UiPath Reviews

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.

We use it to automate repetitive processes. We are also using it to manage people and costs.

I have used it for automation in telecommunication, HR, and finance. I have also done two projects for IT. It is a combination. I have worked on all these different projects.

UiPath helps with cost savings and staff savings. We can use manpower for high-value tasks rather than for repetitive tasks.

UiPath helps with end-to-end automation. I have created end-to-end automation through UiPath. It is a high priority for our company. I have not yet worked on the AI functionality.

UiPath reduces human error. If it is a repetitive task, then bots cannot go wrong. They have already been coded with whatever is required, so human errors are generally not there, but there can be scenarios that have not been covered, and they can result in exceptions. We have to work on them and update the bots so that we do not get the same issues.

UiPath improves accuracy. The teams for whom we have done automation are happy. There are no errors. It improves their efficiency. Bots can work 24/7 or at whatever time they want. There is no dependency on time, which is not the case with humans.

The time savings vary from project to project. On average, if a human takes three hours for a task, a bot would take about ten minutes. UiPath reduces the costs, but I do not have the metrics.

UiPath is very user-friendly. There is ease of use. People can understand it very quickly.

It is very easy to use.  It is very good. There are many people who are uploading learning sessions on YouTube, which are free. It is good to learn from there as well. There are many sources to learn and explore it. There is also a community of UiPath users.

UiPath Academy has complete courses for developers and business analysts. A business analyst can follow the course path created for business analysts, and a developer can follow the course path created for developers.

I have been working with UiPath for the last four years.

It is a stable solution. However, if your applications are changing, you will have to do some manipulations in the code. Now they have a feature where you can keep your UI things in your config or in the assets, which is helpful. It is easy.

I do not interact with them directly. There is a team that communicates with their support. 

I know Automation Anywhere, and I have also done a certification on it about four years ago, but I did not work on it. I am not familiar with the features currently in Automation Anywhere, so I cannot compare it with UiPath. I have more experience with UiPath because we got more UiPath projects. We were going to work on a project with Automation Anywhere, but that did not happen.

I have also worked on UiPath Document Understanding, but most of my experience is with general automation.

I have set it up from scratch in one of the companies. It was not that hard. It was easy to set everything up. I was doing it for the first time, so it was a little bit confusing, but it was good. There were forums and YouTube videos. The UiPath team is also available if you need help with installation and what to use. It was good.

After the code is ready, the bot deployment takes 10 to 15 minutes. Three years ago, it used to take us an hour.

I have not worked extensively with any other tool. My experience with UiPath is good, and I would rate it an eight out of ten. I am satisfied with UiPath.

I use UiPath to reduce any data entry, report generation, or anything where UiPath can help avoid human errors.

The solution is very user-friendly and easy to use. It comes with pre-built automation. The tutorials are very helpful. 

I have been working with the product for six months. 

The tool is stable. 

UiPath is scalable. 

The tool's support is helpful. 

I use UiPath to reduce human errors during report generation or data entry. Simple errors can cause delays down the stream. 

The product has helped us save hours, which can range from a few hours to tens of thousands of hours. 

UiPath has helped us increase accuracy. It is helpful in data validation. 

I rate it a ten out of ten. 

I use it for RPA in bank reconciliation, credit card operations, retail banking, vendor invoice management, purchase order matching, and employee onboarding.

It helps to minimize the on-premises footprint and speeds up and reduces the cost of digital transformation. It also reduces human error and that reduces costs and makes systems more reliable. 

UiPath can also free up employee time. It depends on how many automation initiatives you run, but you can probably automate 20 to 30 percent of tasks.

Overall, the most valuable aspects are the automation, UI navigation, and orchestration.

It's fairly easy to use and automation can be done by relatively junior people. It's a low-code platform, so it requires a little bit of scripting but nothing too crazy. A business analyst can use it in most cases.

We're an implementation partner, so we don't use it for ourselves because we're too small. But for our client base, it enables end-to-end automation. That's a very important aspect, especially in banking where there is a lot of competition, the margins are low, and operating costs are high. They can't make any mistakes. That requires them to have an automation solution that does manual and repetitive tasks for them. It's a cost imperative.

And being part of the UiPath user community is a positive. I have also done a couple of the sales-oriented UiPath Academy courses. They are really easy to consume and they are free for partners and they're very business oriented.

UiPath is not easy to work with, as a vendor, from a partner perspective. They are difficult to deal with.

I have been working with UiPath for two years, not as an engineer but in business development.

It's very stable. I've not heard of any major issues where the system collapses.

It's scalable. You can throw more and more robots at it.

Technical support from UiPath is slow but good enough.

Neutral

ROI depends on the customer and what they need, but you can definitely have a return on investment of 300 to 400 percent within about three years. It's a relatively quick payback.

They are the biggest RPA vendor with the highest market share. They have a good product and the company seems really innovative. They're branching out into AI and process mining, et cetera. Generally, as a vendor, they're the strongest one in the mix.

My advice is to start sooner rather than later with RPA.

There is a lot of hype around the topic of RPA and customers are exploring it, but they can't do it without partners; at least not the first couple of projects. Deployments with our customers take about six weeks.

We maintain the solutions we create. We normally have a support contract in place for at least the first couple of years. Maintenance, on our side, involves two or three people.

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.