UiPath Reviews

We currently have 150 bots in production. It is used the most where there are repetitive, cumbersome tasks. Where we do need to have somewhat of a decision made, we put it into a decision tree. This is our primary use case. 

We are looking into other use cases, such as:

• How do we use it as a platform for pretotyping?
• How do we use it as a platform to drive forward machine learning and artificial intelligence usage in our company? 

We have automated assignments where we previously used employees. The outcome of this has been a greater customer experience achievement. We simply are solving tasks faster, and at the same time, we have been scaling down employees. 

We have started to do tasks more often and faster than we have ever done them before. For instance, some of the things in finance, we only did that once per quarter. Now, we have started doing them once a week. This gives us greater insight into those areas. 

The most important outcome here is the amount of insight which you receive when you put power to a process. It gives you the insight that you wouldn't have had when you had 20 employees working. With two bots doing the work, you suddenly get a data foundation that you didn't have before. Then, you can build upon the bots, instead of thinking you know what is happening.

The platform is object-orientated. You can create and reuse objects, which is a great feature. 

UiPath has decided that people who are great at what they do can be invited into the platform and utilize services on the platform. This is another great feature, and one of the reasons that we initially chose the product as our platform.

The solution is easy to use. When you put it together with the UiPath Academy, it's easy to get it going and understand. The drag and drop feature makes it simple and easy to use. The UiPath Academy is great and helpful.

We tried utilizing the virtual environment, but we had some issues in that area. It's one of the areas that we haven't revisited over the last half year because our volume is that high for us. Thus, it is one of those things that we have sort of left on the side for now, but I do hear there is some great stuff coming with it.

We haven't had instability issues.

It can scale.

The customer and technical support are great. We have received fast, sufficient responses. There is easy access. 

We did not have a previous RPA solution.

We were in a place where we needed to do something differently. At the time, RPA was something different. So, we needed to sort of examine, "Could this help us?"

The initial setup was straightforward.

We saw ROI in eight or nine weeks, so it was fairly fast. We have seen a lot of performance benefits, which I would rate as a ten out of ten.

The solution has helped to eliminate many human errors.

Our licensing costs are roughly 1.1 million Danish krones a year. 

We see some elements in the license model that we're trying to figure out how to utilize. There have been some elements in the license model where UiPath has helped us solve them commercially, and having a license model which is more focused on scalability would be a great feature.

If UiPath really wants to put Attended Robots out to everyone, there will be a cost issue. We have some that we are testing now and what their effect will be. However, these are the robots where the license model needs to change before we go full throttle in that direction.

We also looked at Blue Prism and Automation Anywhere. We selected UiPath based on its object-oriented approach.

There is something off in UiPath's licensing model. Their competitors have started targeting us now because they know that we have a lot of bots. They have different types of licensing models, and say, "Because you are having so many jobs with so many job bots, you can save money on the platform by using us instead." 

Play with it and have a playful nature. Acknowledge that you don't know what you're doing with it, then just acknowledge that you're going to make mistakes. The only difference between being good or great at this solution is your ability to learn from your mistakes, because you will be making mistakes. Also, you will be overpromising when working with this solution.

For automation technology, in general, the system landscape is quite wide. We are just starting to put RPA on the shelf for automation. We are pushing a machine-first approach. RPA is the sort of tool on the shelf now helping us become a more efficient customer-oriented company. It is a tool in the landscape with plenty of existing tools, but this is the one that is the most easily accessible for the business people.

We built ourselves some automated documentation, and it was fairly easy to copy. One of the things that people start doing is documenting what they're doing in an organization and updating the documents, then freely sharing them. We would like some sort of automated documentation, as this would be helpful.

We use UiPath primarily for tracking purposes. We are a logistics provider and have external portals and websites. The tool aggregates information from these systems to our core application. 

We leverage the whole platform. The tool's most valuable features are unattended and attended robots. 

We have to change our account representative every year, which is frustrating. We have to re-explain our business every year. 

I have been using the product since 2020. 

UiPath is stable. 

The product is scalable. 

Support becomes frustrating when the team asks about the cloud and organizational details. 

Positive

Our implementation strategy involved choosing a small use case first, improving the value, and accelerating. 

Two to three partners helped us with the implementation. 

The product is worth its money. We have seen an ROI of 274 percent. 

UiPath is not cheap. 

We evaluated Automation Anywhere and Blue Prism. We chose UiPath because I was familiar with it, and the local representative didn't have a sales pitch tone. 

There is a gap in the marketplace for tracking specialized services. UiPath was the only way to achieve it quickly. 

AI-powered automation has fundamentally changed our organization. We have repurposed the hundreds of headcounts and enabled them to focus on more meaningful work. 

UiPath AI Center has grown and evolved from what it was. We are looking at more opportunities since the person who managed it has left the company. 

We are still trying to figure out AI's use in our operations. It brings in efficiency, but we are in the process of validating it. 

AI use has sped up our time to about 256,000 hours a year.

We have only started to use process mining.  

We use a feature called Document Understanding to extract data from invoices and generate reports. It uses the invoice number, amount, line amount, description, addresses, remit address, and other fields. This is the current project I'm working on. I'm using all the features available in UiPath to train the invoices to identify all the fields. Then, I deploy the training, create a pipeline, and use that ML skill in my coding while developing a project.

We are doing this for our team talent payments team. They usually receive different invoices from vendors for various reasons. My company currently has 700 vendors listed. These vendors send invoices for their services, and the talent payment team used to fetch and extract the data manually before we started working on this project. Whenever they received an invoice, they would open it and write down the data.

We have now completed phase one of the project and are in phase two. For this process, the bot will receive all the invoices and extract all the data needed by the team. We will then create a consolidated report in Excel for each vendor and present it to the talent team. This automation saves the talent team time. In addition, I have used email automation, Excel automation, API calls, and UI automation in this project.

We deploy UiPath on-premises, cloud, and hybrid environments depending on the organization's requirements.

Building automation using UiPath is really easy. Studio is a drag-and-drop environment with different palettes, search options, and simple properties, inputs, and outputs. It doesn't take much effort to develop a workflow in UiPath, even complex ones. UiPath also has recorders, so we can perform our actions and start recording before we perform them. UiPath will then develop the workflow for us based on our screen actions.

UiPath enables us to implement end-to-end automation, which is important to me from an analytics perspective. It makes it easier for us to provide solutions to businesses, regardless of their requirements. With UiPath, we can keep manual interaction to a minimum, from providing input to getting output. UiPath apps and interactions also make it easier to automate processes. In the past, people would develop scripts to automate tasks, but they had to keep in mind that there would still be some manual work involved, such as preparing an input file. With UiPath, we can minimize this manual intervention and prerequisites. This is a significant advantage.

Everyone on our team uses the Academy Courses when they start using UiPath, and whenever a new feature is added, we search the course list for the updated courses. The biggest benefit is being able to learn UiPath directly from the developers, rather than from a third party. When we learn from a third party, they have to learn UiPath first, and then try to explain it to us based on their own understanding. But when we learn from UiPath, it's like a personal experience, because they developed the product and know how it's supposed to be used. The other great thing about the Academy is that it's very interactive, with question-and-answer sections and plenty of resources. For example, they provide input files so we can try out new features. All in all, the Academy makes it really easy to learn UiPath. We just have to take the startup course, and they explain everything through videos, interactive sections, questions, tests, and data flows.

UiPath helps speed up and reduce the cost of our digital transformation.

It also helps reduce human errors in the normal processes that we develop.

UiPath has freed up our employee time. For example, in the onboarding and interview processes, our organization may have many people applying on any given day. Sorting through applications was done manually, but with UiPath, the process has been significantly sped up. UiPath now performs all of the tasks, such as getting candidate details and making consolidation reports for the hiring team. Overall, UiPath has saved us a lot of time and effort, and it has been a great return on investment.

The most valuable feature is the document understanding feature of this current project, which is better than ABBYY FlexiCapture or Automation Anywhere. It can learn on its own, given enough instructions and data. With training, we can actually train it to recognize the specific fields on invoices that we want. For example, UiPath can still provide information from a few of the invoice fields without training, such as the invoice number and date, which are present on every invoice. However, some vendors have specific fields on their invoices, such as the candidate name, job location, or start date, which we can train UiPath to recognize. This gives us the ability to train UiPath beyond the common things, if we are looking for any specific information or if we want to personalize it for a vendor. We are then able to use this trained model in our code, which is very helpful.

I also like the Excel automation feature. UiPath has recently updated the Excel activities package, which gives us more options with a more modern look and feel.

I find the features UiPath provides to be excellent, but the documentation is difficult to maintain. I have noticed that it can be difficult to find information on some features in the UiPath documentation portal. The document portal needs to be kept more up-to-date. UiPath will release the new feature, but the document portal will still have the older version information. The documentation portal could be easier to navigate if it were redesigned to make it easier to find information about a particular feature. It would be great if the portal were updated as soon as new features are released.

I have been using UiPath for almost three years.

We have occasionally observed some abnormalities, but we have not yet found the cause. For one of the processes, we are running macros and triggering them with UiPath. These macros can take ten to eleven hours to run. Sometimes, UiPath stops while a macro is still running. Once the macro is completed, UiPath is supposed to perform another task, but the macro takes so long to run that this does not happen. I believe this is a problem with our program, as it is taking too long to complete. These kinds of delays can occur, and that is understandable.

There are many areas where support can improve. However, it is not that bad. In terms of sticking to schedules, they are available quickly and listen to all of the problems. Sometimes, we have hit roadblocks because the people assigned to solve a particular support ticket did not have any idea about the feature. This has caused problems for us, as we have had to spend time filling in another person who actually had the knowledge about that feature. We have run into this problem a few times. 

Neutral

Our organization previously used Automation Anywhere, a script-based RPA tool. The fact that we moved to UiPath suggests that we wanted to change products for a reason. We must have heard that UiPath is better than Automation Anywhere in some way, which is why we made the switch.

We have seen a good return on investment.

I would rate UiPath seven out of ten. UiPath has a lot of features they are working on but they take a long time to enter production.

Maintenance for UiPath is minimal. Small things such as changing the passwords because of the password rotation policy. We maintain our bots through VMs that run on AWS.

I recommend UiPath because it is a low-code/no-code solution that can be used by non-technical people. The Academy courses, which train users specifically on how to use the tool, make it easy to develop and automate processes. UiPath also offers a community version that includes most of the features of the paid version. Earlier in my career, I learned to use Blue Prism, which is a closed-source solution that only had basic courses available in its academy. It was difficult to use compared to UiPath, and it was hard to get any information on any forum or from its academy on how to use the tool and update it. In terms of learning, use, and understanding, UiPath is much easier than other solutions.

We use UiPath for PDF annotations, Excel detections, and filtering data.

UiPath can be deployed on-prem or in the cloud. We are primarily using UiPath on the cloud.

The ability to build automation using UiPath is moderate depending on the complexity of the task.

I used UiPath to locate patients that were suffering from Cholera and the automation helped reduce the number of emails and human error.

UiPath enables us to implement end-to-end automation.

Having the ability to implement end-to-end automation is good.

Compared to other tools, UiPath's user community is strong, and we can consistently find solutions to any inquiries we may have.

UiPath has assisted us in minimizing human errors, saving time and money, and enhancing our client relationships by ensuring the timely delivery of our services to clients.

It has helped us reduce our on-prem footprint which is important.

The Academy courses are great and we use them to grow our skills.

The AI technology enables us to efficiently decrease the significant amount of duplicated or inaccurate patient data and quickly delivers precise and reliable results.

The AI has reduced approximately 50 percent of the errors and has provided accurate output in less time.

UiPath has sped up and reduced the cost of our digital transformation.

Our errors have been reduced by 20 to 30 percent.

UiPath has freed up some of our employee's time by 20 to 30 percent and automation has helped reduce human resources.

UiPath has saved our organization money.

The AI capabilities are the most valuable feature because it reduces human error so we can easily maintain our pipelines and we have a 99.99 percent output early.

I would like UiPath to have an offline mode where we can continue to work when there are maintenance issues.

I have been using UiPath for almost three years.

UiPath is stable.

UiPath is highly scalable.

The technical support is great.

Positive

I previously used Microsoft Power Automate but the UI was not good. Also, the user community and commerce support is better with UiPath.

The initial setup is moderate depending on the requirements. An average deployment takes us around 15 minutes.

The implementation is completed in-house.

We receive up to three times the return on investment with UiPath.

The cost of UiPath is reasonable.

I give UiPath a ten out of ten.

UiPath requires minimal maintenance and when it does the Vendor sends us a pipeline if there is an issue with our update.

I recommend UiPath.

We use it for admissions policy and also for other financial items such as 1099 reporting from the IRS and things of that nature. There are some manual refreshes of systems and Excel documents that we have automated.

It is currently deployed on-prem, but we are looking at the cloud option. We are using version 2019, which is probably one of the oldest ones. It's pretty old. We're looking from a perspective of whether we upgrade it before we move to the cloud or whether we move to the cloud and upgrade.

We have seen quite a bit of benefit. We used to hire temp staff labor in order to do our admission policy, and now, we don't have to hire them. That would be five part-time people that would come in seasonally. For three or four months, we would have five people just cranking away the admission work. We don't need that anymore because of automation.

There have been time and financial savings. On the other side of the house, some of them are attended bots. We've saved the organization about 140,000 clicks. People don't have to click 140,000 times anymore. As a small estimate, we saved the organization about 250 hours last year. If everything goes to plan, this year, we're looking to save about 450 hours from the financial side of the house. We're only scratching the surface of it, and there is always room to grow.

We're still working through it. We recently stood up our system developer space. We have about 16 processes. We're still new at it and still in the beginning phases. We're really looking forward to pushing that envelope. Currently, we have a hybrid of attended and unattended automations. It's about an even split.

The GUI is valuable, and it's extremely stable. I've had six or seven Studios open at the same time working on different things and nothing has crashed on it. It's very stable software.

I love the community. The community is awesome. That has been very helpful. It provides value in terms of just being able to bounce ideas and understand. Sometimes, I try to do one thing, and I just want to know how to do one thing, but that's where the community can help broaden and look at it from a different perspective.

They say that everybody can do it, but not everybody can do it. You need to have some form of technological understanding about it, and just because we can automate something doesn't mean we should automate something. That's where I think there's a marketing thing. I understand where they're going with it, but it's not necessarily how real life is in my perspective.

I am not looking for any additional features. I haven't even used all the features. I'm still learning the platform as it stands and figuring out what's still available. 

I have been using it since 2019.

From a system perspective, it's stable on my end. It just works. That's the best part about it. It just works.

Scalability gets a little bit sticky. That could be just because of where we sit in the organization, I don't manage that relationship of licenses. I only get so many licenses and I'm like, "Well, can I get more?" It's definitely a limiting factor, but I don't know if it's us limiting it from a cost perspective. 

I haven't had to use their support. I go to the UiPath community for most of my questions. 

We used Microsoft Power Automate. It was okay. I totally prefer UiPath.

I was involved in its initial setup. UiPath was not complex, but we, as an organization, made it complex. 

We used a partner AKOA that got bought out by Roboyo not too long ago. So, we did use a partner to implement it. In terms of whether it was smooth or not, it was okay. Our school made it hard.

Our experience with them was good and helpful. It was a good way to go through it. Now that we know more, I would've changed the engagement slightly to get a little bit more consulting in the sense of the COE, governance, and other similar things around it. That's because for the most part, getting the system up and running was relatively simple, but now, with the whole other pieces of it, we're starting to feel some of that effect. It's now about how do we look at it from a different angle.

We definitely have a return on investment in terms of hours and soft cost perspective. We are saving 250 hours and don't have to hire five temps. I can't give the metrics for ROI, but from a time savings perspective, ROI is definitely huge.

We did evaluate other options. We evaluated Automation Anywhere, Blue Prism, and UiPath. It was about a year-long evaluation period between all of them, and UiPath was clearly the winner. It was clearly out there as the leader in that space, and that's why we chose them. 

From our perspective, the GUI was really helpful and very different from the others. Automation Anywhere touted more of just invoicing, but we didn't want it for invoicing. We wanted it for multiple things. UiPath really showed the breadth of what you can expand across.

To someone evaluating UiPath, I would definitely advise finding a partner. Find a partner with whom you can partner and who understands the use cases of what you're trying to do and achieve from an organizational perspective. Without that, you're not going to get an ROI. 

I would also advise managing expectations. It's fairly easy to use, but it still requires technical abilities. Don't think that it's something that you can just plug and play and do whatever you want. It's not going to work that way. It's more about the person and the change in mindset. If a person is open to an automation mindset, RPA is a really cool function, and UiPath solves that particular mindset. Without it, it's an uphill battle. Even from our perspective, from an education side of the house, getting our educators to be okay with automation is tricky.

We haven't yet used UiPath's AI functionality. We are definitely looking into it to see how we can start taking advantage of the AI pieces of it and advance that side of the house. Currently, we are trying to change the automation mindset. I'm a big RPA evangelist in our organization, and I am trying to promote things like automation. People are on board with the thought of it but not necessarily on board with the action of it. So, we really have to understand their process when we get into their process, and some people are apprehensive to share that information. It's the other parts of the piece that we have to deal with.

We have used UiPath Academy courses. It was useful to know the use of the product, the use of the GUI, understand how things move and change, where the checkmark boxes you need to check are, and all other uses. Now with the new versioning, it looks like a more curated function. It's a lot nicer. Previously, UiPath Academy was just a bunch of courses, and you didn't know where to start. The curation for developers or users is going to help people navigate through the UiPath Academy.

Overall, I would rate UiPath a nine out of ten.

We mostly use it for unattended bots. We are a construction company. Our RPA team does more of the complex processes for users. We take high-end complex items, that are redundant, off of the users' hands, then we host it on our servers.

We have a bunch of unattended processes, about 284 processes.

RPA isn't necessarily taking away tasks from employees, but rather moving them from processing-type employees to analysts. For example, if we had billers doing a very redundant task, then we moved that to RPA. Then, the billers do more customer face-to-face work and analysis, e.g., solutions through Salesforce. So, we have those employees who were previously billers move up to better positions where they can do more analysis and human interaction.

The solution has reduced human error. We don't need to go back and fix stuff. Customer representation is also huge. Quality of work is one of our mission statements. Having that repetitive test always being 100% every single day, month, and quarter, and whenever we send specific invoices from our server support, has been really helpful. It increases that quality formation.

There are a lot of job positions that we never really thought that would get created. Freeing up those experienced employees from sitting down and processing a lot of stuff throughout the whole day and moving them up to customers, we started discovering new talents and skills, especially with the younger employees since you are basically freeing up their time to discover new skills that they weren't even aware of. You are investing in them, showing customers that you have a new generation of fine employees who can do a bunch of new skills out-of-the-box.

The orchestration is the most valuable feature, e.g., how stuff can be organized. This is in addition to the fact that we try to move stuff to an unattended base where there is no user interaction. We are moving more to 100% automation rather than putting a human in the loop.

The UiPath Academy is mostly used only by technology associates and power users in each department who show interest in RPA. The academy has improved on the onboarding system that we have for RPA. So, if we see potential with someone, whether it is interns, power users, or even IT professionals around our department, then the UiPath Academy is definitely a good way to go. It kind of eases up the onboarding when determining who is outstanding or could potentially join our RPA teams.

The biggest value of the UiPath Academy is the ease of use. A lot of different platforms can be too complex. The user-friendly platform definitely helps with the ease of its steps. 

While it is the best tool ever, we decided that the user interaction might not actually be the greatest thing ever. 

I have been using the solution for three years.

I am very happy with the stability of it. 

I wish that there might be a better, easier method of updating our platform, especially for on-prem. I believe most of their customers are cloud-based. So, they don't have to worry about updating their Studio versions or Orchestrator. Being on-prem, it can be difficult because we must reach out to have that version. We can't just plan on our own. We are always at least a six-month step back versus the current version.

We have been scaling it as much as we can, especially with how we are trying to scale how big our team is as well as trying to control that specific workspace and workforce that we have.

There are currently five developers using it.

There were a couple of times with the on-premises version that there were complications, since it is not on UiPath's cloud. We have had a lot of complications where we are dead in water. There were a couple of conditions where we weren't able to get someone up to speed on whatever. The support is not as quick to respond as we had hoped. 

We did talk to our account executives about this. It is definitely a work in progress. I know that they have recommended that we move to the cloud, but it is not attractive enough for us to see if it is actually worth moving to the cloud.

We have been with UiPath from the start. We used to have a lot of in-house C# libraries that we curated. RPA was like overpowered macros similar to what we already had. That is why we knew how to deal with it. 

The initial setup was straightforward. We did it through the on-premises by connecting our SQL database, etc. 

The deployment took around three hours.

The initial setup was with their tech support, and that was definitely great. After that, if we had any hiccups, that was where the complications happened.

The main focus was improving efficiency. Once you focus more on redundant paths, having a bot doing it over and over again, that eliminates human error every now and then. There is definitely a huge ROI in that. Our main focus was low-hanging fruit. By low hanging fruit, I mean the redundant processes that users are just annoyed by when they go in every day and have to do it. There has definitely been a huge ROI because we are trying to free up a lot of the project managers for construction to do more focused stuff there rather than job cost details.

We have probably saved the time of 10 full-time employees. For daily tasks, we are saving an average of four hours per employee.

It is one of those things where you pay for convenience. Pricing-wise, UiPath is definitely way more expensive than other solutions that we have seen, especially since we also have Microsoft Power Automate, which is one of the latest tools. UiPath is on the higher end, but it is one of those decisions, "Is it worth the investment? How much are you getting as an ROI?" That is usually how the conversation goes.

Back then, the main competitor was Automation Anywhere, who wasn't necessarily as user-friendly. The main idea was that UiPath was more user-friendly with more forums. It seems like there was a community for it. Whereas, Automation Anywhere was a bit more complex. 

We are using a bunch of other tools to also see the differences. Everything runs so quickly that technology always needs to be up to speed. Companies, like UiPath, are always running so fast to compete in this area. We are also trying to see who is actually the best. UiPath has definitely shown us that, but it also comes with its price.

They are always trying to look for, as much as possible, in-house creation of back-end processes. This means less clicking and tapping on the keyboard for the robot, which is always better. UiPath definitely blends all that together, which is great. It is literally bridging all our platforms together, which is what I love about it.

With UiPath and RPA, the sky's the limit. There is potential for a bunch of things that you can do. When we started, as a construction company, we were thinking that RPA might not be as useful as we might think and make a bigger difference than our in-house solutions. When RPA came out, we thought it was mostly for companies like EY and PWC, e.g., more for financial auditing since there is so much data. However, we definitely benefit from it as a construction company. There is so much potential, whether it is low-hanging fruit or high complexity. It is definitely a win-win for any company, whatever industry you are working in.

I would rate UiPath as eight out of 10.

We typically solve for any use cases that falls under different business functions within our company. That includes finance, supply chains, services, IT by itself, and a little bit of engineering.

UiPath has improved the way our organization functions. The flexibility with which the business processes get changed is great.

A lot of times we know the method of operation, however, certainly it'll not be the same after a few months, a few years, or longer. Our dependent script or whatever is in place (that is dependent on that business process) has to be adjusted. The flexibility with this tool has enabled us to adjust those workflows quickly and deploy them so that our business can continue using those applications or the workflows that we’ve been using before, even after changes to the underlying system.

The most valuable aspect has been the workflows. They have helped to deal with legacy applications. We have a lot of legacy applications in place, which we cannot get rid of. The processes around these legacy applications are something that cannot be automated in a typical way. The RPA is helping us to automate the business processes that have to work with legacy applications.

The ease of building automation using the solution is great as it is a low-code solution.

I'm able to create workflows. By the time I'm familiar with one process, I'll be able to automate the next one. This is the case especially with tools like task capture; I'm just working through the process. In the end, it will be a skeleton workflow and it can be used for deployment once we are done with the cleaning. It has reduced the development life cycle by about 30%. It’s done this by making use of the features that are enabled by task capture and certain other features within the Studio.

Overall, we’ve seen the solution has saved costs. That is our value realization.

Our first target metric is to bring up the number of processes that we can save. We have a formula to convert inter-dollar values in terms of the user experience we are benefitting from. That’s the user experience that is enabled by automation. Those are direct savings which can be calculated by multiplying the number of dollars that we have spent for one resource per hour. Indirect monetary benefits can also be calculated by looking into the user experience factors and adding them when we do the value realization. In the last four years, we would've saved $3 million.

The human error rate has been reduced. Initially, when we targeted some of the business use cases, they were straightforward. They were linear in nature and there the accuracy had the upper hand 99.9% of the time. The reason is that the process by itself is quite linear. It doesn't have multiple branches or exceptional routes that it has to take to complete a particular transaction. We have good accuracy, however, we have had challenges with the accuracy when the business processes get complex. If there is any human intervention or if the quality of the data is not proper, or if the user errors are low, that is where the accuracy rate used to be low. It's better now.

Due to the fact that all these are role-based bots, if there is something that is getting changed, the bot will fail. Down the line, I can see that, for linear processes, accuracy will be great. However, when it comes to some of the complex processes, that is where we have challenges that we are facing with accuracy and we are continuously fine-tuning the process in such a way so that the accuracy can get better. It's great we can continuously tweak.

The solution does free up employee time and allows for the employees to focus on higher-value work. We have a lot of examples within our organizations where they have to deal with some kind of manually intensive task, such as just reading something from the document and putting that into the financial system.

We normally take up the customization portion that comes directly from customers. Those kinds of customizations have to be updated back into the financial system in order to make sure that they are appropriate. These updates take a while as they have to do with talking to the customer, understanding what changes are needed for a given order, or based on specific correspondence from the customers. With automation, employees can focus on talking to the customer to understand what changes they have to incorporate. And they can offload all the data entry tasks to a robot. This way, they can focus on how they can engage more with users to understand the pain points faced by the customer rather than spending time taking all those inputs and then doing the data entry job. They can be more client-facing.

I’m not sure exactly how much time is saved with automation. I could say that we have around 150 purchase processes that we have automated. We don't trace back how it has replaced a team or member of a team. We always go with the number of hours saved. We go the route of checking and saying “okay, so we have done this, but it needs a constant involvement from them in order to make sure that someone is owning the process.” We still own only the work.

We have started to use the solution's AI functionality in our automation. We started it recently and we have finished the proof of concept on document understanding, which involves AI, of course.

In terms of AI automation, we will be leveraging this tool for all business functions. There is no limit with any of the business folk that we talk to. Whatever the process is, as long as we feel that it is feasible to automate, and there is a value in automating it,  or as long as we feel that we are automating the right processes, we will just take that up into our pipeline.

AI does help us handle complex and involved processes. We include a lot of use cases where the sole core RPA capability would not suffice as a purely role-based automation. We often encounter a lot of use cases where they say, "Hey, this is something where there is no logic in doing it." If there’s analysis or natural language processing, et cetera, we are making use of AI. However, the process isn’t in use yet. We’re just starting.

We have used UiPath’s Academy courses and we are also encouraging our implementation partners to refer to those materials so that they can be approved.

It’s kept us up to speed with the solution. We refer to the Academy daily. Of course, we get help from UiPath whenever we face any hiccups; we normally ask them questions and they're able to sort it out for us. That said, the materials are great for trying to sort out issues or problems on our own.

It's been four years of practice and we've matured with the traditional RPA candidates. We have a strong foundation with what we have showcased to our business folks, and we are good with the healthy background that we are building. However, when it comes to the roadmap of what's next, that is where we are not clear. While we get the concepts, bringing them to reality is looking to be quite a challenge. We are unsure as to if UiPath can actually bring our vision to life.

UiPath is very clear in defining items such as this is what the high automation needs, this is what the process planning needs. We are getting clarity into those concepts and we are able to explain that and take that back into leadership to get other approvals. They are able to understand what UiPath is talking about within these different concepts. Really, it's just figuring out whether we have the right arrangement at this point and if UiPath can get us there.

I've been using the solution for four years.

I'm impressed with the version that we have today. 2019.10 is a version that is quite stable, compared to how we did with 2018. A lot of pieces that are enabled as part of the new version, 2019, are stabilized. We have zero downtime with the tool.

Today, ith X number of bots, if we want to reuse the same solution, and if there is an appetite for consuming those kinds of robotic solutions, of course, buying more bots is going to solve the problem.

If you think in terms of scaling this platform by itself or the other business functions, that is where the discovery piece will come into play. We have to constantly talk to businesses to understand where the opportunities are to scale in the correct manner.

Scalability is possible in terms of reusing existing automations. It's related to the number of bots that we are going to purchase. When it comes to the number of business processes that we are automating, during the discovery process, twe have to engage with our customers and constantly follow up with them. When we understand more about how they're doing business, we're able to locate the kinds of tools that are going to help them.

Currently, we have eight bots in production and 150 processes are automated. I’m not sure how many users are actually on UiPath currently.

We always follow up with our business to build our pipeline. That goes hand in hand with the implementation. We off-load all automation ideas and requirements to the pipeline, to our implementation partners, so that they will be able to implement our vision.

Traditional support for the RPA is great. In terms of the help that we are getting, if we end up with some issues, running operational issues, it could be better if they can propose some fixes. It's not that automation is going to solve every other problem that the underlying system is having. However, we expect some kind of expertise from the tech support when we face issues that are related to the system. We need to understand if there's an ERP error, if it has to do with the underlying system, or if automation has to solve the issue. Often, technical support will say "Okay, so this is your error, go and solve it." Yet, due to the fact that support has seen more issues like this, they should have more insights and they need to be able to share those inputs in a way that is going to help us.

While I didn't use a different solution previously, the finance team has used Blue Prism before. They implemented Blue Prism and they engaged Blue Prism to automate the processes that they have added for automation. Now, we have aligned on a single platform. It is UiPath now, however, they initially had around 50 processes that they automated using Blue Prism.

We proposed UiPath as the one solution based on Gartner ratings.

The initial setup was quite straightforward as we understand how RPA works and we understand how UiPath is going to help, how UiPath is a tool to help us to automate things. It's quite straightforward in terms of that. Whenever we are doing some kind of initiative, like document understanding or data capture, it is quite straightforward.

However, with process planning, we didn't understand the documentation right away. That is where we used to get help from UiPath.

The pricing was great at the start, and so, down the line, we have been enhancing all these features. We are seeing that, as we are looking for opportunities to grow, the number of robots that we need to purchase and the software cost is going to go up.

UiPath has increased the cost. We feel that it's good, however, based on all the new features, which we are pursuing. That said, we expect that whatever robots that we have purchased or whatever the standard platform that we have from UiPath should continue with the pricing that they had earlier.

There will be an offset, however, when it comes to the existing platform like Orchestrator or robots, and we are expecting that the margin should be less.

Back in 2017, we evaluated three to four products. Blue Prism was already used by the finance team, however, we evaluated WorkFusion, UiPath, and Automation Anywhere.

Of those other three, we evaluated WorkFusion and UiPath extensively.

The two reasons that we went with UiPath were, one, the learning curve, and, two, the community edition of UiPath, which had everything we needed to dig into the solution. Whereas with the other companies, there wasn't that option. With Blue Prism, for example, we had to buy a license in order to check whether the tool was going to work for us. In 2017, we were not sure whether this was going to work or not. At that stage, UiPath was the only company that gave us the entire set of tools to try and it worked really well.

We are customers and end-users.

While we're using the on-premises deployment, we are open to moving to the cloud. There are a lot of cloud solutions that we already use in our organization. However, with UiPath, we have stayed on-prem out of concern for security. We don't have clarity on if a cloud solution is going to work securely.

The other concern is around how we are augmenting the capabilities of core RPA. We know that process mining is going to help us, however, whether process mining is already added into the RPA, do we have any solid use cases that we can start with.

I'd rate the solution at an eight out of ten.

My company has multiple processes across various lines of businesses like finance, contact center, HR, tax, etc. Our use cases are based on the business corporation. They have to agree with the use case and what they want to automate. They have to provide the business details about the exact process. The developer or the lead will design the solution accordingly.

For example, in the revenue accounting area, we have around 5,000 to 15,000 requests in a day. It's all based on the number of sales that they made. We have implemented a multi-board approach, where the process can simultaneously run in almost 15 to 30 missions, whenever there is a requirement. We can increase the number of licenses based on the requirements.

We use Automation Cloud and Task Capture. They're trying to implement Task Capture with a couple of lines of businesses right now. We did not implement it completely, but it's in process.

If a person is spending eight hours in a day on a job, we can automate that process. He can validate it in an hour and the rest of the time he can spend doing other things. Our overall experience is good with automation. There are a couple of businesses that are really happy with our support on their daily tasks. 

If revenue accounting wants to do their responsibilities, they need 100 employees. Automation made their life easy and they can now validate quickly with 5 or 10 agents and get it done.

UiPath has saved costs.

We use the Apps feature. It helped to reduce the workload of our IT department by enabling end-users to create apps.

The Automation Cloud offering will help to decrease the solution's total cost of ownership, by taking care of things like infrastructure and maintenance. We are on-prem now. We are going to migrate this year.

We have various automations in various applications like desktop, mainframe-based, and SAP-based applications. I work with almost all of the applications. I see good progress no matter what we do. The most valuable feature is that UiPath works with all these solutions.

Building automations is easy based on whatever automation you develop, just drag and drop. It's easy to maintain.

We use the Academy. If you don't know anything about UiPath, you can go to the UiPath Academy and start using it. It will give you an overall idea of what is what. 

The greatest value from the Academy is that I don't have to go to a person for learning. I can learn on my own time, night or day. The portal is also good. 

They're planning to look into machine learning. They have a vision; they have a plan.

When we raise a ticket, they'll ask a number of questions to analyze the problem. It would be better if they connected quickly and it was a call so they can understand the issue and then schedule a follow-up call. 

We can't explain each and every thing. When it's on a call, we can explain it in a few minutes. 

The stability is good, but when we migrate to a newer version a few issues can emerge. We just have to do our best and make sure everything is up and running. Overall, the stability is okay.

We previously used Blue Prism. It is process automation. The user interface is different. How we interact with the development environment and how we manage the solutions is different. Overall, Blue Prism and UiPath are both good. 

I wouldn't say the setup is difficult. We need to work with various teams to get everything going.

The time it takes to deploy depends on the complexity. If it is complex, based on the developer and urgency, we'll split it into two parts, test it, and quickly deploy it. We have deployed on an emergency basis in one to two days. It's a complex process, but there are five or six developers who work without any sleep around the clock.

I would rate UiPath a nine out of ten.