UiPath Reviews

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 UiPath for invoice processing. We download all the invoices from our application and then send them individually to the respective customers via email. This involves email automation and automation of the user interface.

Building automation with UiPath is easy. When compared to other automation tools, UiPath offers a more user-friendly development platform.

It enables us to implement end-to-end automation, from the basic extraction of data to the complete uploading of data to the respective applications.

UiPath's User Community is excellent. Whenever I encounter challenges or need information about new developments, version changes, or anything related to UiPath, the community is always there to help. Therefore, I find the community extremely valuable.

UiPath can be a useful tool for anyone. It doesn't require a separate environment or the need for a developer. It is beneficial for anyone dealing with any system. Therefore, I believe it can serve as a regular daily process tool, enabling users to automate various tasks effectively. There are numerous possibilities and applications with UiPath.

In my early days of entering this field of development, I completed the UiPath Academy courses to gain a comprehensive understanding of the interface, the approach we should take, and how to utilize the portal functionalities that UiPath offers.

UiPath has been instrumental in reducing human errors by 99 percent in applications that are maintained correctly, particularly in activities such as typing. There are certain tasks where humans are prone to making mistakes while working with applications, but UiPath ensures that such errors are eliminated. Initially, I had some doubts about UiPath's ability to extract data from PDF files, as the UiPath OCR engine seemed to have limitations. Consequently, we started relying on ABBYY FineReader for this task. However, we are now exploring UiPath's UI for document understanding. As a company, we have already developed around 200 to 300 templates using ABBYY FineReader, making it challenging for us to transition entirely to UiPath document understanding at present. Nevertheless, we are considering the shift because the early versions of UiPath were not very efficient, and we couldn't fully rely on it for data extraction. However, with the recent integration of Google Vision, UiPath has significantly improved and is now providing better results in terms of OCR technology.

The user interface is the most valuable feature of the studio version. It allows us to develop all activities and create custom activities as needed. Additionally, it seamlessly integrates with the latest technologies, such as AI, making it very helpful, even for integrating ABBYY FineReader. Users can extract data from the time scripts, which is also a project involving data extraction from all PDF files.

The UiPath Community does not provide version control for the community edition. Let's say I'm currently using a specific version, and then it automatically upgrades the community version to the latest version without the user having the option to decide whether to update or not. Consequently, we cannot use the older versions in the UiPath community edition.

I encountered some issues with my local machine. I created one of the bots using a different version from the community variation, there were problems with compatibility between different versions in UiPath. While those issues used to exist, currently, it has been a long time since I last modified any of the workflows and migrated between servers and my local machine. I'm not entirely certain at the moment, but previously, there were instances where a particular activity in one version would not work in another version and would result in failure. Additionally, sometimes the select task would not identify the select areas in the actual application, even though it worked on the validators. These scenarios are rare but they do occur.

I have been using UiPath for almost two years.

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

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

The initial setup is straightforward.

The licensing fee is moderate and is based on the volume of tasks for which we use UiPath. The cost is satisfactory.

I would rate UiPath eight out of ten.

Currently, we are handling approximately 20,000 units of data on a daily basis. Our focus is on efficiently processing this data and integrating it into the scaled servers. We utilize the scale servers for data connectivity, verification, and storage purposes.

We are currently not using the AI functionality, but our company is anticipating a new project. The assignment of this project will happen very soon, and the company is considering the use of AI for it. However, this decision will ultimately depend on the user and the environment. If we determine that using AI functionality is necessary, we will integrate it into the project. At present, we have not encountered any users who explicitly require AI in their business logic. Therefore, we are not utilizing AI at the moment. Nevertheless, if any future clients request it, we will be prepared to integrate AI functionality accordingly.

Our organization has started using automation with UiPath. Before implementing UiPath, everything was done manually.

If the initial development is done correctly, then the maintenance would actually be significantly reduced. As a developer, we need to ensure that the code is always reviewed by developers, and they should always be available for this purpose. If the initial development is not carried out correctly according to the requirements, then imagine the consequences in the future. The development might need to be revisited for up to 15 years, or at least five years. If it is not done that way, the maintenance cost would be very high because the business processes keep changing. Therefore, to keep the system functioning well and the applications up-to-date, as they are not static, we need to continuously maintain the code. For instance, in the past six months, we've had to make two changes to the application we are working on. Many alterations occurred, such as UI element changes, shifting locations, and complete interface and navigation changes. Hence, it's essential for developers to always keep the code protected and up-to-date.

I recommend conducting a proof of concept using UiPath to ensure that the budget and return on investment are sufficient to implement the solution within an organization.

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.

Our primary use cases are for invoice processing and some legal intake use cases.

The benefits we see from UiPath are always time savings. I've never seen another benefit. It's always that people don't have to do manual tasks anymore.

The automation cloud offering helps to decrease UiPath's total cost of ownership, by taking care of things such as infrastructure, maintenance, and updates, if security isn't a big issue. 

With the cloud offering, you don't have as much control of where the data is and how it's protected versus the on-prem. If you're dealing with very sensitive information, you could introduce a compliance risk if you're using the cloud offering. But with the customers that we partner UiPath with, that's not an issue, so we use the cloud offering.

The screen automation features are the most valuable. There are some things, in an automation process that is complicated, that UiPath isn't very good at. And there are some things that are very repetitive and UiPath is good with it. For those repetitive aspects, it's obvious why it's valuable. It's replacing the amount of time that a human being would have to spend doing it.

We have seen that our clients have freed up time for their employees.

Our clients utilize AI functionality from UiPath. UiPath is really good at simple repetitive processes, but not as much at complex processes. The more complicated it gets, it breaks down because if it's less repetitive, it's less automatable.

AI functionality enabled our clients to automate more processes overall. It helped with end-to-end automation in the way that if you automate more processes, you save more time, and save more money for the company.

It is not very easy to build on automations. That's a problem with UiPath. I don't think it's very easy to build automation on top of it. 

Accessibility needs improvement. It would be easier to build on UiPath if they would have more employee-level users as opposed to consultants. Then that would increase the value of the product and the platform.

I have been using UiPath for two years. 

The stability is good. 

It's very scalable in our organization. The hardest thing is getting in and getting someone to build their first five automations and their first five robots in the first place. After that, it's very hard to rip out. Once you've already automated something and you've done all the in-depth work to set it up, it's pretty sticky.

There are around ten users and they're almost all solutions architects.

We've used Blue Prism and Automation Anywhere, but I think UiPath is the market leader right now.

Even though UiPath is hard to use, it's easier to use than Blue Prism. And it has more features than Automation Anywhere.

The initial setup is never straightforward. There are always bugs. It doesn't matter if it's UiPath or any other company, it's always complex. It's never easy the first time.

The implementation takes around three months. 

Ideally you don't want to take someone's job, but if you free up the time that someone was spending doing something, you don't have to pay them to do that anymore, or you can reinvest their time somewhere else.

It's expensive, but it saves a lot of money too.

My advice to someone implementing UiPath would be to hire someone technical to do it. It's not as easy to use as they say it is.

I would rate UiPath an eight out of ten. To get it to a perfect ten, it would need to be easier to use. 

I am a service provider and developer who implements UiPath for our clients. But in the company that I work for, we also use UiPath to make invoices for ourselves and, mainly, for payroll activities.

We need to get reports from our HR tool and combine them with another source of information where employees are recording the hours they spent with various clients. We then create the documents needed for the IRS. In our case, all the users of UiPath are data entry specialists in different departments, such as HR, finances, and marketing.

UiPath definitely helps reduce the cost of digital transformation.

It also reduces human error. We can be sure, given that our test case is successful, that there are no errors when none are reported. This definitely helps businesses. Errors generally lead to work being postponed. When errors come back to someone at a given point in time, they can rapidly overwhelm that person. With automation working, this is no longer the case because everything is smooth. And if there are errors, they will resolve them one by one.

In addition, it definitely frees up employee time. That is the purpose of automation. Unfortunately, I can't share metrics about this. But the additional time enables employees to focus on more important work and that affects employee satisfaction. Repetitive tasks make people irritated about the nature of their work. When they can work on new tasks that are more complex and creative, it makes an impact on their job satisfaction.

UiPath saves costs in our organization because we don't have errors where it is deployed and because it has reduced the number of FTEs who do repetitive tasks. On average, within a small company, it can save up to 10 FTEs.

One of the most valuable features is that UiPath is easy to deploy, especially for medium-sized companies. It is also easy to scale.

Also, the fact that you can scale automations without having to pay attention to the infrastructure for doing so is quite critical. The infrastructure could require a lot of maintenance resources and affect costs, so that feature is quite important.

UiPath enables you to implement end-to-end automation, with its full range of tools, starting from Automation Hub, which is the initial point for gathering your processes from business lines. It's driven from employees or a center of excellence, and goes on to include implementation, and the reporting in Orchestrator is quite powerful as well. The end-to-end coverage is important, as clients always like one tool that covers their needs and plans.

The only thing missing is something to track the development cycle. We use third-party tools to do that. That is the only gap in UiPath.

Also, scheduling of UiPath robots could be improved. Scheduling is a feature for defining in what sequence, and on what machines, you want your automations to be launched. That area could be improved.

I have been using UiPath for more than three years.

Overall, the stability of UiPath is about average. We do have some instability, because of workloads that are too massive for Orchestrator, but it could be that it was not installed in the right way.

Scalability is connected to the stability. The situation I noted when talking about the stability of UiPath happened for our largest client, where they already have 160 processes running. There are problems with the maintenance of such a large number of bots.

But in terms of increasing our usage, we are in a phase with our clients in which we are constantly enlarging the automation within their companies.

UiPath support is definitely willing to help. They will usually propose a call, if they think that will be easier for solving an issue. Their services are quite good.

We did not have a previous solution, except for Excel macros.

It is relatively easy to deploy. Of course, it's not as straightforward as a simple application installation, but with the help of UiPath, in particular, or with the help of the UiPath Community Forum, which is quite enhanced with answers about installation, it's not a big deal to install it.

Taking into consideration internal IT restriction and internal IT resources, deployment can take up to two weeks.

Our deployment strategy usually involves convincing clients that they need to start setting up a center of excellence for automation and then there are lots of initiatives that need to be undertaken within the center of excellence. Among the most critical are awareness, dealing with IT stakeholders, and of course, the capabilities of developers. Taking care of those things will lead you to a smooth path for digitizing the first processes, which are low-hanging fruit. The further you go, the more you can then enhance your automation with the more advanced capabilities, like AI, Document Understanding, or chat bots, et cetera.

Deployment of one robot takes about three months and up to five people. We need an SME who knows the process that is being automated. In addition, there is usually a business analyst who tries to help optimize the process so that it will work better with robots. We need a developer, of course, and we usually have a data solution architect who helps to ensure that overall infrastructure is functioning. It also helps to have an automation evangelist on the business side.

We have two roles for UiPath maintenance. One is the IT maintenance guy who makes sure the VM is working correctly, and that we can easily scale from the infrastructure perspective. The second role is the operator, whose day-to-day tasks include scheduling the bots correctly, implementing quick deployments by creating assets in Orchestrator, and maintaining things from an RPA perspective.

ROI usually takes six to 12 months.

Licensing is quite complex, and sometimes that's true even when we have to explain it to our customers. There may not be a way to do it more simply.

The only potential additional cost when implementing UiPath involves the third-party tools. It can be a quite big portion, of course, so you should consider that aspect. Examples would be integrating different systems within a company, systems such as Salesforce, SAP, or ServiceNow; all of the main CRMs that businesses use.

We looked at the main competitors, Blue Prism and Automation Anywhere. The decision to go with UiPath was based on contacts we have, clients who had already implemented RPA. We got better feedback about UiPath from them.

The first thing to consider within your organization is whether it's easier to deploy it on-prem or via the cloud version. Then focus on how to structure your development team. It can be either entirely a third-party service provider, or in-house developers, or it could be a hybrid. The third thing to consider is what the cost center will be for RPA implementation in your company.

The marketing side of how easily you can build automations with UiPath is a bit exaggerated. You definitely need some programming skills to do very powerful automations with it. But it still provides various levels of development tools, meaning that you could have zero programming experience and still automate some processes in your company.

UiPath is definitely the market leader in RPA. The biggest lesson I have learned from using it is to start with the low-hanging fruit, and then go on to more complex stuff.

We have two customers. One is in the insurance industry. We are implementing it within our own company to automate HR and finance processes: back office. This is the same thing with the customer: back office. That's the focus.

We are using Studio, Orchestrator, and attended bots. We are not using unattended bots yet.

For one of our clients, their intent is to create a bot because one of their key folks was retiring. This person had a lot of knowledge of the processes and how things happen. So, the idea was to create a bot that helps. They want it to do 25 percent of most of the work, and this person would just validate instead of training somebody new to do the job. Their idea was to not hire for that position anymore. Instead, if the person is just doing validation, 25 percent of that load is then spread across their current staff.

It is easy to use. That is definitely one thing that attracts people. 

I really like the feature that you get to record actions. I wish that feature was a bit more advanced where I could build more automation. Sometimes, you have to stop the robot because the robot doesn't get the level of detail that I am expecting to see in the automation. Then, you have to stop the bot, and stop or break the recording. While it's nice in creating a first sort of brush off your automation, I wish it would just go a step further.

I really like the new products that were announced here. The apps have a lot of potential. I'm interested in learning more about that in the next few months. The same thing with StudioX. Although, it would be interesting to see if they're more business-friendly or not. While UiPath is advertised as a low code platform, you can't put it in the hands of a business user. They have no idea what some of the features are. Some things, they need to have extensive training and be tech savvy in several things before they can go there.

Several of us took training using the UiPath Academy. I thought the UiPath Academy was very intuitive and easy to use. I would give it a five out of five rating.

When you are tech savvy and been trained, it is a four out of five for ease of use. Having that automation recording feature operate better and capture more of the automation that you're trying to build would make it a five. 

With the new products that were announced, UiPath closed a few of the gaps. I can see how they could expand the products into other areas. There is potential there for some workflow capability. I know this would be going beyond RPA at that point, but having one platform that does a lot of things would be nice. Because as it stands, when you need to do a workflow or approval process, you need to send this out somewhere else. There are things the bot can do, but I can see some of that functionality already showing up though with the tasks and apps. However, I would like to see more. That would be good.

Moving bots to the cloud would be the next good step. The new product has Orchestrator in the cloud. I think moving to bots to the cloud could also be next along with having Studio in the cloud where you can do everything in the cloud: Deploy and run your bots from the cloud.

It is pretty stable. I would rate it a five out of five.

I haven't used the technical support.

We learned about this stuff about two years and a half ago. We started exploring it, then we decided to take the plunge and try it out. That's how it came about.

The initial setup was pretty straightforward. 

It took us about four months from the initial purchase of UiPath to putting the robots in production. With our first deployment, we made a lot of mistakes. For us, it was like the first time you do something, you don't know exactly what you're doing, you just do it. Then, the second time, you're like, "Oh, now, I can go back and do other things differently." With us, it was very much like that. We learned sort of on the job.

We did the installation ourselves. 

I didn't do it, but I know that the people that did the installation didn't have any issues with it. They didn't need to open a ticket in particular or anything like that. This tells me that it was fairly easy. 

We have saved steps and time from people doing their jobs because they're not doing all this crazy validation anymore.

We evaluated the top three. UiPath at the time was number three, Blue Prism was number number two, and Automation Anywhere was number one. So, we weighed them out.

I liked some of the functionality from Automation Anywhere. The recording feature of Automation Anywhere was much better and easier to use than UiPath. Although, I haven't seen the new Studio. In 2019, maybe they changed some things in there. Regardless, the Automation Anywhere tool seemed easier to use. But, in terms of partnership, they were not a good fit for the values of the company. Those things all go into account when trying to partner with somebody. That's why we decided to go with UiPath.

Some of the features in the software looked the same between Automation Anywhere and UiPath. Blue Prism seems very hard to use. That one we kind of killed on the spot. Between like Automation Anywhere and UiPath, it was more about how the company's vision, and where things were headed. All of that sort of helped. So, we were at that point that we were not really looking at the software anymore. We were looking at other things. That's how we ended up here.

With the new additions that were announced yesterday, I'd probably give it an eight (out of 10). I still would like to see some other features, which I know UiPath would start crossing into BPM a bit when you start talking workflows and things like that. However, that would be a good next step given their market share, customers outreach, and beyond API and some partners that they have today.