UiPath Reviews

Business solutions, not only IT related.

Improvement on repetitive activities, boring tasks, and error handling reduction.

A user interface for developers: You can develop something without being a programmer!

Typically, the best improvement of Microsoft tools embedded (as for Excel), and SAP could be very useful (but in 2018.4 there is an improvement on SAP BAPI).

Used widely in automations of business processes of all kinds. 

There's a lot of different useful features in UiPath that makes it easy to use and able to create even very complex process automations.

Working with UiPath on developing automations, I'm able to create intuitive workflows that are easy to maintain and understand. The performance of automations is also one of the best in the market.

I like how easy it is to implement code in the process flow and how great the community is. That helps to solve problems much faster.

I think debugging is the worst part of UiPath. Compared to some different RPA tools, this is not the best, but it's still not a problem to troubleshoot any issues that you might have while creating a flow.

• To execute the automation of ticket creation in ServiceNow 
• For the critical situation: creating an incident 
• For the request: creating a request in ServiceNow.

• Return on investment is high.
• Reduces the time for accomplishing repetitive tasks.
• Allows developers to learn new technology and help in implementing the same.

• UiPath free tool availability and free certification for the developer
• Web service activity is helpful in implementing web-based automation.

• It should add the feature of intelligent automation.
• Also, to interpret human decisions using Amazon Alexa as well as machine learning.

It is used widely within our organization. As of right now, we already have a lot of robots in the live environment.

Automation in the data management department to automate few processes to help the operation team increase their production.

Reading content for the robot to process with our own logic, and it is very easy to develop with great user interfaces.

Handling if-else statements for schedules. It would be great if it had elements which could take care of running the job.

Process automation in a global business center of a global mining and manufacturing company. We are mainly focusing on financial processes (e.g., reporting, fixed assets creation, invoice management) and HR processes (personal data sync between SAP and local payroll systems, automatic administration of external consultants).

We've already implemented 30+ small processes to automate, built a knowledge center of RPA and saved a couple of FTEs through the automation journey.

Orchestrator - the central management component and the screen capturing part of the development tool (Studio).

User access management - to be able to set up user rights in a more sophisticated way. In the current version if you grant e.g Execute access to a user it can execute all robotized process in the given environment, you cannot specify the right on a process level.

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.

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.

We primarily use the solution for legacy data transfer, UI automation, CRM and ITSM automation, and call centers. Specifically, in call centers, using UiPath forms and form render has been really helpful.

I love developing in Studio. For my clients, the approachability of the orchestrator is really valuable. It takes a little bit to learn the licensing structure and layout at first, however, once they get it, it's pretty smooth sailing from there. The modern folders have become a great thing for any enterprise that's looking to automate using an orchestrator as a server.

I like to automate in Studio as I'm familiar with it. I honestly just like the platform so I like automating with Studio.

I really enjoy Document Understanding. I like how it all integrates together. Some of the stuff I've seen now with just the connectors and the way you can scale implementations is really exciting. While I do like Studio, I also like how it works with the rest of the platform.

We most recently built an unintended bot that saves them about $500,000 a year worth of GS 14 labor.

UiPath saves costs for our customers’ organizations. That would just be the cost savings from RPA bots. I haven't really dug into the cost savings of the ancillary products, however. I know that one of my clients is using the test suite now after I had built a proof of concept for it, and they've fully implemented it. I'm sure there's going to be a lot of cost savings there as well.

In terms of ease of building automation, it depends on the process. For anything that's ultra-low or a low-level complexity, it's very simple. Once you start getting sprawled out into larger automation that very much becomes object-oriented programming and is basically making a workflow. That's when you really need to take hold of programmatic concepts. You need to be a strong scriptor to be able to make the best RPA bots.

Our clients have reduced human error. That's one of the things that I tend to talk about the most. The bots can get work done faster, however, the reduction of human error is probably more valuable in some cases than just speeding up work.

In terms of UiPath Academy, everybody's used it. I've used it myself. My entire team has used it. All of our engineers are some sort of Pearson VUE certified now. Most of us have the Advanced Developer. A few of our younger junior developers have the associate, the RPA associate, however, they're working on getting the Advanced Developer and they lean on the Academy pretty heavily.

The biggest value in the Academy is the videos, which are pretty helpful. Sometimes you have to slow it down, however, for the most part, the way it goes through concepts, especially for somebody that doesn't have much programming experience, the videos tend to go through some of the more elementary things like variables arguments. That can get a little bit boring for programmers since they've been through that 100 different times. That said, that’s really where the strength lies as it does target a large group of different employees. As an engineer, I might pass by some of the boring stuff, however, I will still find things later on in the training where I'm like, wow, I actually never knew that.

The license model changing every year can be a little bit frustrating. It's hard sometimes when things go from being robot-based to being runtime-based.

Some federal users are still on the 2019 orchestrator or even a 2018 orchestrator. However, by being on them, they can't take advantage of modern folders. This issue is, once they get upgraded to 2020, and they start using modern folders, essentially you shouldn't really be using plastic folders anymore. Some of their frustrations aren't really long-term frustrations. Orchestrators have gotten really popular over the last few years. There are certain things that have made it so much better. That said, we're still in that transition where clients have been using classic folders and then they upgrade and they're going to have to change everything. Hopefully, they don't have to do it more than when they upgrade past 2020.

One of my clients upgraded their production environment from the 2019 orchestrator to the 2020 and everything was in plastic folders and I advised them to switch to modern folders and it was a pain. Once it was taken care of, it was great. It's just that it took a lot of convincing to tell them why it was better.

I've been using the solution for three years. 

It's pretty stable. The biggest issue is just that more companies need to really adopt a change management system, whether that's through Service Now or is built-in change management, those alerts need to be going to the RPA center of excellence. 

There are things that will change or break the UiPath bot sometimes. They're very stable and they've become more stable if there's a change management system. Automated testing can make it so you can catch things that have changed with applications with RPA testing before they've occurred and then you can fix things quickly.

The scalability was tough a few years ago, however, now it's exponentially easier with modern folders and the orchestrator.

I've worked with UiPath support. I would put them at a seven out of ten as they need to be a little bit more timely. There have been issues with a client where support has taken a really long time to get back to us or they haven't updated our support ticket, even though we've advanced. Maybe it was an isolated incident. I have worked with support before where that hasn't happened. I felt like I got in a bad run of working with the support folks and the client was definitely not pleased.

I actually don't have experience with other RPA solutions. I came from a web development background and I went straight into UiPath and now the way that it's scaled out and now that I work in the federal government, UiPath has such a large piece of the market share. I've never really seen a need to learn any other automation solutions. I may learn Power Automate at some point, however, I would really prefer to stick with UiPath.

The solution is pretty straightforward. I've run through complex issues, mostly the NuGet package and it's different with every customer. As far as the UiPath platform goes, it's pretty straightforward to deploy bots. It all depends on how an agency has its group policies set up for security and sometimes that causes issues. It's just about learning new ways to solve different problems that may be unique to an agency or may not be.

In the government, deployment takes a little longer. I would like to think development usually doesn't take that long, however, it's like going through ATO, especially if it's an unintended bot. Sometimes it can take like a few months. It just depends if they've got a center of excellence stood up or not. For example, if they've got an CI/CD pipeline or just a standard development life cycle, a lot of people don't have that set up and then it ends up taking longer as they have to go through ATO. It’s variable. Unfortunately, it's just a lot slower to get them deployed than in the private sector I think.

That’s no fault of UiPath. It's usually group policy security systems and things like that. I've had to talk to a lot of security folks and help walk them through things that need to be changed.

We've been implementing our UiPath as well.

I don't really have too much to offer about the pricing part of it. I don't really work on that side of the business. I would say my only gripe about the pricing would be something like a Studio Pro license being more expensive than a Studio license, just to essentially get something that links Test Manager. Some people might've found that a little bit hard to swallow. From what I've heard, Studio Pro is going away and Test Manager is just going to come into Studio. That would be the only thing I've noticed that I thought was a little silly. Everything else is typically not really my side of the business.

We have everything on-prem in our demo environment and the customers I work with typically have the on-prem offerings as well.

I have used UI path apps in our demo environment. I do not have any clients that are using it.

We have an AI center in our demo environment, however, I don't have any clients that are using it. I do have a client that's actually in the process of installing it right now and getting it through their governance model. That's as close as it would've come for our customers using the AI center.

To those considering UiPath, I would say, just go ahead and do it. RPA is pretty awesome. It's easy to get solutions out. There still needs to be a good bit of work done on the Citizen Developer Model, however, at the same time, as far as getting a team of engineers in there to automate things, if you get good RPA developers, you can get things automated really quickly. People can help you with your standard development life cycle. You just need to jump in.

I would rate UiPath solutions at a nine out of ten. The only reason I wouldn't give it a 10 is that, in terms of the installation of the product, sometimes the documentation leaves a lot to be desired. Sometimes it's tough to work through installation issues without actually contacting support. I do wish that was a little bit more streamlined.