UiPath Reviews

We used it to orchestrate the transfer of data across authorized systems of record, such as Salesforce and we use it to authorize systems or artifacts like Google Sheets and Spreadsheets. We also use it to have a dashboard view and to automate manual user behavior to cut down the time it takes to process specific transactions.

UiPath has reduced human error. With the very manual nature of formulas in Google Sheets and Excel that now can be performed using UiPath and so Spreadsheet controls have been tightened.

The automation cloud offering helps to decrease the solution's total cost of ownership by taking care of things such as infrastructure maintenance and updates.

We were able to significantly cut down time and hours on some of the key processes which then frees up people to focus on their day jobs as opposed to manual routines with predictable processes. We see 75% time savings. 

The use cases revolve around polling data from multiple systems, but when that has been automated using a bot then that takes that time away. You spend less time gathering the data points and more time doing exception management and reviewing the data.

Those manual hours translate to cost savings and that definitely can help us scale and grow. We were able to see at least one full-time employee equivalent savings.

Saving employees' time has allowed for employees to focus on higher-value work. Rather than spend 80% of their time looking for data, they are now spending 80% of their time really addressing the nature of the data, like what went wrong and trying to gain actionable insights as opposed to trying to figure out whether the data was complete, to begin with.

This has impacted employee satisfaction. One of the key challenges with remote, work from home has been the higher probability of employee turnover and burnout. Also, as part of job satisfaction, working on the right things at the right time and marrying professional and personal endeavors and aspirations, from that respect, UiPath has freed up a lot of employee hours spent on manual routine tasks. That really gave them a human element in everyday work, which revolves around getting value as opposed to merely collecting data.

AI helps to automate processes that are more complex. Part of it is that it is very precise with attended versus unattended elements and it also really understands that the key is not to give everything away to the bots, but it's almost always trading off and achieving a balancing act. Where human intervention is still needed by only at the right time and looking at a small sample as opposed to the entire population.

The AI functionality enabled us to automate more processes overall. We've been able to venture from beyond regular G&A processes to more HR processes. From applicant to hire, it elevates the employee experience and does not just look at scaling.

I'm a big fan of the Academy because it has let me self-serve in a way that I was quite accustomed to.

The point-and-click approach is a great sell. I'm not proficient with Studio but I found it easy to spin up a concept, prototype a demo with stakeholders, and be able to demonstrate value add right away.

Venturing more outside of our Windows environment and more towards OS will help. 

It should be less focused on the howtos and more on demonstrating business value add. A business outcome should be that I was able to approve something in however many days or hours compared to my peers when I benchmark across my peers. That would be a business outcome as opposed to a technical outcome, which is all about how many hours did you save? What were the exceptions you saw? Were you able to shut the bot down? They're very different paradigms. UiPath needs to flush out that business element because a lot of us make decisions on ROI. It's hard to convince executives and management if we only focus on the technical.

It's a hard place to balance because there are people who are business savvy, who are looking for ROI, and then there are other people who are just getting into these programs and these solutions. I need to understand the technical aspect of it.

The other part of it is understanding how UiPath plays out in the ecosystem of available cloud applications and other enterprise software used. A lot of the software out there in the market, such as Workday, has native automation, point and click customization, and automation, potential, and capability. UiPath may want to think about how it plays with these other products as opposed to in place of. We have built teams that have developers who are really proficient, including me in NetSuite and other products. Every day we want to make sure we're using UiPath the right way so that we're not squandering or wasting resources because the same time spent on UiPath could be spent redirecting UiPath elsewhere. That application is inherently not sophisticated enough to handle customization. 

We've been using UiPath for one and a half years.

The initial setup was fairly straightforward for us. We actually worked with a partner. We ultimately put it on AWS just for continuity and it was pretty straightforward for us. We don't really have too many bots going anyway.

The actual deployment didn't take a lot of time. A lot of work was spent only because a lot of work was already invested in building out the prototype which mirrored all of the manual processes. We recorded the manual processes and attempted to replicate as much as we could. We did the proof of concept demo without key stakeholders. So by the time we came to building out the actual work in production, it was just replicating what we already had in the prototype.

We are fine with licensing and pricing. We just need to see where we are in our adoption. I don't have enough of a sense of what the different levels of usage could be.

We evaluated other solutions. Back then the community platform was easy to download and it had a couple of ways of gaining access to software from having access credentials to tokens which is a lot more secure for us. There were also managed packages in UiPath that were readily available that spoke to NetSuite, Salesforce, and Excel. It was a no-brainer.

We only have two developers on it, they support it. We don't have citizen developers. The plan is to continue to see if we can get value add and go beyond the processes that we've addressed and maybe put out a team.

My advice would be to be open; it doesn't have to be all or nothing. I've seen users get tripped up over the fact that every time they think that providing value add through manual intervention, through exceptions, they almost always think it's 100% unattended.

At the end of the day, we are not taking away anyone's jobs. Almost always, there will be an attended piece. It's like driving the car on a freeway. You have the ability to put it on cruise control and the ability to put your foot on the brakes. That's what most users forget. They ask about audit internal controls and on our end, UiPath recently attained SOC 2 type two certification in June of this year, which is great. The reality is there's always a manual human compensating review element, so there shouldn't be a risk if it's built right.

I would rate UiPath a seven out of ten. 

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 use UiPath for:

• Financial domain
• Excel automation
• SAP automation
• Citrix automation
• Usage of Orchestrator queues
• RE framework
• Automating password resets
• Security and governance
• Rule-based exception handling
• Large group deployment
• Centralized repository for version control
• Execution logs and credentials

This solution has improved a lot in our organization. Many departments have started automating their daily manual tasks, which involve repetitive and rule-based jobs.

Cost-Effectiveness: There will be no lunch breaks, holidays, sick leave, or shift time allocated for robotic automation. It can be set to work on a repetitive cycle, and as long as it is maintained correctly, it will continue to do so until programmed otherwise. This eliminates the risk of RSI occurring.

Increased Productivity: Using robotic automation to tackle repetitive tasks makes complete sense. Robots are designed to make repetitive movements. Humans, also by design, are not.

Giving staff members the opportunity to expand on their skills and work in other areas will create a better environment in which the business as a whole will benefit. With higher energy levels and more focus put into their work, the product can only improve, which will also lead to extremely satisfied clients.

The most valuable features for us are:

• Citrix recorder
• UI Explorer
• I used to connect using remote desktop and automated it using image automation.
• The cloud deployment option is particularly attractive to some customers for its flexibility and scalability, along with customary thin client advantages.

The user access management could be improved such that we are able to set up user rights in a more sophisticated way. In the current version, if you grant, for example, Execute access to a user, it can execute all robotized processes in the given environment. You cannot specify the rights at the process-level.

I have been using UiPath since August 2016.

Before using RPA, we did the work manually. Once we became aware of this solution we tried to automate our work and achieved success. This has made our lives easier.

The increase in production at a lower cost produces obvious benefits for any manufacturer. The cost of investment can be recovered in a relatively short space of time and the gains from that point onwards are exponential, to say the least.

The initial investment cost is expensive, but I promise you guys this will be very helpful as we can easily automate applications and our productivity has increased.

I didn't evaluate any other option, rather I directly chose UiPath and started working. It proved my decision correct and I can say it's the leading RPA tool in our market now.

We are using Orchestrator for both development and production. We are using attended and unattended bots, and we are using Studio to develop them.

We use this solution for front-office processes, back-office processes, IT processes, and automating anything that we can.

We run our automations inside a virtual environment. We use Citrix and Citrix Server. We have sixty-seven processes that we've automated to run in the virtual environment and its very straightforward. It's deployed out of Orchestrator, and for attended processes, it's as simple as going in, opening a UI robot, and clicking the start button. It's phenomenally easy.

With respect to how easy it is to automate our company's processes, on a scale of one to five, I would say that it's a five. It's very easy. I'm a software developer by trade and I was able to automate several processes in a very short time span. In two weeks I can automate an entire process, end-to-end, which is incredibly fast for the ROI.

One of our processes was extremely complex, which was our customer onboarding process. The complexity was, in part, because it is handled by six different departments. The PDD for it was one hundred and forty pages long. One or two we've done were simple automations, and the rest have been medium to high complexity.

My first robot went into production within a month of me being in my position. That included going through all of the UiPath training, getting familiar with our IT systems, and then actually vetting out a process and automating.

On a scale of one to five, judging how beneficial it is, I would rate the training a five. It was very informative and very detailed.

We are using the unattended robots more than we are the attended ones, and we're trying to continue that drive. We understand that there's a need for some processes to run attended, but if we can, we do process optimization to make it work and be unattended.

We have definitely seen savings in time. I can only speak to one particular instance, which is one that I automated. It was taking a product marketing team roughly an entire month to process, so they were always a month in arrear processing invoices for orders. When we developed this quote-to-order process, it saved us something along the lines of seven thousand hours per month for the one group. I was able to shrink down what a team of twelve people was doing in a month's time, to about seven days.

Unattended robots are my favorite because it allows us to completely remove a process from a person's day. The process can be fully automated and scheduled out of Orchestrator to run. Whether it's several times a day or once a month or whatever it may be, that user no longer has to worry about whatever that task was.

I would like to see support for native C# capability. I have a .NET background, so it's easier for me to write in that language.

With respect to the stability, on a scale from one to five, I would rate this solution a four. There are some issues we've run into where we just can't exactly figure out what is causing the problems.

A robot would run through a process two to three dozen times with no issues and then on the very next run, it will stall in the middle of the process. When we tried to debug it, we can actually replicate that stall but clearly, it's not throwing an error. There's no rhyme or reason to why. It just stops and it just kind of hangs. I would say that it may be a stability issue.

The technical support for this solution is great. They're responsive, and always willing to help. We got infrastructure support to help us through an upgrade so I could actually migrate everything from our on-premises server into Azure. I would rate their technical support a ten out of ten.

This solution started as a homegrown operation by one of our satellite offices that downloaded a trial license and started using it. Once our IT department found out, we hired Deloitte to come in and talk us through the whole process. Then, Deloitte left and we started our own kind of homegrown development. The did not actually deploy it with us.

Prior to choosing UiPath, we evaluated Automation Anywhere and Blue Prism. There may have been one more, as well. We are a very large SAP shop, and UiPath was the only one that touted that it was integrated well with SAP. For the most part, it did.

For anybody researching this type of solution, I would suggest that they try this out and they will instantly see the value.

I would rate this solution a ten out of ten.

RPA overall is about routine, mundane, structured tasks. We use a number of them at my client's work in terms of how do we do back office reporting for general deliverables, contract compliance, etc. 

We had a few different reports that we had to do every month. We have to hand-jam them into a very poorly-formatted database which had weird drop-downs. Instead of entering them manually, and spending a day or month just punching in titles and numbers, we compile it onto an Excel sheet and have a bot run and dump all that information. 

All I have to do is tweak what information has changed from month to month. This has made my life a lot easier.

When I was first introduced to UiPath, I stated that I am very adamantly not a coder. I hate code, lines, and missing that semicolon somewhere in there. Being able to understand that your path is structured as a process flow, you are still able to declare variables, and ensure the background logic is sound. You are also able to really visualize what the process needs to do and the paths that it needs to take: true, false, etc. So, it has been very useful in terms of crafting it.

To exceed the expectations, it needs to be easy to debug, not only easy to craft. You need to be able to make it truly do what you want it to do. As a user, you have an idea of what you want it to do. However, when you hit run, it doesn't always do it, then you have to figure out why. That ends up being the majority of your development time. UiPath does pose a bit of a challenge in terms of easy to understand errors, where it's getting stuck, or what was the logic behind the process that we were trying to do from a UiPath standpoint. Making improvements to these would help out a more in terms of being able to make it more user-friendly.

Looking to go from structured to unstructured data, then UiPath needs to be able to handle understanding natural language and scanning of documents which are not well-written or visible, in terms scanning quality. These are probably the easiest target areas to improve on first.

If I'm using it as an attended bot, it's pretty stable. When you discussing unattended bots, anything could go wrong in the entire stack. We have found times, if I run UiPath for a week, and it needs to simply loop a PowerPoint presentation, come back in a week, then sometimes the PowerPoint will be dead. It is harder to understand if it was UiPath's fault or if it was because the device decided to do a random Windows update and restart itself. It could be a litany reasons, but even then, I can't be 100% confident that the unattended bot is going to run forever.

It would have been hard to set up without some basic training and basic use cases to practice through first. After some familiarity with the product, it is not hard to set up.

We have seen ROI across the board.

It has limited human errors within the confines of how bots were constructed on what we needed them to do.

My specific process that I use it on went from a day to about 15 minutes (time savings).

All the RPA tools are good for different things. For my very simple process, I didn't go with Automation Anywhere because setting up the Orchestrator and turning on the server is a pain. I have had any experience dealing with Blue Prism.

A lot of our business development teams (end users) use it by going to a vendor's site.

For example, end users download information at the point of sale and export it to an Excel sheet, where what happens next is usually manual labor. Whereas, we can go to a site and download a file, then that file is loaded to our business data warehouse. Therefore, we are taking an element away and leveraging UiPath, so staff can do other stuff. That is how were leveraging the UiPath.

It works without human intervention. Since it has become more popular in our company, we will see how we can leverage UiPath with our supply chain, because it seems like supply chain is one of the top five ways to leverage UiPath.

There is a big community, which is very helpful and end user friendly. 

• We would like to know the prerequisites when installing bots. 
• A bot that could provide feedback would be nice.

The stability is great. The product works. UiPath seems better at this than Automation Anywhere.

Technical support has been good. I am happy with their response times.

We have not used UiPath Academy RPA training. I plan to suggest this as a training solution when I return from the UiPath conference to eliminate people asking me random questions about using UiPath.

I came from Automation Anywhere. The UiPath GUI is better for the end user, since I don't have time to develop a bot. Any user can use it.

While UiPath can be complicated, it is much easier than Automation Anywhere.

We were able to replace what we had with Automation Anywhere with UiPath, meeting our expectations. Then, it got popular within the company, exceeding our expectations. A lot of people are interested in UiPath. A lot of people weren't interested in Automation Anywhere. 

The initial setup is straightforward. It's not like an SAP product that takes forever to configure something. It was easy to install. 

We haven't upgraded yet because it seems like they just released the next version.

We're a team of eight business analysts. All of us try to create a bot, so we can familiarize ourselves with the process. So, if I create a bot and someone else has to support it, everybody knows at a high level what the bot does. 

We created an orders to cash department bot, which is already saving man-hours and money. Because of it, we don't have to hire an employee.

I would rate the performance benefits as a 10 out of 10.

UiPath keeps growing, so it has met and exceeded our expectations.

Look into the data web scraping. I don't think another tool has that feature and we use it a lot. Data web scraping was probably the bonus of why we went with UiPath.

We use UiPath for automating activities that which from operations, such as policy administration, claims handling, HR activities, and finance to a little bit of underwriting support.

We are still at about a year and half of implementation, so the benefits are already being realized. Because of the size of our organization, it's going to take more time for it to make a real tremendous impact. What I already see is there are financial benefits that we have been yielding. There are also operational benefits in terms of time savings and user satisfaction of not having to do the menial, repetitive tasks.

• It scales fairly easily. 
• The UI and the back-end platform are very easy to use. 
• There is a roadmap for growth in the organization: scalability-wise and additional features going forward.

Ease of use could be improved. The newer features are easy to use and positive additions, but there is room for improvement, specifically of the UI console for the developer. There are also other features that could use improvements.

I would like to see the OCR, machine learning, and cognitive package that is being discussed in the next release.

One to three years.

The customer support is supportive and knowledgeable. I tend to deal more with the account and management directors because of the relationship. They are always willing to help and support me.

The UiPath Academy RPA feedback from my team has been positive. It's real structured. One of my guys did the RPA development course, and it should have been an in-depth development and less high-level development. So, it was supposed to be an advanced training, but it wasn't advanced from his viewpoint. I think he wanted more hands-on experience.

The version that we implemented two years was probably harder to implement than what it is now. Though, I would not necessarily say it's very complex to set up. It's fairly straightforward compared to other solutions.

We're still figuring out how much staff we need for deployment and maintenance, as it has been a much bigger requirement than initially expected. We're not at the stage yet where everything is hands-off. 

At the moment, I have a team of seven people offshore that do maintenance, support, and run operations. This is helping us have a seamless experience for the user. The staff in the those roles are support analysts and maintenance level 1 support.

Make sure you have your infrastructure correctly set up and that you are ready to scale up, because it will grow.

Ease of use has met our expectations. It would only exceed them once we see the new features come in and they all work seamlessly together. Every release gets better, which is what I want.

This is now a cognitive solution. It's leading in the industry, but there's still room for improvement. However, I know they're getting there.

As a partner, we see many use cases. Our clients are really looking to UiPath or RPA as a means of digital transformation. Some of the areas we see them use it are in finance, supply chain, human resources, IT automation, and tax functions.

The way we tell our clients to look at UiPath is that everywhere they have repetitive functions happening, they should explore RPA as an opportunity.

We see the real value coming out of UiPath in the ability to transform our clients' businesses: Produce rapid time to value and a very good return on their investment as well. That's the real value UiPath provides to our customers.

It is transforming our clients' cost structures but, at the same time, it improves their time to market. It helps them to improve their employee morale, make sure that employees stay longer, and it helps them improve their customer experience.

We see that the speed of business functions has improved by as much as about 70 to 80 percent. A particular process that, at times, would take about ten minutes to execute, has gone down to just two or two-and-a-half minutes. I would give performance benefits full marks with UiPath.

The way we look at it is that features are a commodity. We prefer to look at the value it provides.

Having said that, it is very easy to use. We have seen new developers becoming productive in a matter of weeks, not months. The entire solution is structured in such a nice way that clients can start seeing benefits in six to eight weeks.

One of the things that many of our clients ask us about is security. Some of them are really struggling with how to do multi-factor authentication. A robust and solid approach for dealing with multi-factor authentication would be one of the things we would like to see.

Also, some of the IAM tools have features that have somewhat segregated duties. For our clients, this is a big challenge in terms of how they do SoD. If there were some features related to SoD that were added to the tool, that would be really great.

It is fairly stable. We have not seen any major issues in terms of stability.

The scalability has been good.

We have not used technical support.

The setup is relatively straightforward. It is easy for our clients' security groups, their IT departments, their compliance departments, to understand. They know the key steps that need to be taken. From that perspective, it is relatively easy.

Many of our clients have used UiPath RPA Academy training and have found it very helpful.

In addition to UiPath, the top options are Automation Anywhere and Blue Prism. In addition to that, we have seen some interest in exploring solutions from Pega and Kofax.

One of the reasons our clients select UiPath is that it now has a very well-established customer base. Those success stories help UiPath. A second factor is the ease of use. Our clients find it is easier to train their developers and access the necessary workforce. Thirdly, the licensing model is where clients see that it is among the best-of-breed.

Focus on your objectives. Don't consider UiPath or RPA as just a shiny technology. You need to know what is it that you want. What are your business objectives? That is the first thing you need to determine. Second, you need to set very realistic goals regarding what you want to accomplish. Thirdly, don't wait for a long period of time. Get started. You need to get into finding success as soon as possible. Find the low-hanging fruits, create a few bots, demonstrate the value for people, and then look at scaling up.

The pitfall I see with many of our clients is that they want to think big, do automation for 50 processes at once. But they get a lot of organizational resistance. The key here is to start small, show success, and build on top of those successes.

Almost all companies recognize that there is a need to invest in automation, both RPA-type automation and cognitive automation. When we work with them we try to understand what their strategic objective is. Is it about improving time to market? Is it about improving efficiency? Is it about improving customer experience? Or is it about improving the cost structure? In some cases, it is a combination of all of these. Determining that is usually our starting point. Then we can deep-dive into what the process areas are where we can get the maximum benefit.

All the companies we deal with are focused on improving their cost structure, so cost-saving is the most important criteria that our clients articulate. But in many cases, clients talk about improving the efficiency of their workforce or being able to respond to their customers' needs.

From there, we do an opportunity assessment, identify some of the key, low-hanging fruit where they can benefit. We prepare a value case which could be anything, depending on the client. It could be related to cost savings, it could be related to time to market, etc. Then, as we implement, we set up a value-realization office to track the benefits very closely.

Despite all the new hype happening around upcoming RPA and automation tools, what we have seen is that clients usually do not have the internal workforce that is trained and that really knows the best practices that are involved. That is where they look to partners, like us, to bring in their skills. When we start working with the clients, we start in a 70/30 model where 70 percent of the team comes from Accenture and 30 percent of the team comes from our clients.

To begin with, when our clients start a proof of concept, on average the team size is usually about six to seven people, including the IT support functions that are involved.

I rate UiPath a ten out of ten because of multiple factors: ease of development, ease of maintenance, robust security, and a very good installed client base. These are the factors that actually lead to a perfect score.