What is our primary use case?
One of the main use cases is stringing together different applications, like a financial system to a database for data manipulation or data extraction. Then, all sorts of little things are added onto that from a process prospective.
How has it helped my organization?
From a process perspective, every single implementation that we have done has saved time: Anywhere from 50 to 90 percent of eliminating the process time. There was an example where there was an analyst who was doing a manual comparison process of a bunch of different systems. The use case was that the bot just goes and checks a bunch of systems, then compares everything. They only have to manage the exception, but it almost entirely eliminated the time capacity.
What is most valuable?
There are pre-built activities, which let you build stuff quickly. It is a functionality where you can record, as a baseline, what a process looks like. Then, you can iterate off of that to build the bot and make it more stable. That is pretty nice because it saves you time.
It also lets you display something very quickly, so you can see exactly how it's going to work.
What needs improvement?
The product has met expectations in terms of ease of use. There is a lot of stuff going on underneath. In the Studio view, there is a right-hand side where there is a lot of configurable components of activities which are built. Some of those are exposed, and some are not. From a stability standpoint, it would be interesting if more of that was power user available.
Some of the documentation that UiPath has around the technical specifications, from a security perspective, are very factual and comprehensive, but they don't have an audience, like CIOs who need to approve this solution. Therefore, the documentation is one area where I might smooth the process out a bit, since the audience is different from the way the documentation is written as technical specifications.
In a Citrix environment, you can't directly connect to a lot of the applications that you can on a desktop environment, or in a server environment, where it is not a virtual machine and going through a pipe. However, that's just a technical restriction.
I would like it if UiPath could watch someone do a process, then builds the bot, but not in a recorder fashion. I want it to watch someone during their day and observe the processes that they do, then provide an informed assessment of what parts of that could be automated. This is because some people do stuff that they don't even realize could be automated, like an interpretation of people's tasks. Technically, that would be hard to do, but it would make a killer application. This make it a product to install on every single person's computer at a desktop level, or every environment, wherever the process is taking place.
There is some learning curve to using even the initial capabilities. While there are a lot of great tools to help you get up to speed and learn how to do it, I almost think there are two types of tracks which are only being addressed by a single product:
- People who are technical and know the stuff which going on behind the scenes. When they use it, they want to have more access and more ways that they can tweak it.
- People who have no coding experience, or low coding experience. In this case, it's great, but slightly limited, in terms of the activities which are pre-built and those are very extensive.
It would be nice to have a medium between the two or power user concepts, where you can open up all of the back-end. I do know you can do this in UiPath to access the code and take advantage of APIs, when you get into some of the really complex implementations beyond just send an emails and copying and pasting data from one thing to the other, which takes up a lot of people's time. There are additional things behind the scenes that would be great to have access to with UiPath.
What do I think about the stability of the solution?
It seems very stable. Like in a desktop environment, I can't think of any issues.
What do I think about the scalability of the solution?
For scalability, it requires additional skews to orchestrate everything. While it is an area where I've had less experience, that is the key component to making it scale.
Automation technology at our customers' companies is in its early phases. They are beyond the pilot, but not at scale, which is pretty common.
A lot of the agencies that we work with, where they are doing a pilot, do one-offs and growing exponentially (one to two to three bots). They just keep using it, then reinvesting it. The bot process is pretty quick: We are doing sprints for them in six to 12 weeks, and they are done.
How are customer service and technical support?
As a partner, we have a lot of great people at UiPath who we can call and ask about things.
They've been helpful with understanding what the timeline is for new stuff, like integration and new activity sets.
From a partnership perspective, like in delivery, they've been really helpful.
Which solution did I use previously and why did I switch?
Having a free Community Edition makes a difference. As long as you can get it installed, then there is no barrier to playing around with it and seeing what it can do.
How was the initial setup?
The simplicity or complexity of the installation depends on the environment and the CIO's willingness to install it, especially in the Federal space.
What was our ROI?
It takes no more than six months to get to an ROI that is at least recouping the costs. Time and again, we are just seeing those cost savings get rolled back into doing the next project. It's like a self-funding, revolving process.
UiPath help our customers to eliminate human errors.
What's my experience with pricing, setup cost, and licensing?
I would like to have transparency in pricing. We're creating more functional robotic process automation use cases all over the place. I'm never really clear on what the pricing model is, the skews, and how much of an investment can be made in letting new agencies do any of the following:
- Start to do pilots versus proofs of concept.
- Pricing per bot in production versus Orchestrator costs.
- Fixed cost versus licensing cost per user.
- Have access to Studio.
Which other solutions did I evaluate?
Our customer also evaluate Blue Prism and Automation Anywhere.
What other advice do I have?
It is a really slick product. Just play around with it. It's doable for all skill levels.
The UiPath Academy RPA training is good and easy to use. There is a lot of content there in terms of going from a very basic understanding to being able to do developments. It was one of the first RPA training courses, from anywhere, that I took. I thought it was really good. I has a lot of use cases to practice on.
Disclosure: My company has a business relationship with this vendor other than being a customer: Partner.