debugging, for me, is lacking the ability to edit on the go. It lacks the ability to stop the process on a breakpoint and being able to edit or even go a step back. At the moment when I'm debugging I'm only able to stop the process, check the locals etc. It is not possible to change anything in the code, go step back and try the changed code. You have to start the debugging process from the beginning. It is just slightly annoying and it was there since I started with version 2016. It's not a showstopper at all, just adds some time to development. I'm not even sure it could be done technically, it's just a wish.

I've been using the solution for about four years at this point. I've used it for a while. 

There are occasional errors happening, which cause the software to freeze up. However, this is not more than once every two weeks and I'm always able to recover the project. I would say it's stable. Regarding working automation, I also have no problems as the errors that we have on ready robots never result from UiPath's issues. They result more often from infrastructure issues or robot problems.

Regarding UiPath scalability, it's great. It's one of the biggest advantages. Over the years, you're able to build a library of modules that sometimes make your work a lot faster. You can use a few modules and you will have 70% of the project done. Every module that you work on, which is new and can be reusable, is very easy to make into libraries and to reuse.

In my organization, closest to me, there are only about five or six people on the solution. However, we also use external contractors and consultants who use UiPath and there are even UiPath MVPs there. That said, in my company, it's only developers, operators, and a project manager.

We have plans to employ more developers and to increase usage. 

We have an RPA department, which is using it and it's cooperating with all other departments in terms of creating automation. We have specialists that are specializing in using UiPath for automation. We create automation projects for every department that requires it. The people who are using UiPath are using it pretty much full-time. It's a full-time development. We are planning to increase the size of the development team as the projects are flowing and the backlog is growing. From the business side of our company, the satisfaction is high. The demand is growing.

The solution has exceeded my expectations over the last few months and technical support overall has been great. The way they approach customer service and help us through issues has been great.

The initial setup is pretty straightforward. I'm not a system admin or anything like that and I was able to set up UiPath on the server. It's pretty good.

How long it takes depends on the database that I'm working on. That said, last time it was not even the one full working day. It depends on how much data you have to back up. Usually, it's a few hours.

While I'm not the correct person to ask about ROI, I can say that UiPath has reduced the cost of our automation operations by making it 30% faster. 

I don't know the exact prices, however, I know that compared to other companies, other solutions, it's the best value for money, at least in our country.

I tried Automation Anywhere and also Blue Prism. At that time, there were only these three available for us. That was four years ago.

We are customers and end-users of the solution.

We use the enterprise edition of the solution.

At the moment we are not using the newest version. It's 2019.

It was not my choice to use UiPath. At the beginning of my automation career, it was chosen for me. However, I was able to test other automation software and give my feedback to the employer and UiPath was the winner for me. At that time I was a finance worker. I was not a developer, a professional developer yet. For me, it was the user-friendliness and the way that you could very easily start your adventure with it, and then learn as you go. I have to say that the training packages for UiPath were very good and are enough to make you start working with it.

In my experience, I would say that it is the best platform for people who are willing to learn to automate. Also, if you want to use automation software, you have to consider hiring someone who has experience in it. Even though UiPath is so user-friendly and so intuitive, you still need to have a professional who has some experience.

It's very important to educate people to make them aware of what the RPA is. To be honest, from my experience, humans are the weakest link here, and people who are submitting, for example, input data for robots, cause the most problems. It is important to invest in the education of people and to raise awareness about RPA. 

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

We are using UiPath primarily for unattended automation. We are automating processes for business functions like finance and go-to-market.

We have Orchestrator which is hosted on the cloud and we also have UiPath deployed on-premises. We have three different instances of Orchestrator: one for development, one for staging, and one for production.

There are multiple business processes involving finance users. For example, for intercompany settlements, the end-to-end process was handled manually before. But now, the entire intercompany settlement, which involves many transactions, takes place automatically. Users don't need to intervene. They just need to verify whether all the calculations made by the robot are correct.

Another win for us was in the go-to-market function, where our customers talk to a customer advocate for purchasing different products and offerings. If they want to renew a quote or generate a new quote, they used to contact the CAs and talk to them on the phone, which would take a lot of time. It would take more than a day to process their requests and place their orders. Now, with the help of UiPath, we have developed a fixed form which we hand out for the customer to fill in. The average response time, as a result, has decreased a lot. We are now able to close a deal and generate revenue very quickly, compared to before. The process is around 90 percent faster for us.

We have just started using the AI functionality for unstructured invoices which we receive from different regions. Until now, when we wanted to extract information out of them, there was not any particular rule or way to get that information. A human had to be involved. That is where the AI functionality has come into picture. It makes our robots smarter and gives us the ability to train a robot to extract the relevant information out of different types of invoices.

Of course we have also been able to produce increased accuracy for a lot of our processes. With processes where we are receiving data in bulk, it's very natural for a person to miss out on certain things, but a bot does not miss out on any of the information and create errors in that way, so we have been able to reduce human errors to a great extent.

One of the most valuable features is its ability to allow us to integrate any external scripts—code or any other scripting file.

Also, they have recently come up with new features, like Document Understanding and AI fabric, which we have also started to use. These are helping us a lot with unstructured data extraction from invoices. The AI Fabric has out-of-the-box models, so we are using the invoices model from Document Understanding package. There is also the capability to train the model and that is a great way for us to get information out of the different invoices, as we deal with different invoices from different regions, rather than a single format. This is a great feature which is built-in.

It is also important that all the new services that UiPath is adding to the Portal are managed from the same place. Ease of onboarding for the customer should be a main priority. If the new services can be managed from a single place, it would be very easy for us to onboard them, to understand how to use them, and to enable them in our current workspace.

In addition, things like UiPath's navigation, drag-and-drop options, pre-packaged templates, and low-code features help developers, and people who have some understanding of tech, to build solutions quickly. With these features, we don't have to go down the same path all over again. This helps developers.

Each one of us has used the UiPath Academy courses and that has played a major role in getting people up to speed. I, myself, learned about UiPath by doing the Academy courses and then doing UiPath certification. If anyone wants to start with RPA, and UiPath in particular, it should definitely be their first point to get started with it. The Academy courses are really good.

There are challenges raised by the fact that UiPath is coming up with different versions almost every quarter, and at times almost every month. We plan to upgrade almost every quarter. Recently we were trying to add AI Fabric into our production Orchestrator, but we faced a lot of challenges. We had to involve the UiPath support team in the upgrading process. We were quick movers to upgrade to AI Fabric, as not many companies have done that. There were some bugs that we discovered during our upgrade journey, and that's how UiPath came to know about those bugs. It was little tricky, but UiPath's team is always present and helps along the journey. They have been coming up with a lot of new services and products and there are a lot of announcements on their Portal as well. But it's difficult for customers to keep up with their announcements.

Another area for improvement is version control functionality, particularly for Git. So far, for a lot of files, especially Excel, we are not able to compare the differences between two versions of a project. File conflict resolution could be improved.

I have been using UiPath for two years and three months.

The robots are pretty stable. It just depends on the way they are coded and how robust the developer has made the solution. If they have taken care of all the edge cases and of the possible areas of failure, the robots are predictable.

The solution is scalable. There is functionality to add as many robots as you want by purchasing additional licenses. There is a feature where we can use one machine and add different user profiles which is great. We are able to run the robots by using just one piece of hardware with different user profiles.

But if you are willing to scale up and you want to enable a lot of your team members to use the automation functionality, you can easily do that by purchasing more licenses and you will be able to schedule your processes in a better way.

We have about 15 people who use UiPath in our company. They are mostly developers, solution architects, or business analysts. We have 20-plus end-to-end automations and we use the tool on almost a daily basis.

Not all teams within our company know about UiPath. As of now, we have onboarded the finance and go-to-market departments. We plan to onboard the other teams, to run sessions with them and let them know that something like this exists and that it can help them in their day-to-day work. We are definitely planning to increase our number of automations.

The UiPath support team is there to help us to onboard stuff faster. It helps us achieve our business objectives quicker. We are able to solve stakeholders' problems very quickly. Because we have already planned to go live with certain bots, if our platform is ready earlier, we are able to provide the business value as soon as possible. That has really helped.

I would rate their technical support at nine out of 10. They are pretty helpful. Even if they're not able to come up with a solution right away, they ask for the specific files and all the logs and, usually, things are resolved within a couple of days.

I don't really know about the specifics of pricing, but identifying the type of automation you need will determine whether you can go with attended or unattended licenses. Think about whether you want your robots to run unattended and 24/7 or not, or whether you want a person to validate something in a given process, or if you want to constantly monitor the bot. Those are the types of things that will help determine the types of licenses you need.

With unattended, they now have something called Action Center where you can do a hybrid automation. That type of automation will be unattended, but there will be a human in the loop.

It really depends on what you are looking for and what kind of budget you have. If you already have the Microsoft Office suite, you get Microsoft Power Automate which is also an automation platform. You need to decide how extensively you want to go into the automation journey and whether you are really planning to expand it. If you are planning on going big with Automation, UiPath is the way to go. But if you just want to experiment and try out automation, and you already have Microsoft Office suite, you should try the Power Automate platform.

We're mainly focused on finance for the time being so we've used UiPath for invoice processing and e-billing reconciliation. It makes sure that all of our converting information matches within our client databases. We've done a couple of solutions that track budget spend for certain clients, making sure that if the budget overruns or comes close to overrunning, then someone gets notified. If we get a new client or if a new legal case is opened, automation can make sure that all that information is then uploaded into our database. 

We've done a couple of smaller automations for the legal teams. These have been fairly basic ones though. There were a couple that download files from an email for them, and then rename them with the correct naming conventions, and saves them into correct drives. 

Another use case is to remove outdated users or information from our databases in line with the GDPR system.

In a general sense, UiPath has helped with data lineage, understanding where a process starts, who it rests with, and where it ends. It has made the process that we have automated a little bit more clear of which parts of the process are necessary, which are the parts that hold up the whole process, and which are the ones that are needlessly complicated.

For starters, it just helps give a bit more of an understanding of our processes once they're automated. Secondly, it's changed the way that we approach problems. We're tied into contracts that we might necessarily not want to be, but because we rely on the solution, we don't have a choice. Whereas, because UiPath is so versatile, we can use that to fill in gaps to take over processes, which otherwise in the past, we thought that only one specific tool could do for us. Now, we feel like we'd be less reliant on these specific tools to do a specific job. 

Third, a lot of teams are starting to understand that things can be automated. Whether it's in finance, HR, or even the legal teams, we started speaking to all the different teams and now they're bringing work to us and they're getting an understanding of things that do need to be done by a person and which don't. People aren't just doing work for the sake of it now. If they think there isn't a point to something and it can be automated, they bring it to us and we automate it. So, it's changed the way that we look at processes and don't just hardheadedly get someone to do it for no reason.

It checks our invoice stage for one of the processes that we do for e-billing. Previously, there wasn't anyone to check the financial data that we have in our systems against our clients and our recipients, and making sure that it all matches up. That process wasn't done at all so a month or two months later, a client would come back to us and say, "Hang on, you billed a strong amount or you've put our billing address wrong" which is obviously a little embarrassing. These things went completely unobserved for months. The client had to chase us, complain, and tell us we needed to fix it. Whereas now, it's more of a proactive approach rather than waiting for clients to come to us and tell us that we've done something wrong. We actually have the automation that can check and then validate those mistakes before they're even a problem and before they're spotted by anyone.

We're still in the early stages but we are starting to reach the point where UiPath is speeding up the cost of our digital transformation.

The digital transformation has made a couple of the lawyers' jobs easier by getting rid of the admin staff. It's freed up time and it makes things easier for everyone.

UiPath has definitely reduced our processing times as well. It really depends on the process but it has sped up. 

It has also decreased our error rates. At the moment we're looking to purchase an orchestration platform. At that point, we'll be able to collect more information about exact numbers and we'll actually have the analytics. 

The ability to use APIs within UiPath is really helpful. The web scraping is really great. It's so easy to use, it's very intuitive, and it's usually pretty consistent. When web pages change you need to update it, but it makes it quick. If you need to do another quick process, it's really easy to get it quickly and set something up. I can just scrape data from a website and save it somewhere.

The ease of building automation depends. UiPath makes things that are fairly simple but looks a little bit tricky in another language really easy. But if you're trying to do something really complicated, then sometimes it can be a little bit more tricky. It depends, sometimes it's really simple for fairly basic automations, I think it's fantastic. But when you want to try and get into the nitty-gritty and try and write your own code and then stick in there, it can sometimes be a bit difficult to use.

The documentation can be a little bit lacking. I think they improved it a little bit last month. Last time I checked, it seemed like they spent a bit of time trying to improve it. Sometimes some of the processes are nicely documented. UiPath offers training, which they provide on their website. They teach you how to use it, but for some processes, it just seems like the documentation isn't really there. It makes it a little bit difficult when you're using a specific process from the first time. 

If you're trying to invoke a method in UiPath, if you're trying to write a C# in there directly,  or if you need to do something which can't really be done in UiPath, but it can be done in C# or Python or something else, sometimes it's not that intuitive. It can be a little bit more complicated than it needs to be. I think that integration with other languages could be a little bit better.

We have been using UiPath permanently for around eight months, but we've been using it in-house for about a year before that.

UiPath itself is very stable because it interacts with so many different applications. I noticed in the past, at times, when using it with browsers, for example, using it with Google Chrome or Firefox, occasionally Chrome or Firefox will update and UiPath can take sometimes a week or two to update with it. For that week, you're able to use any solution that involves Google Chrome or Firefox, because it's waiting for that update. I've seen that happen with a couple of different applications, not as much recently. UiPath itself is very stable because it can interact with anything. If anything is updated and UiPath doesn't have time to update drivers to match that, sometimes you can get left a little bit stuck.

It's not really easy when you're using orchestrator to scale up and create a server, add a new bot, get a new license, and get it running. 

At the moment, it's just me using UiPath. I'm a developer and the architect for the solution as well. But we're planning to expand the team next year. 

We have a couple of processes that are running constantly, so I think we're using it as much as we can, and as much as our licenses allow. We're at a point now where we need an orchestrator to keep track and run everything at the same time. We're in the process now of purchasing that. I'll see where we're moving to, to expand quite far beyond that after we've got it. We're just at the point of ramping up.

I've sent a couple of requests to support when we needed licenses and when we changed to a different computer or a different user, and they got back to us really quickly and solved it within a day or so. I've been pretty happy with UiPath so far. I think every time I've sent a request to them, it's been resolved pretty quickly, and even if they couldn't resolve it super quick, the response times are usually within 24 hours or so, which is really good. I can't remember a time where we've been stuck in the dark with them.

I've used Automation Anywhere, but I haven't really used it within my work.

The initial setup was pretty straightforward. I implemented UiPath for a couple of years before I came to my current company. It was quite easy, but even the first time it's always been quite easy and quite simple to implement.

The initial setup only took a couple of days to get it all installed properly and cleared with IT. In terms of getting the first process up and running, it took about a week or two because we already had a couple of processes that were available. That's just a case of tweaking them, making sure they're all okay, and then just getting them set up and getting more packaged up.

Our initial strategy was mainly to focus on finance and to try and reduce the outsourced headcount with a couple of the finance teams. We outsource a lot of our work to a couple of other companies and we want to reduce the cost of that, so I automate it in-house. Our other strategy was to try and free up as much time for our lawyers as possible to make sure they weren't bogged down with work. It gives them more time to focus on the clients and work up better relationships with them.

We're still looking at the process that we've automated and seeing how much time and money we're saving with this crisis, but we don't have that information at the moment.

The pricing is pretty fair. Sometimes the pricing can be a little bit strange. There are different prices if it's for a specific user, a specific PC or if it's an attended bot or unattended bot. The price can be quite different, but I think when you talk to UiPath or when you look at the pricing sheets, there's not always a justification of why a certain license is more expensive than another. 

Licenses are more expensive than another but I wonder why there's such a big difference, why attended is four times more expensive, and that sort of thing. In terms of the orchestrator, I think it was a bit too much. It used to cost about 20,000 pounds a year. Now, they are ramping up costs. If you get an orchestrator but with just a few blocks, it's cheaper and then you can add up more parts to the orchestrator. So the cost goes up, which I think is better.

Definitely to try and get as many teams involved as possible to open up the conversation about RPA within the business. It works best when you've got lots of teams who have an understanding of RPA and how it works. They can come to you with their potential projects and you can filter through them and see which ones are going to be the most helpful.

It's hard if no one else in the business really knows RPA or how it works, or if there's a bit of a wall there. It's important to introduce RPA to as many different teams as possible and to encourage people to get involved, think about the processes that they do in it, and try to identify what can be helpful.

It's important to keep RPA close to the applications and the IT teams because if you're using RPA or UiPath you're going to need to be able to be speaking to your team who need permissions or admin privileges, or you need apps to be updated. It's important if you're going to put it in, have it as close to apps and development as possible.

It's a case of understanding that it's not a case of trying to get everything automated that you possibly can. The goal shouldn't just be to automate everything. If you've got a process and you can do 99% of it automated but you can't automate the last 1%, you can but it's going to be really fairly inefficient. Understand that it's fine for a process to have some bits that are automated, some of which are done by a person. The hybrid workforce, rather than going into the strategy of just automating everything is ideal. I've learned that trying to find that balance and getting that communication between the two is good.

I would rate UiPath a nine out of ten. 

The primary use case is invoicing and billing. The first thing that we used it for was some content migration from one video hosting provider to another. We later on moved to invoicing and billing, which included time sheets, management, and feeding data into our accounting system.

The features that we use the most for our use case include reading PDFs, email integration, and web and desktop automation talking to other desktop software.

We have generally found it easy to use, but we also develop some extensions. We are actually a software development shop, so we have developed extensions to the core UiPath platform. They have made it pretty easy to do that.

UiPath could use more OCR use cases to help with those features.

I would like to see higher end AI type features natively in UiPath. Some native integration over time would help.

We found it to be quite stable.

We have a relatively small use case. Most people have entered the market on a small scale. The maturity will come in, maybe over this year, as people start to scale up. 

I expect some issues will surface when it starts scaling up. However, that happens with any software. 

The eagerness of UiPath engineers and their salespeople to help us along the process has helped us align ourselves more with UiPath.

Support is good, helpful, and eager to help.

The UiPath Academy is great. It was one of the reasons which made us choose the tool, and align ourselves with it. It was easy to get the software, and train on it. If you're doing professional work, you don't want to have untrained people work on it. This will not lead to success.

As a software development shop, we value training quite a lot. They made it easy to help our developers come up to speed with the software and get certified.

The initial setup is quite easy. We have worked with some other RPA tools, but they took us quite awhile to get setup. With UiPath, it was relatively easier to get started.

We have seen ROI by it saving some hours for us. We are a small company. We use the tool mostly because we want to learn about the software. We also save some hours, but we do it to learn and help other customers who are doing it at much higher volumes. The savings for us is relatively lesser than the savings for a larger customer.

ROI is a bit tricky. Customers need to implement simpler use cases: Get ROI from the tool, learn it, and re-implement it. This is just the nature of how RPA works. I see a lot of opportunities for it.

When customers start scaling up their use of RPA and have learnt how to use it, that is when the real ROI will start trickling in. When you start off, it will take some effort to get it right. Once you developed some maturity with the process, and you're scaling up a lot of use cases, and you have one bot doing a lot of different things and being able to share a lot of processes with a few bots, that's when you will start seeing good ROI.

This tool gives opportunities for people to be productive in other areas, which is hard to measure sometimes. The first step is to get them there, then determine where you can go from there. ROI is a very long term thing. The product lets people focus their skills on what they are good at, which is a type of ROI.

UiPath made it easy to learn their software. When we looked at a variety of RPA tools initially, UiPath was the easiest to get started with. It has good Academy content and an open platform, which is easy to download and start using (the Community Edition).

We have been looking at other RPA solutions, but we like UiPath quite a lot.