What is our primary use case?
We are a consulting company and we work for different clients. I have mainly used UiPath for financial processes, like bank and vendor reconciliations, order management, order processing, collections, and invoice processing.
How has it helped my organization?
UiPath automations have saved a lot of man-hours for business people. They used to have to do simple tasks, like creating reports in Excel and calculating with formulas. We just uploaded the data into SQL Server and then connected to Power BI through UiPath. It was a small project for us, just a matter of two minutes or so to put things in place, but it saved them a lot of time. With the bots doing this "small" work, it enabled the employees to relax and work on more valuable tasks.
The employees involved have been happy and they have also suggested a few other processes that could be automated, after seeing the results.
There was also an order management project in which we extracted details, such as delivery date and quantity, from a PDF. Before it was automated, that was a tedious task. It took a lot of time for people to do it and their accuracy was lower than the robot's. The automation reduced the team size for that business and they were very happy. They saw a very good ROI. And it used to take the business much longer to do small reconciliations, but the bots are so fast. They are seeing good results. It has reduced a lot of human error. Initially there are some errors, but once you learn from them and train the bot, you get accurate results.
We have only done a few attended automations, but they have sped up processes that require approval. In those situations, they play a major role. More than the monetary savings, the benefit is that people can concentrate more on the important work, and with less stress. But unattended automation is the most important process.
What is most valuable?
The OCR makes it much easier to extract the details, as does Advance Document Understanding.
I would also rate the ease of building automations as an eight out of 10. It's quite easy in general. In some cases we need to use a coding language like Java or .NET, but we can easily build simple or medium-level tasks. It's even accessible for business people. If we try to explain the code or the architecture of our design, they're able to easily understand.
The UiPath Apps feature has helped to reduce the workload for our IT department by enabling end-users to create apps. Even some of the business people have been trained to do that. They have been able to build small, attended bots.
And when it comes to minimizing our on-prem footprint, I would also rate it at eight out of 10. We have seen good results from our on-premises build.
And if we are not sure about something, we can get help from the UiPath community. I have worked throughout the whole cycle, and in all aspects we get good support. People voluntarily contribute to the community. It is a vast community and we get answers quickly. UiPath itself helps people connect and they give badges and goodies to people who are contributing well.
Initially, it was mandatory for us to get certification through the UiPath Academy. The course is free and even the business people have been interested in upskilling themselves. All the Academy courses are very good.
For how long have I used the solution?
I have been using UiPath for over three years.
What do I think about the stability of the solution?
The stability is good, but they keep upgrading versions. If you want some of the new additions, sometimes you have to take a beta version.
What do I think about the scalability of the solution?
The scalability is very good, and with the latest version it will be much easier.
Almost all our departments have used UiPath automations. Management is trying to identify what else is possible. It's spreading to all our company's departments.
How are customer service and support?
Whenever we have an issue that we cannot solve, we contact technical support and they try to identify the issue and give us the best solution. If we give them our machine IDs, they try to get into the machines and resolve things. Some of our cases were really complex, and they visited our site. That was the best part.
How would you rate customer service and support?
How was the initial setup?
The initial setup was straightforward. It is a little technical but not very complex. The deployment time depends on getting all the prerequisites in place but it usually doesn't take long, about two hours, on average.
Maintenance depends on the complexity of the automations. You have to monitor things regularly.
What was our ROI?
The ROI is very good. We have been able to deploy many processes and upper management is pretty happy with the investment they have made in the bots.
What's my experience with pricing, setup cost, and licensing?
Compared to other solutions, the pricing is moderate.
Which other solutions did I evaluate?
We compared UiPath with other tools and then we made the decision to go with it. A few of our clients use other tools, but in our experience, UiPath is best. It is much easier to use, compared to the others.
We referred to industry reviews and we had discussions with peers and colleagues. I did some research into the market and then I chose UiPath.
What other advice do I have?
Automation will enable you to concentrate more on the things that require decision-making and knowledge, rather than just doing repetitive tasks.
As we have upgraded the versions, it has reduced the time involved as well. Initially, it was taking some time. But once we and the whole business got used to it and understood how the bots work, things went way faster. The solution is improving every day. It has already moved to the cloud and it should start working on IoT because they have started with AI. That will make IoT will be much easier.
Which deployment model are you using for this solution?
On-premises
Disclosure: PeerSpot contacted the reviewer to collect the review and to validate authenticity. The reviewer was referred by the vendor, but the review is not subject to editing or approval by the vendor. The reviewer's company has a business relationship with this vendor other than being a customer: Partner