UiPath Reviews

We have a lot of UiPath use cases. One of the bigger ones is the billing backup process.  

Our company is growing like crazy and using automation allowed us to accommodate that growth without significantly increasing our headcount. We're always searching for new technology to help us stay competitive. We prioritize use cases based on the amount of time it will save. Also, the cost of the resource is factored in. The CEO's time is more valuable than my time.

We've done a lot to evangelize automation among our employees and incentivize them to submit ideas through rewards and prices. Additionally, we have seminars to share information about automation and the kinds of processes that might be good candidates.

UiPath Studio is the feature we use the most to build our automations, and Orchestrator enables us to stitch it all together and monitor bots.

UiPath helps us serve our customers better. For example, we built an automation that enables us to send our invoices to customers quicker, so we get paid faster and do more work for our clients. The solution also frees up staff to work on other projects. If we plan to automate a person's job fully, we ensure that we'll have something else ready for them to do.

UiPath has made some of the Activities less user-friendly as time goes on. Some things that were previously configured through the Properties panel have been moved to a separate activity card. It was easier when everything was in one place and faster. 

Sometimes, UiPath tries to make it more accessible for people who aren't tech-savvy, but it complicates things for tech-oriented users like me. 

I have used UiPath since 2020.

UiPath has been relatively stable. We haven't encountered many issues on UiPath's side. A few times, the performance has been miserably slow while we were trying to debug something, but I think they have fixed whatever the issue was.

UiPath's scalability has been pretty good. We haven't had any issues on the UiPath side. Our biggest problem has been managing our growth. UiPath gives us the tools to do that.

I rate UiPath support nine out of 10. We haven't needed to contact them often because most of our developers are tech-savvy people. 

Positive

I was a VBA guy before. I still use Python for automating some processes, but UiPath is used for different purposes.

The initial deployment of UiPath was fairly complex, but I wasn't directly involved.

We hired excellent partners to assist with all the integrations we needed.

We've seen a return in time saved and reduced headcount. We've automated over 100 production processes. It's the equivalent of having 27 full-time employees, more than covering the solution's cost. We track the ROI on all our automations rigorously and ensure that the automations justify their costs, resulting in substantial savings. 

I rate UiPath a solid eight out of 10.

Initially, we used task-based swivel-chair automation to fix our broken technological footprint. It was common for us to use three applications for one process. Now, we're moving toward larger digital transformation use cases. We use UiPath for Document Understanding, and we're still waiting for our insurance company to approve generative AI. 

Our executives define our AI and automation strategy, which is devolved to our department leaders and employees to determine tasks they don't like doing that we can digitize. Our initial goal was to improve operational efficiency, which we've achieved. 

Action Center is used extensively for digital transformation purposes. The shift from using Excel to bots, providing precise human work, is highly valuable.

We realized significant time savings across three business areas, totaling several thousand hours. Our benchmark process was automating the manual processing of credit card chargebacks. Fully automating this process not only saved us time but also millions of dollars.

The impact on stakeholders has varied. Some segments have leaned into using UiPath. For example, there's a high level of RPA penetration in wholesale. Employees in wholesale have incorporated automation into their applications as critical functions. In other business areas, they're bringing us small, task-based automations that don't impact clients much. They're usually secondary automations that help teammates who work directly with clients.

UiPath has freed staff to work on other projects consistently across multiple lines of business. The amount saved depends on the department. Some areas of the business save hundreds of hours, but the impact is smaller in others.

Some of the biggest areas of improvement are already being addressed. We're looking forward to the healing agent because we see a lot of UI migration because of our broken technological footprint. 

I have used UiPath since 2020.

UiPath is incredibly stable. Any issues we've had were on our side. We needed to add enough VDIs to support the digital infrastructure. Those have been resolved by adding more blade servers.

I have been able to scale up, showing no issues during the installation of new blade servers.

I rate UiPath support nine out of 10. 

Positive

We used Blue Prism. 

Our licensing is generally pretty good for our contract.

We evaluated Automation Anywhere. The decision came down to costs and capabilities. UiPath could do some things that AA couldn't.

I rate UiPath eight out of 10. 

We use UiPath across departments, including HR, IT, procurement, and the supply chain. One use case is hiring and other simple HR-related tasks. We also automate complex processes, like using Document Understanding and machine learning to extract vendor contract information and input it into our procurement system. 

Many applications don't have built-in APIs, and some repetitive processes require a lot of staff to perform. We try to identify those processes and automate them. At the end of the day, it's about how quickly a particular process can be implemented, what kind of ROI we can realize, and the speed of completing the process. 

These processes take forever if you're doing it manually. For example, let's take something as simple as hiring. Evaluating a candidate probably takes 30 to 45 minutes to complete all the steps, and large organizations are constantly hiring. Another challenge is the number of staff you have. By automating using robots, you can reduce the number of people you need to hire and complete the work much faster. It also helps resolve turnover. You can run the automation 24/7, and robots don't take vacations, so things happen faster. 

Another benefit is SLA compliance. We have SLAs to meet for data, and we need to complete some tasks within 48 or 72 hours. Automation helps us meet those targets by completing jobs faster. UiPath frees staff to work on other tasks. Just one process that we use for hiring has easily freed two or three people. Now, they're doing tasks that require human intelligence and knowledge. 

Any solution, such as Power Automate, can do traditional RPA functions, but UiPath's Document Understanding sets it apart. The document understanding feature can handle a significant amount of handwritten notes and efficiently extract information. While there is a human-in-the-loop component for validation, it is still faster than manually extracting information.

My biggest problem is that UiPath is growing so fast and adding integration with so many different products that it's hard to keep up. The COEs at various companies and our developers aren't able to keep pace with what's happening. It's a good problem to have. I'm not complaining, but there are so many features and little time for developers to learn and implement them. 

If you need something new like a CICD pipeline or somebody for a test suite or to work with Document Understanding, you can't use our existing staff because they don't have the skills. Now, I need to go out and hire more people. I need to reduce the company's size to save money but also spend more to hire. 

I have used UiPath for about seven years.

We have not encountered any stability issues with UiPath. The cloud-based deployment has been stable, and we have not experienced any unexpected robot shutdowns. Issues tend to arise from other SaaS applications rather than UiPath.

UiPath has been able to scale effectively as our organization grows. Scaling with UiPath has been easy and efficient.

The customer service has always been good. However, it takes longer to reach support now than it did four to five years ago, this can be attributed to their increased customer base.

Positive

At my current organization, we didn't use a different solution before UiPath. However, I have previous experience with Blue Prism and Automation Anywhere.

The initial setup was straightforward. Despite using a partner, we managed most of the work in-house due to my previous experience with UiPath.

We worked with a partner for the implementation. Although the partner helped, we managed most of the work ourselves to tailor the solution to our needs.

When you start a program, it takes a while to reach the point where you achieve an ROI. Still, if you're not seeing an ROI with UiPath by the second year, you're doing it wrong. We are doing that right now. 

We've found a lot of processes working across different teams and departments. We spoke to the leads of various COEs and found processes that would realize the highest ROI or SLA compliance. A department might have only one or two procurement processes, but they are sizeable. Automating those will help you achieve an ROI faster.

UiPath isn't cheap, but it's priced competitively with other automation solutions, and it offers more resources.

I was not part of the organization during the evaluation phase, but I know they chose UiPath because it was easier to set up with comparable costs to other solutions, more resources available, and robust training material for basic RPA functions. It's easier to train people to perform basic RPA functions.

I rate UiPath nine out of 10.

I have several use cases but primarily I use UiPath to input transaction data to the websites.

UiPath has helped us improve operational efficiency by automating tasks previously performed by humans. This frees up employees to focus on more meaningful and strategic work. In one project, we achieved 100 percent automation, while another reached approximately 70 percent.

Building automation using UiPath is easy even for inexperienced users.

We use UiPath to automate production processes in the healthcare industry.

To automate end-to-end processes, we employed multiple UiPath bots, as a single bot couldn't handle the entire process due to the disparate nature of the systems involved. These bots consisted of a web automation bot, a secure automation bot, and an existing legacy automation bot, which served as the backbone of the automation.

The UiPath User Community is accessible through the UiPath developer portal. It's a valuable resource full of information, where we can learn about the impact of new releases from other users and experts.

In the time I have been using Uipath, I have noticed that the text recognition tools have improved making it the best in the market.

UiPath has been beneficial in helping to minimize our on-premise footprint by automating 100 percent of some tasks.

As developers my team and I use the Developer Academy courses from UiPath to get certified. We also use the courses to help train new users which is helpful.

I am happy with the AI functionality. It has helped reduce the development time for us.

The AI functionality has helped us to automate more processes overall.

UiPath helps speed up our digital transformation and reduce the cost. Our digital transformation using UiPath did not require complex upgrades or application support.

UiPath reduces human error by 80 percent, enabling faster transaction rates compared to manual processing.

UiPath is the most user-friendly automation tool in the RPA category.

Storing data partially using internal data tables for internal calculations, without relying on a full database, is most beneficial for our workflows.

Computational text recognition has room for improvement as it is not 100 percent accurate.

I have been using UiPath for around two years.

I would rate the stability of UiPath ten out of ten.

I would rate the scalability of UiPath ten out of ten.

The technical support is good.

Positive

I previously used Blue Prism but found UiPath to be the most user-friendly.

The deployment was straightforward and took two hours to complete using four people.

UiPath is expensive which is why we need to have bots that run 24/7 to maximize the work and justify the cost.

I would rate UiPath nine out of ten.

We have UiPath deployed in one location.

Maintenance is only required when changes are made to the website.

I recommend UiPath to others.

We use UiPath to automate data entries for ERP and CRM.

Building automation using UiPath is straightforward.

UiPath has helped automate the processes of start-ups and newly constructed systems and offers a significant discount on licenses, prices, and service mandates. Our operations were upgraded by 60 to 70 percent.

UiPath enables us to implement end-to-end automation, which is of great importance.

UiPath's user community is valuable.

UiPath has helped minimize our on-premises footprint. We have deployed our UiPath license in the cloud using Microsoft Azure, but we can also utilize any other cloud provider. As a result, we no longer need to wait for weeks for hardware to arrive.

We can enhance our employees' skills by utilizing UiPath Academy courses.

The AI's ability to automate processes that are more complex or involved has helped with our proposals and use case scenarios.

UiPath's AI functionality enables us to automate a greater number of processes overall. This has contributed to achieving end-to-end automation in our organization.

UiPath helps accelerate digital transformation and reduce its costs.

UiPath helps reduce human errors, which is one of its significant advantages. The operations for our HR team, sales team, marketing team, and technical use cases have become faster and error-free.

UiPath has freed up approximately 50 percent of our employees' time.

UiPath has saved approximately 35 percent of the costs for our organization.

UiPath is easy to use, configure, and integrate.

UiPath can improve by enabling us to target specific use cases based on the departments within an industry, rather than just focusing on the industry itself.

I have been using UiPath for two years.

I rate the stability of UiPath, eight out of ten.

I rate the scalability of UiPath, ten out of ten.

The technical support team is good.

Positive

We previously used Microsoft Power Automate but switched to UiPath because it is easier to use and does not have the same limitations.

The complexity of the deployment was moderate.

We have witnessed approximately a 35 percent return on investment.

UiPath is slightly more expensive than Automation Anywhere and Microsoft Power Automate.

I evaluated Automation Anywhere, but based on the reviews and business experience of multiple friends, UiPath appears to be less complex than Automation Anywhere.

I rate UiPath a ten out of ten.

We have a team of 20 people who are responsible for maintenance support.

We are using it to extract information from invoices. We have different types of invoices from about 180 vendors and we need to automate extraction from about 6,000 invoices. We receive invoices via email and are using automation to extract the invoice, put it into a folder, extract information from the invoice, and then enter this information into a SAP-based solution. Not every detail is taken from the invoice, only the relevant portions. 

We have already developed it and it's in the testing phase, where what is being tested is sending the money to the vendor.

For example, if we have purchased something for £1,000 from a vendor and they have sent us an invoice, we extract all the information, confirm that the purchase has been done by looking at our records, and then we have to submit it to the accounts office. That office will create the payment invoice for the vendor.

It now takes about half an hour for each invoice to be processed versus taking two to three days to do the same invoice manually.

And while I wouldn't say that UiPath enables end-to-end automation for everything, for invoice processing it does. Cash to payable is one of those things that UiPath is able to do from end-to-end, right from the point of getting the invoice from the client to the end where an email is sent to that client saying, "Your invoice has been processed. We have transferred X amount of money to your account." In some cases, especially when invoices are handwritten, we face small problems but, other than that, we are able to do it.

And the turnaround times in creating automations are much less compared to when we were using Automation Anywhere. With that solution we were not able to do it as quickly as we can using UiPath.

We did a PoC for an HR company that was giving appointment letters to about 100 people across its franchise. They wanted to give them out in one go and wanted some way of automating the process. UiPath had the tools that we could use to manipulate it enough and send the appointment letters in 15 to 20 seconds.

And automation has absolutely freed up employee time. Now, people are only looking at exceptional cases most of the time, where automation is not possible. They aren't looking at most cases. Productivity has improved to a great extent compared to what it was before automation. People are going home on time and getting their leaves on time and getting to spend quality time with their families. They are happier compared to how things were.

In addition, there was a lot of human error when people were entering information into the computer. Especially in an accounting situation, if someone inputs a four instead of a nine, it's very difficult to figure out where things went wrong. But with UiPath, there is no more inaccuracy or typos.

What we like about the product is that we are able to customize a lot of things quickly because UiPath already has certain APIs and tools available that we can integrate with our system to extract information. For example, if you have to open Word or extract information and put it into tools like SAP or Salesforce, those things get done quickly and efficiently.

I have been using UiPath for about a year.

UiPath is always uploading new versions of its software. So far, we haven't had any problems related to UiPath crashing or anything like that. The stability has been satisfactory. It's good, decently stable software.

It is very scalable. You can scale it up to any amount that you want or scale it down, depending on the kind of processes that you're doing. 

We have automated the number of robots that we use. Every day we look at how many invoices we have to process. Suppose that today we have to process 5,000 invoices. In that situation, we use all 10 robots. If the next there are 15,000 invoices, two more robots will be activated to take on that load. And it works in reverse. If there are fewer than 5,000 invoices, we have eight robots working on them. It took us a while to automate that aspect.

The support is a little bit lacking, response-wise. Just like in banking, where they give you a relationship manager, they should provide someone who is responsible for a project. That person would be responsible for responding to your queries quickly and efficiently. What happens now is that I have to wait for them to come back to me and it takes a lot of my developers' time to figure out how to do things. Support could be better.

Neutral

We did a project for a company that wanted to identify certain vendors to talk to but they needed to know which vendor would give them the best price. They needed to do a comparison but they were spending tons of time evaluating the vendor information. We used Python to do this, not UiPath. We made it possible to do the comparison quickly and efficiently so that when they speak to the vendors they know exactly what to talk about. It improved their resource allocation because they had 15 people doing this work. Now, there are only two people doing it. The other 13 people have been deployed to other sections and other types of work.

Even though Python is very powerful, you need to do a lot of coding. We wanted software where we could minimize coding, a low-code solution.

We looked at UiPath, Automation Anywhere, Blue Prism, and Kofax. But out of all of them, we found that UiPath was a more wholesome product. It's not that the other software products don't have good features, it's just that UiPath has a lot of tools that can be used quickly and efficiently.

Right now UiPath is on the cloud, but eventually, it will be on-prem. When we signed the agreement with them, we told them that we would do it on the cloud and they had to provide us with the storage and cloud space. They were very accommodating about that.

We were able to deploy the first automation in about two weeks. It's not just setting things up, but also making sure that it is working. The users also needed to evaluate things using their tools and data. So the setup was not that bad. Within two weeks we were all set up and ready.

It is worth the cost. We did costing for our invoicing project and we are seeing between 20 and 25 percent ROI.

The price of UiPath is too high. From their website, what I see is that if you can buy one license it will cost about 5,000 rupees here in India. And for enterprise solutions, they are charging about 800,000 rupees for about 100 licenses, which is quite high compared to similar software solutions.

The ease of building automations depends on what the client wants. Some processes can be done very quickly and efficiently, but some need a lot of tweaking to meet the requirements of the client and they take a little time. But as a general rule of thumb, it is quite efficient actually. Some take very little time and some can take a couple of weeks.

The UiPath user forums are good, but there's nothing new in them. Whatever they are saying, we have already done it. There isn't much new information there. For example, UiPath has a tool known as Document Understanding, using Computer Vision to do a lot of the processing. We were stuck a little bit but the user community was not able to give us much insight mainly because Document Understanding was very new. It still is quite new and people have not explored it enough to give their feedback. We were flailing about, trying to figure out what to do and what not to do, what works and what doesn't. We were more or less on our own.

In our company, we try to make sure that prospects have gone through the UiPath Academy on their own. For us, it is mandatory that they do so to have at least a basic idea of what UiPath can do and, during interviews before we hire them, we try to test them on some of the use cases. We don't want to spend time teaching them about it. We assume that if they have gone through the Academy courses, they are well-versed in what is expected.

Our primary use case for UiPath is robotic process automation and automation fabric with document understanding AI.

Usually, after six to twelve months, our customers start implementing end-to-end processing with UiPath but they often start off with small tasks.

There is a clear value in being part of the UiPath community. We get money from UiPath for discounted licenses. Our customers hire us to implement their professional visions, and we're paid by the hour.

UiPath improves our customers' organizations. The effects of this growth usually start small. For example, we may notice that specific records are transferred in less time or with less manpower. Then, as the growth continues, those people become more involved in all aspects of the company.

The solution has a large impact on minimizing the on-premises footprint for our customers.

The Academic courses are vast. It provides our clients with the opportunity to start on their own and become somewhat independent. We use the courses as a huge resource to train our customers.

Usually, after six to 12 months, we start introducing our clients to more complex processes where the document understanding or AI fabric capabilities of UiPath are useful.

UiPath speeds up the digital transformation for our clients.

It helps reduce human error. This is mostly seen after UiPath has been implemented because people are not usually willing to admit their mistakes.

UiPath definitely frees up on average three to five percent of employee time per month. We have had small instances where the solution replaced a full SE with only one process.

The solution can reduce costs in retraining people on old or mundane processes, and it can also reduce costs by automating certain processes. This in turn can free up resources so that we don't have to invest in retraining people to do those same processes again. Automation eliminates the need to hire new people to do the job or carry out the process. After 18 to 24 months, many of our clients find that they don't need to hire more people to keep up with their growing business.

The simplicity of creating automation from a low code level is the most valuable feature of the solution.

UiPath's built-in automation is very easy to use. Our organization educates and provides lessons on how to use its automation and the feedback is that UiPath is easy once the introduction is complete. The solution is comparable to other software in this market.

There has been a huge improvement in Linux, Microsoft, and Mac support recently. However, we still struggle with the implementation in Citrix environments. The solution works with Citrix, but there is room for improvement. 

UiPath releases a lot of new features multiple times throughout the year causing our customers to fall behind. It would be fine if there was only one release a year.

I have been using UiPath for six years.

We are a technical partner, so we have direct support. If we post the questions well formed to the support team, we get a quick answer from them.

Positive

We use Automation Anywhere, Blue Prism, Power Automate, and our own products during the typical analysis quadrants. UiPath is the solution we use 95 percent of the time.

The main difference between UiPath and other RPA tools is the vision. While other tools focus on automating tasks, UiPath focuses on developing citizens who can automate tasks. This means that UiPath is the best tool for organizations that want to invest in their employees' skills.

The initial setup is straightforward. I give the ease of deployment a ten out of ten.

The implementation is completed in-house.

UiPath is not the cheapest solution, it's more or less the most expensive one, but we get what we pay for. I give the pricing an eight out of ten for its competitiveness.

I give the solution a ten out of ten.

We're a consultancy and I am the strategic architect. I have implemented the product at 25 different client locations spanning multiple industries. Their RPA requirements range from pretty standard, bread-and-butter workflows that navigate an application and follow some business rules, to more sophisticated ones that are integrating Document Understanding and a little bit of chatbot.

I have deployed it on multiple application stacks, including out-of-the-box SAP, Oracle, Microsoft, and some specialty, third-party products like DNA, Encompass, LendingQB, and others.

We have helped companies reshape their resources. That's a part of the benefits. They want to put automation in place because they want to change their headcount and not have to do those rote, mundane business processes.

We have been able to show enhancements in resourcing. A very good example is that we built a process for a client who had to spend three or four days a month doing a really lousy process involving 3,000 payment transactions, every month. The robot is able to execute that workflow in a half day, so we freed up two and a half to three and a half days where he does not have to do it. To him, this was a huge lifesaver.

It has also reduced human error, for sure. That's a positive selling point. When we build workflows for our customers we include business reports and audit logs. We typically add a status flag for a record so that every record that is transacted has traceability through the audit log. We also have a status report, and that shows how many records the workflow executed, how many were successful, and how many failed. We see a range where between 65 and 90 percent of the records go straight through. That means all the business rules were met and the process was completed for those records. That shows that they're identifying a much smaller subset of errors and that they can rely on the robot to successfully complete the end-to-end transaction. And whatever is leftover requires human touch.

That changes the dynamic in operations. They don't have to concentrate on every single record, but only somewhere between 10 and 35 percent of all records may have to be handled manually. It shows them which ones had errors, the ones that did not meet the business rules, and they know which ones to concentrate on. That's a feedback loop that helps them decide if they need to add a business rule or change a business rule to get to a higher percentage of throughput.

In terms of employee time, I have documented situations where clients might have had 10 people working on half a dozen business processes. We've implemented IPA—intelligent process automation—and then they only need three or four people, so they can redeploy those other folks to other places. It saves them money because they don't have the FTE costs they had before for those processes.

From a development point of view, the Studio tool as the basis of componentized architecture has been a really critical part. You get out-of-the-box, componentized architecture to jumpstart or accelerate development and that's a very key feature. 

When talking about deployment, you have a very robust infrastructure to manage your automations, the robots, and how they can be configured, deployed, executed, monitored, and maintained. 

When it comes to process discovery, it has excellent front-end tools and capabilities vis-à-vis Task Capture and Automation Hub. 

And at the back end, the notion of botting sites to monitor and manage your robotic infrastructure and reporting on it is pretty great. These are all pretty good tools.

The ease of use is because of the UI's capabilities. The fact that it has a .NET Framework, from a developer's point of view, makes it a very easy product to jumpstart into. But what is key is the ability to do really fine development activities. You really can get to a nuanced level of development for complicated and robust workflows. The tools are definitely well constructed to allow you that kind of flexibility. 

A really good example would be if you are doing something with OCR to read a PDF. You can vary the OCR engines and test them out to determine which OCR engine will give you the best results. That's pretty good because you do get into situations where one engine may work better than another.

We can also implement end-to-end automation and that is critically important. We always strive for what I call "straight-through" processing, where we're trying to handle all the use cases based on business rules. We're not always successful, but that's not a bad thing. If we can take 60 percent of your processes and automate them with straight-through processing, where everything works, your exceptions are a much smaller work set. That has had a significant impact on clients. For one of my clients, where we have worked very hard, they have better than 90 percent "throughput," meaning that 90 percent of their transactions go completely through the automated workflows. The client has been incredibly pleased with that.

We also use the UiPath Academy all the time, in two ways. Internally, we avail ourselves of all the courses. It's especially important to understand new updates and releases. It's a great place to go to understand what those new features are. That is of real value. 

But the Academy is also a good starting point when I want my engineers to be certified. They can jumpstart that process by going to the Academy and making sure they know how the product works. They follow through on that program and complete the training. Once they finish that, we try to get a project or two under their belts, and then have them take the certification exams.

One of the chief problems in all of our implementations is "application sensitivity." If an automation involves a webpage or Outlook, every item on that screen—the menu bar, the actual document, an attachment, a field—has a selector so that workflow can work correctly. UiPath does a very good job, whether for legacy systems or newer systems, of using selectors so that you can build applications that have discrete functionality. 

But what happens when a selector breaks? That means that something has changed in the application. This is especially true with SaaS or third-party applications. They make one change to a field and the selector breaks and that means it has to be touched and fixed. 

UiPath could do a better job of enveloping selectors to make them less fragile. There are techniques that can be used to achieve that, even without a system-related improvement, but they are not out-of-the-box. That is the one area that is the biggest pain point. It happens all the time.

They should reduce selector sensitivity and improve remediation when one does break. 

I don't know how they would do it, but if the change that caused the break were a relatively minor thing, they should somehow have it automatically recalibrated. I'm sure it's a tough problem, but clients complain to me about that all the time. I have to explain to them, "Well, the application changed." They'll say, "Well, we're looking at it, we don't see anything." It's often true that you can't see it, but the selector underneath broke and that means something was done but, visually, an end user would not see it if it was a minor change. So I'd like UiPath to find a way to "desensitize" selectors.

I have been using UiPath for four years.

It is very stable. There are no questions about that.

There are absolutely no issues with scalability. We're using this with multiple clients.

The new robot polling is very helpful. We are using it effectively for clients and that technical capability is a great enhancement. The modern folder profile gets us there as well. 

We're very pleased with the cloud-enabled product sets. I push that with as many clients as I can because it's the easiest to implement. On the cloud side, there were issues at one point with their licensing management, but that has finally been smoothed out and that makes life easier. If you want to add another product, as long as it gets licensed, boom, it's there. I don't have to think about it. Overall, the scalability is great.

The environments that we work in are client-driven, but they can have multiple locations and geographies. We have a couple of clients where the implementation is in the US but it is supporting Europe. And we now have a client that needs to be supported in South America. We are cloud-enabled for them and the product works great. And while it has nothing to do with UiPath, there are some latency issues over the network, so we may have to rethink how we deploy in different hemispheres. But we know that UiPath tech can support that.

We will lean on their technical support when we have exhausted our capabilities. Most of our issues have been in the Document Understanding sphere, especially in custom model development, although sometimes there have been issues with it in out-of-the-box systems. For all of my IPA projects that include Document Understanding, I try to convince the customer to buy Premium Support, because regular support could take two to three days to finally get to the right answer. With Premium Support, I'll get it in a day or a day and a half, and that can make a big difference.

I rate their support at seven out of 10 because the initial triaging takes the longest time, and that's one of the greatest concerns for me. If you have regular support, as part of the triage process they will tell you to look at frequently asked questions, but of course, we've already done that. Overall, the FAQs are one of the weak points in the fabric of available resources. We're putting in a support ticket because we haven't found what we need. That level of support is very generic and you really have to knock hard on their door hard and say, "We've done that already. We haven't found our answer. We need to talk to an engineer." Level-one support is usually too junior, but when we get to the next level, we finally start to get better answers. Level two is good, but level one and that triaging can be painful.

We rely on the partner network, and UiPath has been an excellent partner. We do use the community as a reference point, but we don't get a lot of value from using the FAQs.

On the flip side, I have used the Community editions of all the products. That's a big plus, especially when a client doesn't want to put any money into it upfront because they're very nervous. We use the Community edition to prove the point. In that respect, the Community edition and the forums do become helpful.

Neutral

I started with Automation Anywhere in a previous job. I like both products. Both it and UiPath are excellent. Going with UiPath really had nothing to do with a problem with Automation Anywhere. When I came to my current company, they had already decided to go with UiPath. They had done a few projects with UiPath and that set the tone going forward.

As a consultant in a global practice, I do have a couple of Automation Anywhere projects going on. I also have a project that is using Power Automate. 

Our preferred IPA solution is UiPath, but clients drive that decision. I had one client who said, out of the gate, "No. We're using Automation Anywhere. No questions asked." And I said, "Alright. It's a good product." 

But as a company, we lean toward UiPath as a starting point and they've been an excellent partner, and I say that wholeheartedly.

Deploying the solution is straightforward. It involves a low level of complexity and less effort.

I have a separate DevOps team that actually does the build-out of the environment. They're separate from the developer team. DevOps does the implementation. They'll talk to the client's IT department directly and work on all the details of setting up the infrastructure and they'll get it ready for us. Then the developers take over.

We do lean on UiPath support in some niche issues areas, but for the most part, my engineers are pretty well qualified.

In terms of the solution's AI functionality, such as Document Understanding and chatbots, we no longer advertise ourselves as doing RPA. We advertise ourselves as an IPA shop—intelligent process automation. The focal point of that is Document Understanding and the DRUID AI Chatbot capabilities. We're getting an awful lot of Document Understanding projects and we use our sandbox to pump our clients' data into the Document Understanding frameworks and intelligent form factors to prove that the solution works. We really want to go for the bigger ticket items that require Document Understanding.

When dealing with Document Understanding, we are introducing a new capability to the client. We train them on how to use the tool. That is a definite change in the client's skill sets and it does pay for itself in the long run. There is a delicate balance. The investment cost is always the tricky part, but once clients start seeing their data coming through automatically, the light bulb comes on.

Since UiPath became a publicly traded company, the flexibility and variability on pricing have really gone down a lot. It's tougher to get a better deal out of them. I'm not saying it can't happen, but as a publicly traded company, they're not the same company that they were when they were private and first growing. It's understandable. They have stockholders to answer to.

The top vendors are

1. UiPath
2. Automation Anywhere
3. Blue Prism (which we don't do a lot of work in)
4. Power Automate, only because it's Microsoft.

I encourage people to look at the review and evaluation sites to help them start getting an idea of what is available. Then I say, "Here is some actual work we've done with UiPath. This is our actual experience. Check the marketplace data that's out there," because there's a lot of information they can avail themselves of. That way, they can be satisfied that what our company is recommending is valid.

I may point out some of the key questions for them to look into. If they're trying to scale, what are the business problems they're trying to solve? If they're thinking about a Document Understanding requirement, they should compare what's going out there with other intelligent document processing capabilities and take it from there.

As a partner, what has been helpful is that UiPath offers a not-for-resale (NFR) license. These are fully loaded licenses and ours is cloud-enabled. We're using them for PoCs very effectively. There is a lot of great value in them. I have a couple of projects now where we've asked clients to send us their sample data, their documents. We have our sandbox ready and I have one or two developers knock that process out with a turnaround of one or two days. We can bring it back to the client and say, "Here's your data and this is what we were able to do with it." That is very effective.

I really appreciate the way the product has been architected. It's a robust product set. We have built custom models with the UiPath toolset. We've had several use cases where we had to do so because there was no out-of-the-box solution, and the tools are great.

The AI functionality has enabled us to automate more processes overall. They are the more difficult projects to do because Document Understanding is not a pure, out-of-the-box solution. There is work involved in it but we've been successful at it. Once we get the models well-trained, the client starts to really see real value. They're seeing the straight-through processing that they're trying to achieve.

The client I mentioned earlier, the one with the 90 percent "throughput," is an example. That automation is the result of custom models. We worked hard on that and we were very successful. The client has been very happy.

Overall, the way I would rate UiPath depends on the support level I have to use. If it's Standard Support, it's a five or six out of 10. If I have Premium Support, it's a seven or eight.