UiPath Reviews

We have many use cases, but the primary ones are on the finance side for intelligent automation. We use it for system updates and system manipulations.

UiPath has improved our organization in terms of 

• quality
• accuracy
• reduction in headcount
• working around the clock
• consistency.

It is the primary key to our digital transformation. And we have been able to do so without expensive or complex application upgrades or IT application support.

Our accuracy and compliance have improved manyfold. And in terms of employee time, our benchmark is to save three employees per bot, but we have achieved something around 2.1 employees per bot.

We are a consortium with multi-discipline businesses, and we are able to use UiPath automation across all our sectors, but it has mainly helped us with shared services.

UiPath enables us to implement end-to-end automation, and that is something that is important to us.

Of course, we have used the UiPath Academy courses, and that has been very handy and very useful. That is what we have used to significantly build up our capabilities. They are our entire training platform. We brought people who are not IT-savvy, complete laymen who were not in IT at all, into our platform of technology. To do that conversion, the Academy had to be very strong. It was not only the UiPath Academy that helped with their training, it was Microsoft PowerApps as well. The two of them together created this magic.

One functionality we would like to see is OCR.

I have been using UiPath for the last three years.

It's very stable.

It is scalable.

We have not had technical support from UiPath.

It's a very straightforward deployment, but any time we update the deployment, it becomes a bit complex.

We have a few VMs on-premises that we use for Orchestrator and the machines to run the bots, but the queue to run the bots is in the cloud. Most of our applications are on the cloud.

Implementing the first set of activities took us about nine weeks. We engaged a consulting party to identify the platform we should use. While we were doing that, we did opportunity assessments across the organization, to identify the processes that would be most valuable to automate.

UiPath is slightly more expensive than Automation Anywhere, from what I understand. But the pricing comparison is a mix between the two because UiPath attended bots are quite cheap compared to Automation Anywhere. If you bring in UiPath's unattended bots, that's expensive.

We have used Automation Anywhere, Blue Prism, and now UiPath. We had to decide among the three, but ultimately, there was no choice for us because Automation Anywhere and Blue Prism did not respond to some of our systems. This was especially true when doing screen grabs, specifically on the AS400. So it was a no-brainer for us.

I don't see a major problem with UiPath's ease of use, but I'm not a developer, I'm a decision-maker. But honestly, the development life cycle using Automation Anywhere is shorter. With UiPath, the development life cycle is slightly longer, but it is not a major issue.

The most important thing is to follow the best practices from UiPath in building the bot processes. What happens is, when application upgrades happen, if you haven't done it in the right way, your applications will fall apart. You have to make sure that the screen-grabbing methodology and referencing are done according to the best practices of UiPath.

We use it for making end-to-end projects. We are working with a commodity trading company where we have automated almost 150 processes. We have automated daily tasks or repetitive tasks.

It allows us to implement end-to-end automation. It's an ongoing activity where everybody is involved in automating things. Everybody is looking for a cost-effective output. With manual processes, there are chances of errors, but with UiPath, there are no errors.

It's cost-effective. For example, if ten members of a team are working on a given task, with UiPath, that task can be done by one member. It saves costs for our clients, and they can use the freed-up employees for other important tasks. So, it saves time and costs and improves accuracy for our clients.

It helps to minimize the on-premises footprint.

It speeds up digital transformation or reduces the cost of digital transformation. Doing so doesn't require expensive or complex application upgrades or IT application support.

It reduces a lot of human errors. It also frees up employees' time, but there is a drawback. Previously, if a hundred-member team was working on a given task, after automation, you don't need that many people, and they end up losing their jobs. That's applicable to any kind of automation case or any of the automation apps. The time saved with automation varies. It depends on the project.

It's user-friendly. The UI is very user-friendly. It's quick to learn. Anyone can learn this tool.

The Orchestrator feature given in UiPath is very good for monitoring processes. We get alerts for everything on time.

The ReFramework feature available in UiPath is widely used. We have almost 90% of the processes running on ReFramework. Other built-in features are also very good. Exception handling is a very good feature that has been introduced in ReFramework.

The Insights feature that they have recently introduced is also very good. We can create dashboards and configure alerts.

The UiPath community is good. They also provide free-of-cost UiPath Academy where any beginner can learn about UiPath free of cost and get certified. It's a very good service provided by UiPath. I used UiPath Academy when I started with UiPath. The courses are very well prepared and detailed. There are videos, and there is a theoretical part. At the end of every course chapter, you have to take a test, so you get to know how good you are at that part. Each and every point and detail has been covered in the UiPath Academy courses.

I have not used it that much. It has been more than enough for my needs. However, its stability could be better. There are cases where because of the UiPath upgrade, some of the activity features get upgraded, and the processes that we have designed using an older version of UiPath don't run after the upgrade. In such scenarios, we have to downgrade and use only the older version. We have seen issues in that part. It's good to add new features, but that shouldn't impact the existing development of processes that we have done for our end users. We shouldn't have had to design features using the older version. We find it difficult when they remove or change features with the upgrade. We have to reach out to the UiPath community for a solution.

We have been using this solution for 2.5 years.

I'd rate it a seven out of ten in terms of stability.

I'd rate it a nine out of ten in terms of scalability.

They are very quick. They have separate teams. You can email them your query and you get a response within two to three hours. I'd rate them a nine out of ten.

Positive

I've used another tool previously, but we could only automate a limited number of processes with that tool, whereas, with UiPath, we don't have any such limitation. 

I wasn't involved in its setup.

I didn't evaluate other options. I had heard of Automation Anywhere, but more people were using UiPath, so I also chose that.

It's very good. I'd recommend it to everybody. You should use UiPath instead of any other tool.

If somebody wants to learn UiPath, I'd recommend UiPath Academy instead of purchasing a course from any of the other platforms or going to a class.

I'd rate UiPath a ten out of ten.

We have tried more of the RPA part. We haven't used much of the cognitive part.

We use it for our client purposes. We don't use it much for internal use.

It has helped to automate many processes. One of the places where we have tried it is the Citizen Development Engagement Program. That's where some of the people who were tech-savvy were able to use it properly.

It enables implementing end-to-end automation to an extent. Having a single tool for everything is helpful.

It reduces human error. A person can focus on his or her core activities rather than doing repetitive tasks.

It has freed up employee time. The time saved could be 70% to 80% depending on the use case of an employee.

The product is good. It's highly scalable, and it's stable. Over the last one and a half years, based on whatever we have developed, we've found it to be pretty stable as compared to the other platforms, such as Automation Anywhere.

We have used UiPath Academy courses. In UiPath Academy, there are courses and role-based training programs. They are good and effective. They give you some exercises to perform, and the community edition is also available, which is good.

The cognitive capabilities of UiPath are pretty time-consuming. If that can be improved, it would help a lot.

I'm not using it directly. Our team has been using it for the last seven or eight years. I have some experience with it but not to a very detailed level. 

It's stable. I would rate it a nine out of ten in terms of stability.

It's scalable. I would rate it a nine out of ten in terms of scalability.

Their support was good, but at the same time, for certain areas where we had issues, we had to directly call them up and try to get support from their internal COE teams. I would rate their support a nine out of ten.

Positive

We weren't using any other solution previously.

I wasn't involved in its initial setup.

They would've not directly saved costs, but they certainly would've gotten some value in terms of time efficiency or productivity, which would've indirectly helped them to save costs. The savings also depend on the FTEs freed because of automation.

I didn't evaluate any other solution, but people in my company might have evaluated other options.

Understand the product first, go through their internal training, and then decide whether you like it and how you want to use it.

It can speed up digital transformation or reduce the cost of digital transformation, depending on how you use it and where you use it. This digital transformation doesn't require complex application upgrades, but support upgrades are required.

I've explored UiPath's community, but in a couple of instances, I didn't get any proper responses or proper answers. We had to directly get in touch with the UiPath team for insights and information about the queries we had.

Overall, I would rate UiPath a nine out of ten.

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 a service-based development company and we implement automation for our clients. UiPath is one of the RPA solutions that we use for this.

A recent use case that we implemented for a client involved a macro in an Excel sheet. The macro contained approximately 1,000 lines, and it was being used in an Excel spreadsheet about 10 pages long. They had dropdowns within the sheet that had to be set, depending on the action. They also had to work with some of the logic themselves.

With UiPath, we implemented a solution where the bot will create a task. It first checks to see if all of the necessary conditions are there. If they are, then the bot will automatically run the macro. If instead, some of the values are missing and user input is required, then the bot will create a new task to request the missing items from the user. It uses the UiPath forms and the client will receive an email to say that a task has been created and that it will be completed once the necessary values are selected.

Finally, once all of the values have been selected, the bot will run, use the input, and complete the execution of the macro.

A second use case for us was done using the Action Center. In this case, our clients send emails, and we have API calls that are done in response. Once an email comes in, a message ID is created and assigned to it, then it is turned into a Queue item. At that point, the user is presented with different actions that are dictated by the content of the email.

Depending on the user's selection, there are three or four paths that it can take. Ultimately, the bot will send an ETA and some request data to the appropriate parties, which is controlled by yet another process.

Using UiPath for automation is a little bit costly but it saves a lot of time, and it also reduces human error. When humans perform tasks, there are a lot of errors that come about. However, when a bot performs the same task, the number of errors is significantly reduced. This is the reason that companies are implementing UiPath and undergoing a digital transformation.

In our experience, bots run with minimal errors, in the one or two percentage point range. Of the thousands of items that they process, very few will result in an error. Humans, by contrast, normally have an error rate of 5% or 6%.

It is very easy to develop automation using UiPath, and I would rate it a four out of five in this regard. This is true whether it is IT automation, UI automation, desktop automation, or otherwise. We have even performed Citrix Automation recently, where we used remote runtime. In that case, we had access to a lot of features and this made our work very easy to do.

This product enables us to implement end-to-end automation. Some of our clients use the process mining feature, which includes task capture. Then, based on that, they generate the process design document (PDD). After they have the PDD, the bot is designed using Studio, and then it is ready for deployment. Deploying a bot includes publishing it using Orchestrator, and once it is running, Orchestrator monitors it. From end to end, UiPath is part of the process.

This is important to us because some of our clients are not very technical. They have ideas of what they want to do, so they walk us through the steps in a process. During that time, we will begin using the task capture capability to record what they do, making it easier for us to gather ideas and requirements. The whole process is an easy way to capture good use cases for the client.

Most of our clients are now opting for cloud-based deployment. This is important to them because they don't have to store everything on their on-premises servers. Essentially, they don't have to waste any space.

One of the features that I like is that the bot will continue to work on other tasks, even if one task is blocked because it is waiting for user input. For example, it's very good because whenever we need to have user input, we don't need to use the attended automation. Just because the user is not available to select the actions, it will not break the bot. Rather, the bot will work on other tasks. Once the person manually completes the required action, the bot will resume the pending task.

It is very easy for us to get selectors by using the UI Launch Explorer. I have used other tools that require we visit the webpage and get the selectors manually. This means that we have to inspect the page and find the elements. However, with UiPath, we have the selectors readily available using UI Launch Explorer.

Another good feature is the UiPath Academy. Whenever a new feature is released, we learn about it from the Academy. I would rate it a four out of five in terms of helpfulness for getting employees up to speed. When we review the new courses that they release, we can quickly get a complete idea of the feature that they are presenting.

The UiPath forum is very helpful. It is the best forum available for any of the tools that we have. I would rate the UiPath forum a five out of five.

One of our clients is using the UiPath Apps feature, and although it is easy to use, they are having some issues with it. For example, when they deploy an update, it is pushed to the cloud and then it will break an hour later. There have been two or three such issues and ultimately, they result in a high priority ticket to fix the problem.

I have been working with UiPath for approximately four years.

With respect to stability, the general system is stable. This includes the robots, Automation Cloud, and the Action Center. However, we have had a lot of downtime with UiPath Apps. It had been one or two days per month when our processes were getting blocked and although many of these issues are resolved, last month we had recurring issues with downtime.

The technical support team is very helpful. For anybody with a license, there is an option to raise a ticket based on priority. The support team tries to fix such problems very quickly.

Overall, the support team is very good and I would rate them an eight out of ten.

Positive

I have explored two or more other RPA solutions. One of them is Automation Anywhere, and another is Microsoft Power Automate.

When I explored Power Automate, it didn't have many features. It is a product that is still growing but when I looked at it, UiPath had more features.

In the case of Automation Anywhere, it's a little bit more difficult to work on. As an example, Automation Anywhere does not have ready-made selectors. There is no equivalent to the Ui Launch Explorer so we have to go to the webpage and find the elements by ourselves.

One advantage to Automation Anywhere is that it's a little bit less costly.

Using the Apps feature for one or two of our clients has sped up the time required to develop bots for them. Also, because it is a drag-and-drop interface that only requires a small amount of coding, making it work is much easier.

Our clients dictate the deployment model, whether it is on-premises or cloud-based. One of our clients uses Amazon but the majority of them work using virtual machines that are running on their in-house servers.

The automation saves time and money for our clients, although the amounts vary and are based on the specific solution. As an example, in an email task that we automated, the bots replaced a team of people. On average, the automation saved 28 hours per day for that task.

In general, several hours can be saved per day for each automation.

Due to the reduced costs and other benefits, our clients are ready to create more bots.

UiPath is a little more costly than competing solutions such as Automation Anywhere. 

The cost for licensing is handled by our customers that use the bots.

I have not personally used the AI functionality when creating automations, although some of our clients use features such as Document Understanding for invoice processing. They also use the ML Trainer. These features help them to automate processes that are more complex. For example, when they have 20 or 30 invoices coming in each day, the bot is trained to look at them and it makes the job very easy to do. Also, when the accuracy drops, the bot can wait for input in an attended fashion. This has helped a lot of our clients.

I would rate this solution a nine out of ten.

I'm not currently using UiPath, but in my previous organization, which I left seven months ago, we had a complex trading application that included a web form and a Windows form. And on the Windows form was an Electron framework. If you want to run a web application inside a Windows application, Electron is a bridge between the web application and the actual Windows app. Because it was a complex application, it was not very easy to automate. That's where UiPath came in. It perfectly fit our automation testing scenario.

Before UiPath came into the picture, we were planning on doing automation testing with Selenium. The test plan with Selenium was going to take about three months. When UiPath was introduced and we started working on it, we completed the whole automation, end-to-end, in about one and a half months. It saved us that much time. And we made sure that our product was delivered with the required quality and that we did not compromise on that.

Because UiPath is SaaS, we were able to automate everything in a very productive manner. We were able to cross-verify all the flows and all the functionalities. And UiPath didn't require a huge amount of setup. It runs on minimal requirements.

In terms of human error, we saw a reduction, of course. It's not possible for a human to catch every error when new functionality is built. With UiPath automation, we were able to analyze errors right away and resolve them.

Another benefit was that it freed up employee time. It did a lot of the work by itself. The user only had to make sure that the correct workflow was involved and he could just sit back and check that everything was going correctly. It probably saved us 45 minutes daily.

UiPath makes you more productive because it comes with a lot of drag-and-drop features. You don't need to know the APIs to access particular elements on the screen. You can just drag and drop and define your actions and go ahead with the workflow. You can focus on the workflow rather than learning about the APIs, which is what happens with Selenium and other automation tools. That is one of the most beneficial features of UiPath.

I don't know if I was doing something wrong, and I did get assistance from the UiPath guys on this, but sometimes UiPath wasn't able to find an element on the screen. But that's what UiPath is for, and we wanted to make sure that our workflows were working correctly. Sometimes it was able to find an element and sometimes it was not. UiPath support did give us a solution, but it was not helpful enough.

The issue that I mentioned earlier, that sometimes it wasn't able to find the elements, was the only issue I saw with respect to UiPath. Otherwise, nothing was breaking and nothing was problematic on the UiPath side.

They were very friendly and they tried to be very helpful, but they weren't able to solve the issue I raised.

Positive

The version of UiPath that we used involved a direct installation. We asked our in-house team to get it installed because we didn't have the permissions to install software. They installed it in our system and we started using it right away. It was very straightforward.

I have worked with Selenium, which is an automation tool. That has quite a learning curve, but with UiPath it only takes you one or two weeks to get started. Once you're familiar with the basic tools, you can start writing a workflow. It is straightforward; nothing complex.

I never did the UiPath Academy courses because we had senior team members to help us and, in that company, we had a "learning playground" where we could go through the slides directly, without going through a whole learning process. We were then able to start our work right away.

UiPath did a good job. Before going into production, we needed to make sure that every test scenario and every case was handled. That's where we took advantage of the UiPath. We would run UiPath again and again and there were no breakages in our code and nothing was falling apart before going into production. I was working for an investment bank and every record was important.

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.