What is our primary use case?
We primarily use UiPath for outsourcing. Customers call us when they need extra people to fill positions, on a temporary or permanent basis, similar to a temp agency.
The biggest use case that is running right now is that we get job openings or requests from a lot of different third-party brokerages, customers, clients, vendors, et cetera. They all arrive through different platforms. We get an email saying there's a request, please check it out and let us know if you have someone to fulfill the position, and the request is implemented through UiPath. It's automated. We've created all of the mailbox folders based on the sender and the subject, so we know which customer or which broker it is. Then, we make the email follow a link to the information for the job opening or the inquiry and we put it into our Salesforce system.
There are a couple of smaller use cases as well, where we have task operations that have to be done weekly or daily. Mostly it's reading emails or reading schedules and making changes in files.
How has it helped my organization?
The automation of job inquiries has a lot of sufficiency on how we operate as we used to have multiple people need to be available throughout the day to manually check if an email with an inquiry came in, and that would require them to drop work and open the email, check it out and maybe take action immediately. Now that the robot is running and taking care of the need for filtering through all the results for them, employees can stay focused on the other tasks that they have. They don't have to keep an eye on a second monitor every time and drop everything they're doing to read an email only to decide what is relevant or not.
I understand work has to be tested. It hasn't impacted the entire company yet as I've been here a little short of a year now and we haven't made that big of an impact just yet.
What is most valuable?
The most valuable aspect of UiPath is the community in terms of the way they open up their platform to the community and make it freely available for people to try and to practice. The amount of feedback from that community makes it very easy for us to get into UiPath and if you're trying something that you've never done before, you at least have some insights. There's almost always someone who has done it before or who has asked the question. I would say the community is one of the biggest extra treats for UiPath.
From a technical perspective, I like the learning curve in the Studio and in the orchestrator - or the Cloud Platform as they call it now - due to the fact that it's easy to get into. It's easy to grasp the basics and to get started. You can scale up as fast and as far as you'd like or need to for your customer. It can do everything. You don't have to learn everything in advance to be able to work with it. It makes it really approachable.
Building automation can be really easy. The biggest challenge is to find the easy use cases as the use cases in the company can get quite complicated quite fast. That said, using the recorder in the Studio and then converting that to work in a mobile office is quite easy. I started in 2016 or 2017, and between then and now there's been a lot of changes. It's always been easy for developer-minded people to get started. However, now with the introduction of StudioX, it is even more focused on the different users and they have a different entry point for them. What I like about UiPath is that the training is really comprehensive. You can almost just record what you do by hand and then StudioX will translate that into a robot and then you can fine-tune it to make it more robust. Smaller costs can be easier steps. Just press record, do what you do, and then you're able to work with teams.
Scaling automation without having to pay attention to infrastructure does make my job a lot easier for now. What I do see in companies is when they've taken the first steps and they start to scale up, a lot of them have policies or ways of working in place where they want to stick to the ways that they know. A lot of time I see customers will, in the end, do it by themselves anyway, so they use all of the upscaling functions that are available as they want to do it the way that they always did.
UiPath enables us to implement end-to-end automation starting with process analysis, then robot building, and finally monitoring of automation. However, while it does facilitate end-to-end automation, it does take a lot of the development and running and monitoring of the robots on itself. That is something that is facilitated really well by UiPath. The process discovery and the analysis is rather newish within UiPath. Maybe it's not as well integrated into the community platform.
At this time, UiPath has helped to minimize our on-premises footprint as it is a cloud-based solution. It's important that the on-premise footprint has been minimized as it makes it easier for us being a small company. We have 160 people working for us in the Netherlands and then a couple in the Caribbean. Bringing new technology in like robotic process automation and then asking from the IT department to get me free service and results of my configuring and have all the discussions about what goes where, how the security works, how to find the work, who gets access, et cetera is easy. This is due to the fact that UiPath is offered on a cloud basis and I don't have to do all that on-site work, which allows me to get to building and talking about RPA quicker.
The fact that the vendor handles infrastructure, maintenance, and updates saves time for our IT department. It helps us to implement a lot faster. The client companies can have a reliable cloud solution to help them do at least the first steps to get them acquainted with the product. It makes it a lot easier. It helps me a lot, and it helps our customers in starting out as well.
UiPath has decreased the time to value in that since it's cloud-based, I can deliver faster than I would be able to do on-prem. If we have an idea, or if we want to scale up, we can do so faster in the cloud solution than I could on-prem.
The product lowers the overall total cost of ownership by taking care of things such as infrastructure, maintenance, and updates, however, I'm not sure what would happen if we scale up.
The automation Cloud Platform has definitely helped reduce the time it takes to create automation. It brings a lot of things together. It's easy to use for clients and customers. It makes it easy to bring different disciplines together, so I don't need to think about how to reuse my code, or how to explain to the customer, and I don't need to share the processes to be able to release, run, and monitor and to get reports on the results.
UiPath has reduced human error. There are fewer errors and the processes are less error-prone and once the technology has proven itself within the company, within the customers, people start to trust the robots to do what they do. Employees don't need to check the work that had been done as they know that if the robot reported that it was done correctly, then it was done correctly. In that way, it has saved a lot of time by not having to check anything.
It has also freed up employee time. It's a three-person team and it saved them a couple of hours a week doing the work that they used to do. It saved them a lot more focus as they didn't have to monitor the email inbox all the time. They were able to apply more focus to the other things that they were doing. That said, it's hard to quantify the gains. However, overall, it has made them happy. That's one guarantee. They absolutely love that they gave the mundane work away to the robot because it was bothering them to be monitoring an email inbox all the time. It's given them the time to focus on cases that match the right people to the right inquiries or openings. I don't have any metrics on it, however, anecdotally, they tell me that it helped them to do the rest of their work better as they could apply more focus to more important tasks and placements are better attended to. There's much more focus and attention and better matches being made.
The solution has saved costs for our organization.
What needs improvement?
I'm trying not to sound negative about it as I like them a lot, however, the process mining and the process mining features stem further away from the development of the robots and the monitoring. The development, run, and monitoring are really closely knit, or really close together, and then process discovery is starting to get there. It's on its way, however, I don't see that it's as closely connected as the other three parts.
The automation operations have not brought down any company costs. Automation operations have gotten more expensive due to the fact that we added UiPath to them. That said, you do get gains at a different branch of the company. We didn't replace anything with UiPath. We weren't able to skip a step or program or tool, which makes it an added cost.
More documentation would be helpful, as they change rather quickly. There are two yearly stable releases and then a couple of community releases and data releases in between. Sometimes not all documentation is changed as quickly as the features are. Sometimes you can find something in the documentation that is not the answer, or not available in the product anymore. That's simply a side effect of how fast they develop the product.
Sometimes it's not entirely clear what features are, for example, available in their community edition, or in the on-prem, or in the cloud. The difference between the on-prem and the cloud has become clearer in the past few weeks, however.
For how long have I used the solution?
I've been using the solution for three years now.
I started out at my previous company with systems integration. We started out with discovering robotic operations, discovering the tools, and suppliers. We chose UiPath and one of the competitors, as we found them to have the best suit with our customers. That was the end of 2016. That's when I started doing training in UiPath and started doing some custom integrations.
Now, I switched to a new job at a different company where they want to start an RPA practice as well and they chose UiPath solely for RPA.
What do I think about the stability of the solution?
From the operations standpoint, the stability of the cloud it's very good. I haven't had any issues with stability. The Studio will crash at random times. I've identified two scenarios where I'm able to make the Studio crash every time by just doing the same actions.
However, other than that, the automation was really stable, and I haven't had any issues or incidents. In Studio, I'd say it is good enough, however, there is some room for growth there.
What do I think about the scalability of the solution?
Scaling automation without having to pay attention to infrastructure is a bit pro for UiPath as I'm starting an RPA practice. We don't have a lot of infrastructure engineers to build the project yet. Therefore, a lot of the time, with new customers as well, it will be a bit of a one-man show. Yet, what we can do is communicate to the platform and then make sure the infrastructure is there and then implement the platform and build a business analysis basically in an un-built realm. I have to do a lot of things by myself, so the fact that UiPath brings in the Cloud Platform and the Studio and it's all integrated and you can scale up without having to have too much. You need to know something about infrastructure to understand what it does for you, however, you don't have to do it all by hand. I don't need like three or four DP-trained individuals to be able to scale up or scale out. It's helped me get further faster.
Once you build the infrastructure and you know what you're doing and you know where you want to go with your platform and scaling, it's rather easy.
The only people really using it at this time are me and six trainees. There are a couple of ops people as well that are able to log in. We might have a total of ten people on the solution.
It's not being used too extensively now, however, that's for a large part due to the fact that most of my colleagues are working with our customers, so there are not too many internal processes or tasks. However, we do have plans to increase its priority as the tasks that we do have are at some points largely repetitive. We do a lot of operations and maintenance for our customers as well in different fields, so we are mainly looking at that for further automation opportunities.
How are customer service and technical support?
Technical support has been pretty good.
I get a quick response and it's usually constructive. I manage to fix my own problems a lot of the time using the community forums and information from there. I haven't had too much interaction with UiPath tech support.
Which solution did I use previously and why did I switch?
We did not previously use a different solution.
How was the initial setup?
I personally implemented the solution at my company.
We currently have it running, so some internal processes. And, we're looking to expand that into the customer landscape.
The setup is simple. They deliver it in a cloud environment, I didn't need to do any installs or make any arrangements.
You need to make an account and get started and watch a couple of training videos that will help you through it. The adding of the robots is very well documented in the forum, in the community, and in the training sessions. They have made it really easy to get started and to get the information you need to take the first step.
The deployment question is a tough one as I started out at this company while already having a communicators subscription on my own account. Therefore, I started out using that one and then gradually shifted toward using more automated resources. I don't have a clear overview of how much time it took to deploy. It might have been a couple of weeks overall, however, I was doing different things at the same time, and I never took a metric of how much time it took. I'd say starting out if the prerequisites are in place at the company, it could be a matter of days.
Tasks such as setting up an account, getting some service, et cetera, if you know what you're doing and you know what to ask a few questions before starting, it's a couple of minutes or hours. That said, in reality, there are always things you forget or things that they didn't do, so it always takes a little extra time.
My implementation strategy was basically to figure it out as I went, which is not the best strategy, however, it was the best we could do due to the fact that the company didn't really know what they wanted to do with RPA. I was figuring out my own place in the company and then their wishes with robotics with RPA. There were a lot of things at the same time, so there was not a closed strategy other than to start up quickly, as soon as possible, get feedback, and then try again.
For now, I alone handle deployment and maintenance tasks. That will be the case until our trainees finish training.
What about the implementation team?
We did not use a third-party service such as an integrator or a consultant.
What was our ROI?
We have not yet seen an ROI and have no concrete plans for any in the near future.
What's my experience with pricing, setup cost, and licensing?
While I have one or two sheets from old presentations that have pricing information, they are over a half year old. I have no current insights. I wasn't included in discussions between the company and UiPath in relation to licensing.
Which other solutions did I evaluate?
The company might have looked at other options. However, they did this before I was hired. Ultimately, they did want to choose UiPath, and I was hired based on my experience with the product. They chose UiPath at that time as they were working together with Oracle and that company has always been very Oracle-minded.
What other advice do I have?
I use the community Studio and the Cloud Platform. I take the cloud from UiPath. I'm not sure where they host their solutions. I use the automation cloud from UiPath.
End-to-end coverage is not too important to my work at this time. Maybe if they were more closely integrated, I would be able to offer it more easily to my customers. However, now, due to the fact that I often go in at the first interaction with a customer or at a company, I have to introduce the concept of RPA, I have to introduce the product of UiPath, and I have to introduce or orchestrate the Cloud Platform and Studio. What I've seen is that that's enough for the first steps, usually, the company will have a pretty clear vision of what they want to start out with in terms of automation. However, introducing the process mining capabilities would add an extra step to the start-up that we have to do and what they want to see is faster results in the early phase. It's short the time from when I come in to initiate the first value, so they can appreciate the value and start the business cases and go from there. Maybe, once they are a couple of steps further on and they have a couple of automations, then they go look at the process of task mining as they have the infrastructure, they understand what the process automation is about, and then they start to see the value process or task mining. Therefore, the end-to-end factor, for my job, for now, is not too important as I don't truly use the end-to-end approach. I do the start by myself with the customer and then we go from there. Then, in the next phase, I will build them practices and they will start to automate the beginning of the process discovery as well. There is not something that I have initially do. Once companies start beyond that first phase and the first steps, then process discovery and process mining can be really important in automation. In a later stage, it becomes more important. However, in my case, I work a lot in the early phases and haven't seen too much of the process discovery products in that phase.
Attended automation hasn't really helped us scale RPA benefits as we are a rather small company and there's only a small group that works with the product, and therefore, we haven't been able to use the assistance in the same way a larger organization such as a bank or insurance company might use it.
We don't use the staff solution yet and we have not taken advantage of the AI functionality. While I have played with AI, I haven't had any use cases to implement the AI sensor.
Overall, I am quite satisfied with the product.
I'd advise new users to start by doing instead of only reading. Start small, like finding small processes or if you're an individual, look at your own work. Find something you could do and automate that as it gives you the best appreciation of the value. Try it out in your own environment and just explore how it goes as that gives you the best insights. For me, when I started, it was a great feeling to watch your screen and watch your cursor follow the screen without doing anything.
Keep asking questions when talking to users. When translating the biggest use case into other processes, spend more and more time talking to the users and going through the processes, and defining and understanding what happens. Otherwise, it's going to cost you a lot of extra time figuring out why you've got all these weird exceptions that you didn't expect. Everyone always talks about how easy robotic process automation is. However, only once you understand your processes from a user's perspective, you'll run into a wall. It's never standardized. It's never the same. I need to warn my customers more frequently about this pitfall, due to the fact that, yes ultimately, it's very fast, but it only is once you know exactly what you want to automate and that's why most of the time it's time-consuming.
I'd rate the solution at a nine out of ten.
Which deployment model are you using for this solution?
Public Cloud
If public cloud, private cloud, or hybrid cloud, which cloud provider do you use?
Other
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