UiPath Reviews

We suggested UiPath for one of our company's clients to automate DevOps processes. This is a part the company doesn't want to touch. They tried automating with Ansible Playbook and Terraform. We wanted to eliminate human intervention altogether. We are still transitioning from dev to staging and then production. We have done most of the research. We will move from staging to production if it works with our architecture and can be scaled.

Our client is one of the biggest companies out there. There are maybe a million users worldwide. They primarily focus on the Asia-Pacific region, but there are also users in Europe and the Americas. The client has several web applications and a hybrid structure. Some data are on the cloud, while other data is on the on-premise servers. We created solutions for them over the years. We have an SI and DevOps team working in parallel for years. Our goal was to automate everything that could happen without intervention. 

It's a massive project that will take time, and we still haven't moved out of development. We try to make the processes more streamlined. All the associates are researching it and working on their parts. Right now, I can only say how it has benefited me. I've automated some fundamental DevOps tasks. 

It saves a lot of time because you don't have to come in on weekends to provide service or troubleshoot. You can automate these tasks and schedule them to run automatically. You can optimize your work and how you spend your time. For example, some services need to be routinely patched, so we automated patching every third Sunday. However, we still needed to come in on weekends to troubleshoot after the patch was applied. 

We have shadow scripting to automate these processes, but we had to go online to see if it's up and the ports are open. I automated this with UiPath and scheduled it for the weekend, so I no longer need to come in on weekends. It saves around two to four hours per week. That is about 16 hours a month. It wasn't easy in the early stages. It took around two months to understand the tool. I was also working on other projects simultaneously.

There is a recording feature that copies each step of a task. You can automate every process via this recording. It's a cool feature that helps you define the variables. I also like their trial version, which lets you experiment with the solution and learn the capabilities before buying the license.

I still haven't used the drag-and-drop APIs, but I look forward to this feature. We currently use Jenkins for our continuous integration tools. There are some APIs from Jenkins, and we extract the job details from those APIs.

UiPath's interface and user experience could be improved. The name is UiPath, but their UI is not that great. It's outdated. It seems like a 2014 or 2015 software. They should look at other products on the market.

Another thing is that UiPath lacks online training resources. Maybe they can start their own YouTube channel. You have to rely on the documentation to learn. There are some resources, but they aren't available on the official site.

We have been using UiPath for six months.

UiPath is quite stable. I haven't seen any downtime. I can also pause the upgrade itself if I don't want the upgrades to cause instability. The long-term version is available as well.

We are still in the development stage, so we don't know whether it will be scalable. 

I have never had a need to contact UiPath support. I usually try to Google answers or figure the issues out on my own. 

I am from the build release team, so I automate the deployment and build process. I work on CI/CDs and try to automate most things. The deployment was highly complex. I was new to this project, so it was challenging for me. I was learning on the job and trying to understand the process itself because it was already partially built when I joined, and I was responsible for making some of it. 

The application takes about 10 to 20 seconds to install, but it will take around a week to build the infrastructure. We are just replacing the web service, not the whole application.

We tried a blue-green strategy for implementation. We built blue nodes and ports similar to production and shifted the web services to the new one. If it is up and running and everything works fine, then we can close the previous one, and we can redirect traffic to the new one with the help of load balancers.

We have 25 people on our DevOps team who do everything from architecture to automation. They're not just dealing with one web application. There are hundreds of applications. I worked on several applications building the architecture and helping. For example, let's say we build or add some features to a project. To automate those features, we need to understand them and how it works on Kubernetes or other platforms.

It definitely needs maintenance because we deal with a large user base. It requires a lot of maintenance and downtime to make things work during staging and development. Maintenance is always necessary, and we are the ones who maintain it. We have four or five people on call weekly to maintain the solution. They are the responsible people or points of contact for the developers or application owners if something goes down or goes wrong.

UiPath's price is reasonable. It's not so high relative to the capabilities. I don't know about different licenses or more premium versions. Prices are negotiated on the corporate level. 

We considered Automation Anywhere. However, It doesn't allow for an extended trial. We needed to purchase a license after 50 tasks, and we didn't have enough budget to experiment. Blue Prism is also there. We had the same problem. There wasn't a trial version.

I rate UiPath eight out of ten. UiPath has excellent features, but you need to be patient enough to learn.

The solution has provided assistance with the removal of repetitive human transactional activities; document to text solutions; complex data extractions; cut and paste operations; information content management. This is either supported in promoting strategies with our business partners, or implemented at our clients, or included in products we develop for our clients. 

We use it in our own operations that have been migrated to other products or solved with coding or third-party software offering solutions to specific needs. Solutions are based on client sites and our clients pay for their own licensing.

The costs involved and the licensing model have forced us to recommend other solutions to our clients and to stop using UiPath internally due to constraints imposed on small businesses (specifically around the community edition). 

For our clients who can afford the licensing costs (Blue Chip Clients), the benefits have been to remove some repetitive activities from the target areas. 

In most cases, where there is a high-value resource impacted by these repetitions, there has been a cost-benefit in doing so, however, where the labor cost is below a certain threshold, the benefits are contained to error avoidance and reliability only with (additional) costs being migrated to support the technology and increasing overall IT OPS costs - particularly now with the increased fees and current licensing model.

The product as a whole is a valuable contributor to efficiency improvement. It integrates with ease (although some coding experience is required for higher/involved functions). We use it to streamline and support our customer operations primarily, but also to do internal acceleration on human-dependent (simple) tasks.

Simplification of complex task creation by introducing pre-coded objects is the single most attractive feature of the product. The choice between attended and unattended Bot applications with similar functionality is an advantage. 

Features are on track, however, service and cost models need to be reviewed to be market sensitive and related to the industry. Providing a great product at the wrong price without consideration to the economic conditions of the markets within which it is being offered, creates barriers and another product is sure to fill the void.

Closer integration with machine learning frameworks and matrix processing can be improved and will benefit low-cost/entry-level uptake and activation for some clients. Although pass-through options exist and have been activated, this is not sufficient to create encapsulated learning within the organizations and serves to improve third-party algorithms with added exposure to privacy (information systems security management) risks. 

I've been involved with UiPath since the launch in South Africa with Larc Technologies as the first UiPath solutions partner and reseller for the country.

No robotic solution can ever be classed as stable unless there are no change dependencies. It will always require more support than any other core technology - its the nature of the beast.

Running multiple robots in an environment requires orchestration, which is another expensive modality in the UiPath stable.

Consultations outside the normal service environments are strained, authoritative, and inflexible and there is little consideration for anything outside their immediate scope of vision and there is zero hesitance to move against initial strategic positioning and commitments. 

Neutral

We have been involved with and supported UiPath from the onset. We have also delivered enterprise solutions with BluePrism and Automation Anywhere. UiPath has proven to be capable, but costly and inflexible from a pricing and support model viewpoint.

It depends on the nature of the requirements and can be super complex or super easy. Supporting the bots are always a challenge and supervision (alerts, monitoring) is essential.

We work with excellent vendor implementation teams and have in-house competence in design and delivery. In most customer environments, there are competent implementation and maintenance resources for bot environments. Over the past 5 years, bot development, administration, and maintenance skills have improved, however, there is still a significant gap in proper orchestration and optimization within bot frameworks - which affects the overall cost and effectiveness of automation strategies.

At present, the ROI is negative for us as a company. For our clients, it varies. When all costs are considered (TCO) over a two-year period, financial breakeven is mostly attained with some negative ratios (if it's the wrong tool for the job). 

In most cases, there are intangible benefits. In all cases, IT operations cost increased and, in worst-case scenarios, the business benefit was short-lived as the technology costs escalated and the resource reduction potential was never attained.

HA and DR planning are essential when determining actual resource reduction potential.

UiPath is becoming expensive and will be outpricing themselves if they continue to enforce their current service configuration (model). Many clients have been impacted by the pandemic and instead of assisting to breach the gaps, there is a sense that UiPath is monetizing on the disaster.  

We looked at BluePrism, Automation Anywhere and we are now moving on to Open RPA - a viable option if you have the right skills to plug gaps. 

I work at a financial firm where we do trade settlement activity. We are using UiPath for cleaning up data, doing reconciliation, and finding where the trade breaks and trade files are. It helps us lay the groundwork for the value add work, which comes later.

It allows us to grow our business. The use case that we have is a huge time saver because we do not have a lot of volume right now. We are looking to sell part of the business and get more clients onto it. The only way we could do that or even open that door for possibility is to automate and go through a lot more volume. 

Our teams are under huge pressure because trade volume has gone up over the past year. UiPath is just getting us back to the status quo and then also opening the pipeline for more volume to go through. We have a very strong program that encourages people to get trained up on tools. 

StudioX is going to be a big game changer for us. We found with the other tools that we use that as soon as we put UiPath in the hands of everyday users and ops users, they will be able to quickly learn it. This will make a big impact because we will get big volumes and projects coming through.

UiPath has done a good job coming up with the broadest use cases. However, I would like to see them dive into more industry-specific use cases. For example, checked OCR and brokerage statements are common. Anything unique to the financial industry would be useful for us.

We have using UiPath since February when it got brought into our team. We just had our first box go live about two weeks ago. We have had three go live so far; one using StudioX and two using Studio.

So far, I haven't heard any issues. We are always going to expect issues, but so far so good and I hope the stability is good. Alteryx had issues at times, which created some pretty big problems. Hopefully, UiPath will not do that as much, because we are expecting to lean on it.

I have not used them directly. 

It was not so much a switch for us. We are still using Alteryx. UiPath is a much better automation tool than what we were using before because it was self-service. We didn't have to have our COE build it and related solutions for us. We have similar functionality with Alteryx. Anyone can learn it and start building and go through our governance process. Doing so, they can have a huge impact on their team.

We are a large company and the initial setup took our COE quite a few months. However, I believe their experience was positive overall. A lot of the issues we had were internal and concerned how we were going to do our governance. We were very strict about that. 

Getting people access was easy and so was learning to build. Everything on the UiPath side went smoothly.

We're a mature automation team. Over the past four years, we've delivered well over 150 FTE. We're always looking for new tools and to pick up some of that automation that we couldn't do before. 

UiPath has helped with data scraping and plugging into websites and combining that with Alteryx. We can attack 90% of our use cases now. We can not deal with the other 10% for internal governance reasons and not so much capability.

The three use cases we have implemented with UiPath have saved about half an FTE. 

I know that the reason we went with UiPath is because it is a lot cheaper than the other vendor we were using. It is of a better quality as well, but it is less expensive to run on an ongoing basis. 

I'm not sure if we evaluated other options. My team does not look into the suite of options. We have a separate COE that sets everything up for us. We are tasked with implementation. 

My advice is to first build a good team that you can trust. Because great tools are useless if you don't have any builders or people that know how to use the tools. That is what we have been focused on. Also, have very specific support for your team.

In terms of product testing, I use it in the product with the test suite to mount the test manager and then follow with the requirements. After that, I create the test cases and I'm running them on different platforms on the web so that I can proof back from the web with test suites.

I use the different tools of UiPath. However, in the future, I’m hopeful UiPath will help us to expand into different countries. right now, I use it personally. Soon, the entire company will be using it as well.

The automation of the cloud offering helps to decrease the solution's total cost of ownership.

The document understanding is great. I interact with different documents of people. The IDs of one are different from a document or a PDF. For example, our contracts, et cetera. It can understand the differences.

I’m not quite sure about the ease of building automation using the solution just yet. It seems to be moderate. Not too easy or difficult.

The solution has helped our organization save costs. It’s likely saved us about $10 million.

UiPath has helped us reduce human error. That’s had a partial impact on our business. Our techs understand the different types of processes and competencies it can help with. Regular users cannot see this just yet.

It has freed up employee time. It’s allowed for a focus on higher-value work. Employees seem happier. It’s an easy tool to use and deploy.

We’ve used the UiPath Academy courses. All employees take the course and learn about it. You still need more education afterward, however, the biggest value of the Academy is the knowledge. I've got people who are new in the company and I can just say "take these courses." It's accepted by everyone as part of the process.

The graphics could always be improved.

I've been using the solution for three years. 

The stability of the solution is good. UiPath has a different release each year at the moment.

The scalability is great. You have a manual so you don't have to do the courses. You can read through it.

We have about 200 users at this time. We have different areas in the company that uses UiPath. For example, the administration uses that tool. You have a test suite and you can have development using the UiPath Studio as well.

Technical support has been great. Whatever my query is, they are able to answer it.

We did not use another RPA solution before UiPath.

The initial setup was straightforward and simple.

The deployment took about one month.

The pricing and licensing have been great.

We did look at different automation tools before choosing UiPath. We looked at Blue Prism and Automation Anywhere, however, we ultimately chose UiPath.

The UiPath Academy courses were a big selling point. Also, its ease of use. Automation Anywhere and Blue Prism were so difficult to understand. UiPath is more interactive and it's more visual.

We're a UiPath partner. 

I've used both cloud and on-premise deployment. Right now, I am using the cloud. 

At this point, we do not use UiPath's apps feature.

We have not used the solution's AI functionality in our automation program yet.

If I were to advise anyone on using UiPath, I'd let them know it's easy to use. You have manuals and courses to help you navigate the solution. The new releases make it so that it continuously gets easier. 

I would rate the solution at a ten out of ten.

We're still building up the program, but right now our primary use case is for report review. We're looking to branch that out more.

It's reviewing reports. I worked for a bank and there are reports of transactions from the previous day. UiPath was looking for anomalies for fraud and things like that.

It's still very early on but we have caught a few instances of fraud that we would not have if we weren't using UiPath. 

UiPath has reduced human error. We're very early, so it's not a big impact, but we did find a few instances of fraud that we would not have found without it. 

We see time savings for our users in the sense that they now can do more tasks that should have been done all along but weren't getting done. That's more where the gains have been this far.

I like the whole ecosystem. They're not just looking at the automation tool, they're looking at automation from end to end. 

It's pretty easy to build automations. I have a coding background so it's not particularly challenging for me to use Studio, but for a person who does not have that coding background, I think that the Visual Builder guides you through the process pretty easy.

UiPath Academy is a good training program for people without that coding background. It's good to get them into the mindset of how exactly flows works of automation.

The Academy offers us familiarization with Studio and how it functions.

The API integrations need improvement. They should build a better framework for the ability to integrate with other external APIs.

I have been using UiPath for less than a year. 

I would rate the stability an eight out of ten. 

It's pretty straightforward. It either runs or it doesn't. Occasionally it does crash and we've had to restart services and whatnot to get it going again.

We haven't been using it enough to see how it can scale. 

There are two ITs who use it in my company.

We have plans to increase usage. 

We don't really see our staff as being good candidates for citizen development. There are a few that could, but we do plan to expand out into other departments as far as gathering ideas and implementing processes for other departments.

Their support is pretty average. It's not good or bad. It's off-shored. There are always difficulties with cultural differences and language barriers. They know what they're doing but sometimes it takes a while going around in circles to get the question that you're asking across. That's pretty normal. Most companies are the same way. I would say all companies have huge room for improvement there.

The initial setup was pretty straightforward. It was easy. The installation instructions walk you through the process. We didn't run into any problems. It took less than a week. 

We also looked at AntWorks and Blue Prism. We went with UiPath because of the maturity of the product that seemed far more mature than its competitors. The product seemed more thought out.

Based on our experiences, I would say you have to have employees that are dedicated to doing this. This can't be done as a side project.

I would rate UiPath a nine out of ten. Nothing is completely perfect. The stability of it could use a little bit of improvement. The support is not great. UiPath is very good, but no one is perfect.

We've got mostly finance use cases including a lot of accounts receivable and stuff like that. Then, there is a lot of work where I do trading settlements, so a lot of settlements as well. The back office automation's there, too. We're still getting used to it and still getting started.

We've been able to expand up to citizen developers, and have been able to show them how to do various things. It's easy to pick up, so a lot of citizen developers are learning it now, and with little to no coding experience. It's been great.

The recorder has been great. Just being able to really start your automation there, and just modifying them a little bit and then getting them really in production has been helpful.

The solution has saved costs for the organization. For example, I used to do back-office stuff, and I was able to move to more of an IT role. That was definitely a savings there, and obviously, no one had to automate it after me or do it manually after me.

We have found that the solution has reduced human error as now it's a bot doing it. It's really reduced errors due to the fact that no one has to check each time to ensure the work is error-free, and, in general, there are a lot fewer errors. 

The solution has freed up employee time. For example, as I mentioned, I myself have moved off of back-office tasks and, in doing so, the company did not have to hire someone after me. We've likely saved 10,000 hours in a year. We're really happy with that result. The additional time has enabled employees to focus on higher-value work. People can now just quickly audit it and then move on to something more important.

The Academy is great to use. We've been able to learn a lot from there. That's what our citizen developers will look at as they get more familiar with the product, and as we show them how to develop items. It has positively affected the process of getting employees up to speed on the solution. A lot of them have little to no coding experience and the Academy has helped by showing them what they need to learn. The biggest value is if they have little to no coding experience, it'll really start from the basics and teach them from there. You don't have to teach them all the variables and stuff like that.

While I like the Academy a lot, it could maybe go deeper into some of the topics. The basic ones, such as Excel, which is already a decent course, could maybe go into more specifics. My issue is that, while the basics are good, getting into the weeds a little more could be very helpful. It's hard to specify exactly what is needed, however.

We've used the solution for about a year now. We're still getting used to it. 

Our stability is great. You rarely have any downtime, once you build it. There's obviously the support, however, I'd say it's pretty minimal.

We're trying to work on scalability at the moment. It's there, however, we have a lot of different departments that do a lot of different things and that's where we need to really work on scaling. It has nothing to do with UiPath. It's just about getting everybody trained up on everything on our side. That said, we can see how it is possible to scale in the future. We do plan to increase usage.

Currently, we have about ten users who are familiar with UiPath. It's not too many. They are either developers or just everyday users that support it.

In terms of technical support, from the perspective of tickets, et cetera, I would say they are pretty good. We've only done a few upgrades so far. We've only had it for a year, and so far, in that time, support seems great. They have been helping us out on everything.

We did not previously use a different RPA solution.

I can't speak to the initial setup, as we had an outside party handle pretty much everything. I actually joined after they onboarded us and everything, and therefore wasn't a part of the process at all.

We have two to three people that handle maintenance tasks, on top of the AI.

We had an outside party do the deployment. It was a consultant. They did it for us.

I don't have any insights into the licensing process. 

While I joined after UiPath was implemented, my understanding is the company did look into a couple of other options, just to see their capabilities.

I would advise potential new users to go for it. The Academy offers a great starting point. It's a great tool. I would recommend UiPath.

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

I am an automation consultant and most of the robots that I work on are unattended.

Some of our use cases involve end-to-end automation. One of them is an SAP system where the transaction data, material numbers, and other things are used for T-codes. Based on the value of data in the T-code, it opens other T-codes in the process and updates those registries accordingly. This may include, for example, T-codes one and two. Then, from T-code one, I need to get input with regard to my material numbers. This might be a materials invoice or the invoice numbers of material orders. With those, you have to put it in one T-code and get output.

Based on the output of the T-code one, you need to do the rest of the operations in T-code two and T-code three. Once the job is completed, update all the information about the different T-codes in an Excel sheet and then update it back to the system.

UiPath saves time both from the perspective of a developer and an end-user. I can talk about the two positions because I have been involved in both roles. On the development side, the features make it very easy and tasks that normally take half an hour can be completed in a minute or two.

With respect to the end-user, assume that a process normally takes an hour a day to complete. Once the automation is in place, the whole process will be done in a minute or two. Importantly, the user does not have to monitor the process because it runs in the back end or on a server in a remote location. The entire process will run without monitoring.

At the same time, the user will be informed. Let's say that you have to get some data out of it; most of the time, the data available every few days. Personally, given that I am not normally in the role of the end-user, I have to log in to all of the systems and look for the data. However, if UiPath is configured and developed properly then it will inform you in an email that the data is now available. Similarly, if there is no data available then it can be configured in such a way that the user will be informed of that. This would give the user the opportunity to save and plan to utilize their time for other purposes.

In our company, we have a lot of use cases where we were able to implement unattended automation. This meant that we saved a lot of time and we were able to reutilize the employees for more useful engagements. 

An additional thing that we are able to achieve through using an RPA like UiPath is a reduction in errors. When we are performing any kind of activity, such as a recalculation in Excel, or calculations in a step-by-step process that involves manually copying data between two places, there is a high chance that an error will occur. This is a human error that can be avoided once we implement the automation and move it to production. Ultimately, all of these types of errors will be eliminated.

It is difficult to estimate the total number of errors that we avoid, but I can say that we were able to save time and with each process, the number of errors is reduced.

The most valuable feature is the set of data scraping tools. You can scrape data into your tables, then easily transform it or convert it between formats. If UiPath or another similar automation tool was not there, it would be very difficult to automate something that is a UI- based application. There is no other option to get that back-end data out of it. If we were not able to convert the formatting, or if for whatever reasons we cannot extract the data into a table format, it would be very difficult for us to convert and get the data that we want. The data would be difficult to format and we would spend a lot of time on it.

UiPath provides the data in a table format and in a structured manner, which means that we are able to get the required value from the table and do the necessary calculations on it. It saves us a lot of time in this process.

We have started using the AI functionality but so far, not to any great extent. For example, we were able to identify different types of images while reading an invoice. Prior to using the AI capabilities, we were not able to read them. This is our only use case for AI at the moment, but we plan to explore other activities and possibilities.

We have used the UiPath Academy courses and by doing so, we were able to learn a lot of things. They had examples of use cases that can occur in different scenarios and instead of getting that from a live environment, or during development, we were able to learn it from the Academy and a live example.

With the Studio, we can do basic troubleshooting in the production machine or VM, in case any error occurs. This is helpful because we don't have to move the data back to the development machine.

The integration with APA should be improved with respect to adding data from external sources and being able to bring in data from third-party applications. Also, it should be better the other way around, where UiPath is providing APA data to other applications.

I have been using UiPath for the past four years.

If the application is working fine, without making any updates or changes, then the bot will work as expected about 95% of the time. However, if there are any changes to the end-application made by the developers, or there is a content change, then we definitely have to align to those changes and it will take time.

Generally speaking, we move a process to production once it is stable.

We can easily scale this solution so the scalability is quite good.

We have between 15 and 20 developers in my team who work with UiPath. I am not sure about the number of people on the other teams. In terms of end-users, there are more than 100.

I have developed 30 processes personally, and my team has created more than 200. We plan to continue using UiPath in the future.

We have used technical support and the UiPath technical team is good. Whenever there is help required, and we are not able to find the solution for that from the UiPath documentation, we get a ticket with the support team. Based on the criticality of the process, they help us.

We did not use another RPA solution prior to UiPath.

The initial setup is straightforward and very easy. The main component is called Orchestrator and then there are two more components called Studio and Development Robot. These two are connected to Orchestrator, and once the development is complete, you can do the unit testing on the same machine. After this, you publish the package.

Once the item is published, it will be pushed to the Orchestrator and then connected to the bot. This is where you're going to run the process. Once it is complete the bot will start running. The whole process will take approximately 10 minutes and you can move the data to production.

When the process is running in production, Studio allows you to troubleshoot from there, without having to move it back to the development machine.

I deployed UiPath on my own. They have provided enough documentation.

The pricing and licensing costs seem okay to me, although it is a little bit on the high side.

In the past, you needed to install the Studio license if you wanted to be able to troubleshoot in production. However, that has changed and you no longer need to buy it separately.

My advice for others who are implementing or using UiPath is to ensure that they test the robots and processes thoroughly before moving them to production.

I would rate this solution an eight out of ten.

We have developed a product for a court of arbitration. UiPath provides the automation engine behind it. Our product is a platform that is live online. It allows a party to provide some contract information, and the robot assembles a document and communicates with DocuSign, our signature provider. It then sends out a correspondence to the other party and manages the signature process for a bespoke contract for an arbitration agreement.

This is a service that we provide to the world, pro bono, as it were, to promote arbitration and the adoption of a particular arbitration clause. It's accessible to all. Parties can log in and it helps them to negotiate and conclude an arbitration agreement in a mediated fashion. The robot sends out email on behalf of a third-party, a court of arbitration, and it helps the parties get that agreement done.

It's about concluding an arbitration agreement before the dispute goes any further.

It helps us in providing added value to the clients and to the community at large. It's a marketing thing for us, in the widest possible sense, rather than something that we use in our practice.

But in terms of reducing the cost of digital transformation, if a person had to do what the robot does, it would probably be impossible. It would be impossibly costly. If one person had to handle the communication, instead of the robot, and try to negotiate each addendum, nobody would do it because it would take days or weeks for a lawyer to manage, and it would be prohibitive. Yet, all of a sudden, we have this service that is so cheap in many ways that it can even be provided for nominal user fees. It's quite dramatic.

I would also imagine that processing time is reduced by many orders of magnitude. As a professional, if I had to manage an addendum like that, it would take me weeks. And it takes about seven minutes or so, if all goes well.

What I have found interesting is that our product acts as a human would but it's not intrusive. It doesn't require any real integration or interface with one's own systems, in any meaningful way. Obviously, you need access, an account to log in, but it otherwise acts as a human, and that makes deployment quite smooth. It doesn't require you to change anything in your system. I found that very useful.

Regarding the ease of building automations, I'm not sure how it's done because I'm not a programmer myself, but it's great. Just looking at how fast they moved once we had the program settled in — it was quite fast. For this particular process, which is assembling a document, talking to DocuSign, sending out emails, and so on, the deployment of production was like "today." It was quite quick.

In terms of the ease of management of automations using UiPath, I don't dare poke into it, as a non-technical person, but it looks manageable. I have someone who does not do RPA normally, who doesn't do this type of programming at all, but that person knows where to look for errors and doesn't get lost. It's reasonably accessible.

I could use more standardized features, retail-style, things that I could use off-the-shelf. Right now, all this requires quite a bit of adaptation in bespoke work with UiPath, which they've done very well. But looking at it after having used it, I would get stuff that is prepackaged from them, if they were any.

We launched with UiPath in June.

The stability of the solution is okay. 

The downside of the upside, when I said that it works like a human, is that in some cases, if it interacts with a website that is changing, then it's like a human. You need to adapt it to the changing environment in which it works. That's an inevitable fact of life, that it interacts with other apps. It can also interact through APIs, but you want it to be very flexible, you want it to be an agent, like a human. The downside of that is that if something changes with a website, then of course, you have to change the robot and tweak it a little bit. But that's the only issue that has required our attention so far.

Our product is a public-facing instrument and we have had no problem with the number of users, so we have not seen any issues with scalability.

In terms of potentially increasing our use of UiPath, we're exploring a number of solutions actually, for practice management and actual lawyer work. These would be in-house solutions, rather than public-facing. We have a few ideas that we have run by them and we are waiting for feedback.

We've had no problem with the customer support. We were in direct contact with the whole team. They have always been quick to respond. I would rate them a 10 out of 10.

We would use regular Microsoft automation features. I would have a flag on a particular correspondence, or a particular rule for attachments. We would use little bits and bobs of automation that are available, but we did not have any bespoke solution.

We went with UiPath because they made themselves known in the sector and it was a question of the vision that they communicated. There was a modest vision of providing solutions to very discrete problems, not revolutionary solutions to everything. Rather, they focused on whatever helps in a particular organization. We liked that. It matched our understanding of legal tech as well. It needs to be supportive of whatever little bit of help you need, rather than providing you with an environment that engulfs you with everything. We liked that approach, and when we approached them they were very receptive.

The initial setup process was okay. I'm a non-technical person, but I was able to manage it. 

It took quite a bit to figure out what we wanted from it, the flow and the logic of it. After we agreed on that, on the concept, actual production took two or three days. Of course, somebody had already done a proof of concept, although that was not based on a final brief. We danced around and changed it a bit.

For maintenance, we have somebody in tech that we pop questions to, and our maintenance of the server is done in-house as well.

We have realized return on our investment. It was a joint project with UiPath so we had special arrangements in terms of licensing, but it was very well received in the market. It was very beneficial for us.

Our product is something that we launched in June, and the robot has been featured in general business publications, in the Kluwer Arbitration Blog, and the Resolver, which is the Chartered Institute of Arbitrators magazine, as well as the Romanian Arbitration Journal. Essentially, everybody knows about it. It is one of the most popular UiPath robots out there; the most featured and interviewed robot in the wild. We were quite pleased with the publicity.

My advice is to think about it very carefully and know exactly what everybody is doing every day in the office, the little bits and pieces. Really look at that seriously, because there are so many things that we do in a software environment that are very amenable to automation, and it saves a lot of time. Think very carefully about the particular needs of your office and look into it, because it can save you a lot of money.

It's clear that this is the future.