Zack Phelps - PeerSpot reviewer
RPA engineer at Sonic automotive, inc
Real User
Feature-rich, great support, and helpful community
Pros and Cons
  • "The way they stay on top of Orchestrator is really helpful because that has been the platform that controls everything. The dedication to that is pretty helpful. Every time there's a new release, it seems there are more and more features. It's also not hard to learn."
  • "One improvement that could be made is in terms of keeping the documentation updated. Some of the online documentation is outdated. Because things are always changing, it is understandable that information becomes outdated pretty quickly, but sometimes, when you want to go use something, deploy something, or troubleshoot something, the documentation says, "Do this," but what it says to do no longer exists."

What is our primary use case?

We use it for everything. We use it for very simple things, such as moving data around in Excel, and bigger things that include using more advanced technologies, APIs, and some of the newer stuff that UiPath has had, such as Action Center, etc.

We have not yet used its AI functionality in our automation program, but we plan to do that in the coming months.

How has it helped my organization?

The company is growing so fast, and we've been able to use automation to keep up with that pace. We've started rolling out to individual citizen developers. We're trying to change the whole company in terms of the way people work by using this technology.

What is most valuable?

The way they stay on top of Orchestrator is really helpful because that has been the platform that controls everything. The dedication to that is pretty helpful. Every time there's a new release, it seems there are more and more features. It's also not hard to learn.

When it comes to the UiPath Community, everybody is helpful. If you don't know how to do something or you want to learn about something, it's pretty easy to connect with other people or talk to people at UiPath to get that knowledge or learn how to do something. You can also just point somebody to UiPath Academy. They go from knowing nothing to being pretty good with things pretty quickly.

What needs improvement?

One improvement that could be made is in terms of keeping the documentation updated. Some of the online documentation is outdated. Because things are always changing, it is understandable that information becomes outdated pretty quickly, but sometimes, when you want to go use something, deploy something, or troubleshoot something, the documentation says, "Do this," but what it says to do no longer exists.

Buyer's Guide
UiPath
March 2024
Learn what your peers think about UiPath. Get advice and tips from experienced pros sharing their opinions. Updated: March 2024.
765,234 professionals have used our research since 2012.

For how long have I used the solution?

I have been using UiPath for a little over four years.

What do I think about the stability of the solution?

Its stability has been really good, especially lately. It has always been relatively stable, but as they've added things, it still seems to be pretty stable.

What do I think about the scalability of the solution?

Its scalability is pretty good. Orchestrator is able to handle whatever you're throwing into it. If you need to add a bunch of processes or jobs, it's pretty easy to do. The only thing that would slow that down is if you need new servers or something from IT. So, from the UiPath side, it's pretty easy, but there are other variables.

How are customer service and support?

They're pretty helpful. If you submit a ticket, somebody reaches out to you pretty fast, but usually, I'm able to just reach out to our account managers and get help within a few minutes. I'd give them high remarks. I would rate them a 10 out of 10.

How would you rate customer service and support?

Positive

How was the initial setup?

UiPath was pretty involved with it. So, it was pretty straightforward. We're about to move to UiPath Cloud though, and our account managers are pretty involved in that, but it has been pretty turnkey and straightforward.

Our implementation strategy was to get a platform that works and start building things. I'm not sure of the overall strategy. Some of the decisions were made before I got here.

What about the implementation team?

We worked pretty closely with UiPath. They've been great and pretty helpful. 

What was our ROI?

We have definitely seen an ROI. I don't know any of the specific metrics per se, but I know the values out there. We're just getting hammered with use cases everywhere. We did something literally last week that took us three days to deploy, and it saved a team 100 hours of work.

Which other solutions did I evaluate?

I came to the company as they were just starting to use UiPath. I don't think they evaluated other options.

What other advice do I have?

My advice to others evaluating the solution would be to compare what UiPath is doing to all its competitors, and none of the competitors would scratch the surface of what the offerings are.

I'd give it a 10 out of 10. I liked UiPath so much that I went to get a job strictly in RPA. That wasn't directly UiPath, but before I started where I am now, I was working with UiPath just a little bit, and then I was like, "I want to pursue that for long."

Disclosure: I am a real user, and this review is based on my own experience and opinions.
PeerSpot user
Strategic Architect for IPA at Visionet Systems Inc.
Real User
Makes it very easy to jumpstart into RPA and enables complicated, robust workflows, but selectors break easily
Pros and Cons
  • "When talking about deployment, you have a very robust infrastructure to manage your automations, the robots, and how they can be configured, deployed, executed, monitored, and maintained. When it comes to process discovery, it has excellent front-end tools and capabilities vis-à-vis Task Capture and Automation Hub."
  • "What happens when a selector breaks? That means that something has changed in the application... UiPath could do a better job of enveloping selectors to make them less fragile... That is the one area that is the biggest pain point. It happens all the time... They should reduce selector sensitivity and improve remediation when one does break."

What is our primary use case?

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

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

How has it helped my organization?

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

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

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

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

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

What is most valuable?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

What needs improvement?

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

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

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

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

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

For how long have I used the solution?

I have been using UiPath for four years.

What do I think about the stability of the solution?

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

What do I think about the scalability of the solution?

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

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

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

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

How are customer service and support?

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

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

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

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

How would you rate customer service and support?

Neutral

Which solution did I use previously and why did I switch?

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

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

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

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

How was the initial setup?

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

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

What about the implementation team?

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

What was our ROI?

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

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

What's my experience with pricing, setup cost, and licensing?

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

Which other solutions did I evaluate?

The top vendors are

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

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

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

What other advice do I have?

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

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

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

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

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

Disclosure: My company has a business relationship with this vendor other than being a customer: Partner
PeerSpot user
Buyer's Guide
UiPath
March 2024
Learn what your peers think about UiPath. Get advice and tips from experienced pros sharing their opinions. Updated: March 2024.
765,234 professionals have used our research since 2012.
Andres Da Silva - PeerSpot reviewer
Quality assurance engineer at ChenMed LLC
Real User
Enabled us to provide quick turnarounds instead of full-stack development, giving us quick ROI
Pros and Cons
  • "The UiPath community has been great. There are a lot of great mentorships, a lot of forums, and a lot of people who are very interested in growing the community. It's been very nice to work with them. Anybody who is in UiPath has been an amazing partner for us."

    What is our primary use case?

    My use cases are as a QA engineer. I mainly test automations that have already been built. I'm not part of the development side. We started small and some of the business processes we have used it for include onboarding, document processing, and payer processing. Our company is involved with healthcare and we're trying to grow the help we can give our healthcare workers.

    How has it helped my organization?

    We've gone through a lot of leadership and backend changes recently. UiPath has enabled us to provide quick turnarounds, as opposed to having to do full-stack development to do end-to-end automation. It's given us quick ROI with quick wins.

    In terms of using automation for a good cause, we are primarily a primary-care-physician company. We are helping less fortunate elderly people. We provide a lot of insurance benefits, so our work is mainly helping healthcare to be less expensive. Automation is allowing us to go through hyper-growth. It gives us the opportunity to get more seniors into our centers and have that affordable, great health service that we provide.

    What is most valuable?

    So far, we've only focused on UiPath Studio and the Orchestrator piece. It's been great and we are looking to expand it to the digital assistant platform soon.

    The UiPath community has been great. There are a lot of great mentorships, a lot of forums, and a lot of people who are very interested in growing the community. It's been very nice to work with them. Anybody who is in UiPath has been an amazing partner for us.

    We have also used UiPath's Academy courses and we have two members who are now UiPath Certified. It's a very easy training course to follow. It's low code and comes with a lot of resources and a lot of forum assistance. It enables people to learn without feeling the pressure of having to figure it out on their own.

    For how long have I used the solution?

    My company has been involved with UiPath for over three years. I switched to the team that is using it about a year and a half ago.

    What do I think about the stability of the solution?

    As the platform grows, it's becoming a one-stop solution, but it also becomes difficult to integrate with your pre-existing IT solutions. It kind of lives in its own little bubble. Within that bubble, it has been self-sufficient and very reliable. We don't have issues with the bubble. It's a matter of integrating it with the rest of what we already use and are accustomed to.

    What do I think about the scalability of the solution?

    We have it on-premises, but we know that we can grow our servers, and the Orchestrator has been amazing. So scalability is not an issue for us yet. But if we get into more hyper-growth, we might have to move onto the cloud. We've seen a lot of support for that, so I don't think there's going to be a concern.

    How are customer service and support?

    I haven't had to reach out to their technical support or work with them. But during the research that I needed to do, looking at the forums was great. The website, the documentation, and the forums have been super easy to use.

    How would you rate customer service and support?

    Positive

    What was our ROI?

    We already have positive ROI. We're in hyper-growth and management wants to see hyper-growth ROI as well. It's meeting that expectation now.

    We mainly look at how many hours it takes to do a manual process, and how many transactions there are in that process. If it's something that is going to require us to continually hire people to do it, so that we can keep growing, it becomes one of our main targets for automation.

    What's my experience with pricing, setup cost, and licensing?

    An area for improvement comes down to licensing. We need to sell UiPath to our company first and the biggest hurdle is: How do we convince the company that this is going to add more value? We see a lot of potential for adding more technology to what we do, but it comes with the price of adding new licenses and seeing if that's going to add value to the company.

    If we could have more of a trial period, since we're already licensed with Studio, and go through a trial period for key applications to see if they can benefit us, that would be helpful.

    The pricing is more of a topic for our C-level and there is a little bit of pushback on the pricing. I think the pricing is fair, based on the ROI that we have already provided with some quick wins. But when it comes to moving into the other applications, that's where there is some pushback. That's where the concern comes in.

    What other advice do I have?

    Definitely look at it, not just as a tool but as a change to your company. Your company has to be willing to adopt automation and not just for solving one problem. It needs to be, "We want to fix business solutions overall."

    It's a 10 out of 10 because of how easy it is to adapt and grow into it. The challenge is due to the fact that I am at a low level in the QA world. Pitching it to the C-level has been the only kind of pushback I've had. But personally, my own experience working with the application is that it has been one of my favorite technologies to work with so far.

    Disclosure: I am a real user, and this review is based on my own experience and opinions.
    PeerSpot user
    Sumesh Gansar - PeerSpot reviewer
    Product Marketing Manager at a tech vendor with 10,001+ employees
    Real User
    Top 5Leaderboard
    Easy to use menus, provides folder organization capabilities using a centralized tenant, improves robustness of our processes
    Pros and Cons
    • "The UiPath Academy was pretty helpful for us in the initial stages."
    • "The product could be made a little less glitchy. Specifically, when too many users are working at the same time, it hangs a little bit here and there."

    What is our primary use case?

    My primary use case with UiPath is to automate workflows for processes in web-based applications, such as email and Excel automation. We also use it as a task or workflow management tool, capable of assigning tasks, checking on the status of tasks, and more.

    Another thing that I have been doing with UiPath is replacing repetitive tasks performed within the organization. Automating such tasks makes the related process smoother and faster. 

    We are using the UiPath automation cloud offering, which is a SaaS solution. One advantage to this type of environment is that we can get updates instantly. If it were an on-premises or hybrid model then the setup and maintenance take time, but this isn't the case with a SaaS model. This instant setup is what we needed because it made for a smooth transition from manual processes to automation. 

    How has it helped my organization?

    With respect to building automations, UiPath is a pretty straightforward platform. The major reason that we choose to implement UiPath is the interface that it provides, which boosts the usefulness of the entire platform. If we need assistance then there are many knowledge base documents available. There is also in-app help, which makes it very easy to understand and start using it.

    I was able to learn how to use it within a week, which shows how easy it is. For example, it does not require a lot of coding. It's more of a drag-and-drop interface, making it easier to develop programs and automate processes.

    UiPath enables us to implement end-to-end automation, and it has completely replaced the manual processes that we were using. This includes analyzing the process and implementing automation to collect the data. Data fetching is done using the robots that we create.

    Since implementing UiPath, we have experienced better retention of our users. This is because we have been able to make our process much smoother, as well as quicker. Consequently, we have been able to deliver at a much faster pace. This has enhanced the customer experience and in turn, has improved customer satisfaction. Overall, we have seen an increase of about 30% in terms of user retention. This has translated to increasing revenue.

    With respect to automating our processes, automation has reduced our manual efforts by more than 70%. This means that we are able to concentrate more on other aspects of our business. The business is growing because we are able to do things like work on our website, customer engagement, and customer relations.

    UiPath has taken care of most of the backend work for us, which is a good bonus. It has reduced our investment in manpower by about 50% and decreased our overall output time by more than 70%.

    Automation has definitely reduced the rate of human error when compared to our previous, manual processes. At this point, there is minimal to zero human error. I estimate that approximately one hundred percent of human error has been eliminated.

    Implementing this product definitely helps speed the process of digital transformation, and reduces its cost as well. One of the goals of our organization is to completely digitize. We want to optimize everything so that employees can focus more on the customer relationship aspect, building more value for our brand. UiPath has definitely helped in improving the overall process.

    Our digital transformation did not require any external support for third-party application software. It's an in-built process and we did not need anything extra.

    What is most valuable?

    The specific feature I like is folder organization, and it is in the Orchestrator tenant. This is very useful because it keeps all of my folders and data in a centralized tenant.

    The menu options are easily accessible in the Orchestrator tenant, which is something that I like very much.

    The UiPath Academy was pretty helpful for us in the initial stages. We were able to learn more about the software and what is there. They also provide courses and certifications, which assist with learning and getting employees up to speed.

    It took only a week for me to completely get a handle on the software. Taking the initial training and certification courses is a hassle-free process. It is not difficult to induct somebody and have them start using the product.

    The courses that they offer provide hands-on experience, and I think that it's a good initiative that they are taking on by doing so. It helps to ease the learning curve and allowed us to learn more about the world of automation.

    UiPath has a user community that is very knowledgeable and friendly. Our peers in the UiPath community are able to dumb down responses to a beginner's level of experience, regardless of what queries we have put forth. Whatever we have wanted to do with RPA, they have been able to help. We now have a good level of comfort in terms of interacting with our peers in the community.

    We have experience with other communities and have found that the discussions are generally at a higher level, which may be too difficult for a new person that is just starting out with the product.

    Generally speaking, I like the features that I am using and I could not really say where improvement is needed in that respect.

    What needs improvement?

    The product could be made a little less glitchy. Specifically, when too many users are working at the same time, it hangs a little bit here and there.

    In a future release, I would like to see drag-and-drop functionality in the robot creation process within Orchestrator. As of now, it is not available there. It would be helpful because from there, it is easy to create a process flow. Instead of switching between multiple menus and multiple tabs, we can do it from the Orchestrator or the main menu.

    For how long have I used the solution?

    I have been using UiPath for approximately a year and a half.

    What do I think about the stability of the solution?

    I would rate the stability an eight out of ten. Sometimes, when the load is high or there are many users working at the same time, or when I'm working on different parts at the same time, it lags a little bit. There is a slight drop in performance.

    Otherwise, it's very stable and secure software.

    What do I think about the scalability of the solution?

    Using the automation cloud offering has meant that scaling up automations has been very smooth for us. We started out with between 40 and 50 users working on this particular tool, and now it's between 150 and 170 users.

    There are two levels of roles; admin roles and user roles. The admin role is able to assign and approve tasks, using the task management module. Regular users are able to perform all of the other functions.

    It is definitely a scalable solution, being cloud-based and SaaS. It is also very customizable. Customizability is the unique selling point (USP) for this particular product, given the number of customizations that are available and the number of features that can be added.

    How are customer service and support?

    The technical support staff is brilliant. They are very knowledgeable and very quick when it comes to addressing our queries. They don't ask us to wait for long when we have a problem, and we normally have a resolution within hours.

    There is also a community forum that helps us to deal with problems ourselves, without the dependence on the technical support team.

    I would rate the technical support a ten out of ten.

    How would you rate customer service and support?

    Positive

    Which solution did I use previously and why did I switch?

    We did not use another RPA solution prior to UiPath. Before this, we were doing everything manually.

    How was the initial setup?

    I was not involved in the initial setup and deployment.

    What about the implementation team?

    As we opted to implement the cloud-based model, the maintenance on our part is minimal. We just have to update the software from time to time. The amount of maintenance that we perform is not only easy but saves a lot of time for our IT team.

    The team of people for maintenance consists of six or seven junior IT staff. They perform the updates and nothing more.

    What was our ROI?

    Using the automation cloud offering has helped to decrease our time to value. An example of where we saw the benefits of this solution was with an Excel automation that we created. This process involves an Excel worksheet that contains between 20,000 and 30,000 records. We had to manually search for particular records, and the process to approximately a week to complete. Now, with UiPath, the same process is completed within a couple of minutes. 

    Once we signed up with UiPath, we instantly saw growth in our entire business. It was a win-win situation. 

    The additional time has enabled our employees to focus on higher-value work, such as R&D, customer engagement, and improving our brand. It also has an effect on employees' satisfaction, specifically, mine.

    A lot of time spent doing repetitive and redundant work is something that was irritating me a lot. Now that the automation is in place, I just have to set up the workflow. It has definitely increased my overall morale and satisfaction. 

    What's my experience with pricing, setup cost, and licensing?

    One of the downsides to UiPath is the cost of the enterprise version. It is a little bit on the higher side.

    UiPath's cloud offering is a centralized, all-in-one platform. It saves money because you don't have to invest as much in other software, and it's cheaper than some solutions because you don't have to maintain the platform or the database. However, because it's not cheap, the overall cost reduction is not drastic at first. Taking a holistic view, it does because overall, it will reduce costs.

    There is also a Community Edition that can be used free of charge. This is an option for users that find the price to be high. One main differentiating factor with the Community Edition is the number of updates. There are fewer in the Community Edition.

    Also, the support offered for the Community Edition is not as quick. People will not have a great user experience. However, it is important to remember that in terms of cost, the Enterprise Edition is a little bit pricey for small and medium-scale enterprises. 

    What other advice do I have?

    About a month ago, we started using the AI functionality of the software to design robots and processes. At this point, we are looking to use AI for our internal applications.

    One example is that we are working on security-related automation that triggers an alert when somebody inserts or removes an external hard disk from a system. Taking advantage of the AI capabilities has helped us to maintain a much safer work environment, in terms of data security.

    The AI functionality has definitely enabled us to automate more processes. A lot of manual work and redundant work has been reduced. Also, the number of errors that we had occurring during our manual processes has been greatly reduced.

    This solution has definitely helped to free up employee time. Tasks that used to take approximately a week, now take just 30 or 40 minutes. This is a lot of time saved, which allows us to concentrate more on other aspects of the business. For example, improved customer engagement has resulted in gathering more leads. Also, we have more time for R&D.

    I estimate that we are saving approximately five hours per day, so 20 hours per week, per employee. In addition to the areas that we have more time to concentrate on, it has helped improve the value of our brand overall.

    My advice for anybody who is looking into implementing this product is that it's a must. This is the go-to software that I would recommend for anybody looking to automate their business in a smooth and efficient manner.

    Cost, of course, is something that has to be considered but if they can afford this solution then they should implement it. It has a wide variety of features and functionalities, which are market fit and market ready. 

    I would rate this solution a nine out of ten.

    Which deployment model are you using for this solution?

    Public Cloud

    If public cloud, private cloud, or hybrid cloud, which cloud provider do you use?

    Other
    Disclosure: PeerSpot contacted the reviewer to collect the review and to validate authenticity. The reviewer was referred by the vendor, but the review is not subject to editing or approval by the vendor.
    PeerSpot user
    CEO at smartbridge
    MSP
    Reduces human error, provides great AI functionality, and has excellent technical support
    Pros and Cons
    • "The solution has decreased the processing time of the client's invoices for IT. Just IT. Not the rest of the organization. That said, just there, that’s 600 hours of annual savings in one department. On top of that, we’ve decreased processing time by 90%."
    • "UiPath should take several steps forward to be prepared for this competition and create differentiation with capabilities that Microsoft does not have. The innovation within UiPath is going to be very, very crucial. However, the most important thing is clear the differentiation in the messaging."

    What is our primary use case?

    We are a services company. In terms of how we use UiPath, we handle a lot of the financial processes, including our customer billing, our time tracking, and our time reporting exceptions - such as looking at who has not submitted a timesheet. When this exception happens, there are automatic emails that go out using the RPA, from UiPath. 

    The whole process from our inventory, which is our asset, is automated. With the asset, which is the time that our people spend on clients, we make sure that we capture what we need to create and send invoices out. The whole collection and AR process, including making sure that we get the money and send reminders to clients, that whole process, is automated - with human intervention, as needed.

    How has it helped my organization?

    The solution has decreased the processing time of the client's invoices for IT. Just IT. Not the rest of the organization. That said, just there, that’s 600 hours of annual savings in one department. On top of that, we’ve decreased processing time by 90%.

    What is most valuable?

    The automation cloud offering helps to decrease the solution's total cost of ownership. More than that, it creates agility so companies don't have to worry about delivering the infrastructure team and setting up sellers and all the things that they need to do to get to the stage of actually installing the software and internal security. That all takes time to go through. With the cloud, you avoid all that. You basically create agility for the clients to jump onto automation and not wait for all these things. It can be frustrating sometimes in large companies. That's why we tell clients to avoid all these headaches. With the cloud, you’ll get going very quickly within a matter of a day or so.

    RPA is not the only thing we do. We do a lot of ERP, CRM, all of these things. Traditionally, we are a full-service organization for clients and their journey to the cloud. Everything's going to the cloud. There are some organizations that still have on-premise ERPs to migrate from the on-premise to the cloud. When those fundamental applications are going to the cloud, automation is a no-brainer. We would always promote the cloud version over on-premise.

    The RPA is the most valuable aspect. The power of machine learning and AI along with the document understanding capability that UiPath has is great.

    By implementing that portion of the solution, we get clients to 95% accuracy in reading invoices for processing into the ERP. While running basic automation will continue, the world is moving towards intelligent automation, which is with all the machine learning and AI.

    Overall, the solution has saved costs for our clients.

    It has reduced human error. Machines can do anything faster, cheaper, and of a higher quality than humans can do. That is just a universal fact. I don't think we have measured the accuracy, however, there's no doubt accuracy has gone up. The client recognizes that the accuracy rate has improved.

    We're not talking about removing errors. In some cases, errors may happen. However, when I say we’ve seen a 90% efficiency rate, it doesn’t mean the remaining 10% are bad decisions. We're talking about how it could not read those things. The confidence level is low, and therefore, it's kicked to a human to review. It did what it's supposed to do, which is to flag for human review, which is how processes should happen.

    The solution has allowed the employees to focus their time on other higher-value work. That's what we pitch to our clients. We never tell clients that oh, you can lay off people. We do not tell the clients that that's what they should do. Rather, we advise clients that what they can do with automation is free up people's time. That means either freeing up a portion of the time or fully freeing time or completely reassigning a job. 

    After automation, you may have to reorganize your department. However, with the freed-up time, departments can focus on the most important thing, which is what can they do to create focus on the customer and create an experience for the customer, where the customer feels they want to be connected with your brand.

    I have a case where I was talking to the CEO of a big restaurant company. HR, payroll, finance, all those areas that reported to him. He also handles customer experience. I told him about automation and the power of automation and how it will free up people's time. He said, “So what you're telling me is I can free up a portion of my staff so they can focus on all these customer complaints we're receiving?" For him, that is going to be a game-changer.

    UiPath has also positively affected the employees themselves. They've become a little bit more satisfied with knowing that they can focus their time on higher-value work. In most cases, initially, there'll be fear for them. They don't know what automation is, and why they're doing it, and what it's going to do to their position in the company. That fear will always be there with humans. That's why leadership needs to focus on change management and communication. Those things become very, very important. Once you do it right, people will actually feel happy. They will no longer have to say "Oh, no, I don't have to stay until six o'clock, seven o'clock every day to finish the SaaS." Now it's much easier. They can focus on the things that they truly enjoy, which has nothing to do with the heads-down work that they do all the time.

    We use the solution's AI functionality in our automation program for our clients. For simple processes, you don't need AI. However, the complex process where machines need to mimic the human thought process requires AI. AI is not perfect. It's not a holy grail that is going to solve all problems. That's not the case. We have to be careful. However, if you use it right in the right way, then you can truly solve complex problems.

    I’m not sure if the solution's AI functionality enables us to automate more processes overall. It's hard to say. For me, the way I look at technology is that it is not a hammer that's looking for a nail. You have to look at your business needs and then figure out what technology will best fit or solve the problem. It could be simple AI, or, maybe in some cases, you need more advanced AI. I would look at it as what's the right technology for what purpose. That's the way I look at it.

    We do use UiPath’s Academy. We have several people that we've pushed through training and certifications through the academy. It’s helped get those employees up to speed on the solution.

    Also for us, as we are a services company, that gives us a stamp of quality seal in order to market our services better as we are certified and qualified.

    What needs improvement?

    UiPath continues investment in machine learning and AI. That's one thing they have to do. The fundamental thing UiPath needs to understand is the competition, the market, is not Automation Anywhere or Blue Prism. Rather, big competition is coming from Microsoft.

    It's around the corner and Microsoft is going to come in a big way. I’d advise them of the parallel of Power BI. Power BI three years back was not a good tool. Other tools, like Tableau, were the kings of the BI space. Fast forward three years and today we do a lot of BI for clients. Almost every client of ours is migrating to Power BI, like Power BI's matured to 80% of Tableau, and that's good enough for them. On top of that, Microsoft was throwing free licenses to their customers. When you do that, versus buying $2,000 a pop or $1,500 a pop from Tableau, users line up behind the free tool to reduce their costs. Microsoft is doing that with Power Automate now. I just talked to a client, a big client, a $10 billion company, where they were at Blue Prism. They just told me that Microsoft just gave them 70 free licenses. Now, they are forced to bring Microsoft Power Automate into their RPA strategy even though before, they were not considering that.

    UiPath should take several steps forward to be prepared for this competition and create differentiation with capabilities that Microsoft does not have. The innovation within UiPath is going to be very, very crucial. However, the most important thing is to clear the differentiation in the messaging. That's very, very important. They should be ready and arm their partners with information about why UiPath and not Power Automate.

    I've been around the industry for 35 years, and I've seen lots of incumbents getting blown away in various technologies at various times. The big power comes down hard. UiPath has got to be ultra nimble to not get crushed.

    For how long have I used the solution?

    We started working with UiPath in 2018. We partnered with UiPath in late 2018. It's been about a three-year journey so far. 

    What do I think about the stability of the solution?

    In terms of stability, I've not heard anything bad at my level. That means no bad news is good news.

    What do I think about the scalability of the solution?

    We do plan to scale beyond the client's IT department and to the rest of the organization. When they scale it up to the rest of the organization, and this organization operates in 25 countries, they have over $190 billion in assets in these countries that we can add efficiencies to. The scale of efficiency that we will get with what we did will be huge. That’s the next step is to roll it out to the rest of the organization.

    General scalability is an issue when it comes to processing large data sets. However, with the right creativity, you can solve those things due to the fact that you can have the right infrastructure to catalyze or do whatever you have to do to create scalability. We are used to doing that. We deal with ERPs and we create architecture and design the environment in such a way that it can scale. That said, you need to know how to do that. 

    How are customer service and support?

    Technical support is very good. We're very pleased with that. When we ran into problems with a client, with the document understanding, initially the success rate was not very high. Then we had to reach out to the support and they actually jumped in and assisted us and told us what we needed to do. Once we did that, then things took off and we got to 90% accuracy. Initially, it was only 50%. Therefore, for us, it's been good.

    Which solution did I use previously and why did I switch?

    We did not previously use a different RPA solution.

    We did partner with Automation Anywhere,, however, ultimately, we didn't do anything with them.

    How was the initial setup?

    The initial setup is straightforward.

    We're a consulting company, and we work with several clients. For some deployments, we were able to do the first deployment in 30 days. With other clients, it took about three months or four months, depending on the use case or the initial use cases that they picked.

    Different companies operate differently. I always advise clients that they need to pick simple use cases and deploy them first before they go into complex stuff. Sometimes clients make the mistake of picking their most complex use case and say, "Oh, let's try that." No, that's not a good way. It's not a good way to embark on a journey that's long-term.

    You've got to think big, start small, and be agile. If you get a complex use case at the beginning, you lose agility.

    Which other solutions did I evaluate?

    We looked at Blue Prism, Automation Anywhere, and UiPath. The momentum was with UiPath. I knew where the momentum was and how we needed to align ourselves. That's why we did UiPath.

    We looked at where the market demand is. For example, Blue Prism. We knew that Blue Prism is a lot more IT-centric, IT heavy, programmer heavy, which defeats the whole purpose of self-service automation. It's never going to succeed in the marketplace today as we promote self-service for everything.

    That's why we didn't want to waste our time with Blue Prism. UiPath obviously has the community edition, which was brilliant. Basically, they saw a gap in the market. That's a parallel to what we do, for example, in Vtech space. Also, for example, Tableau is a good tool. So many people love Tableau. They've used Tableau. You had the established players in BI space like MicroStrategy and Oracle OBIEE, however, they were very IT-centric and Tableau came in and beat them. They sold out into the business and you could download, pay $2000 and download a license and start creating your dashboards. I was glad that UiPath took a similar approach by creating a community edition, and then letting end-users download and then play with it.

    What other advice do I have?

    We basically help clients think through their RPA strategy, their automation strategy and figure out what the right technology would be. We are a reseller. If it makes sense, we'll resell and we'll advise clients regarding UiPath for their RPA journey. We also use the solution ourselves. We have automated certain things, certain processes within the company. That becomes a practice round and a learning ground for our people so that when we go to clients, we can take some of these ideas and do to the clients as well as reaping the right expertise.

    I'm not sure if we are using the UiPath apps feature or the applications feature. In my role, I just lay the strategy and the team executes it.

    A lot of times things stall. In company setups we see a lot of cases where they did a few automations, a few bots, and then things stalled. That's a problem in the industry and the way to solve that and truly embrace the art of the possible is with automation. To get there, you need to execute across senior leadership. Without that education, they just don't put their weight on their departments to do the journey. Education is one thing that is very important. They understand the art of the possible.

    Another important aspect at the outset is having RPA as a corporate strategy. Pushing to make it a corporate strategy is really going to help. That way, you can stall it for some time, however, eventually, it will have to get done. Otherwise, they are left behind when your competitors take advantage of the agility. There needs to be a center of excellence and companies need to develop internal capabilities. If they don't have capabilities, then they fear not knowing how to handle something. Those are common problems. And those need to be overcome.

    I'd rate the solution at a nine out of ten.

    Which deployment model are you using for this solution?

    Public Cloud
    Disclosure: My company has a business relationship with this vendor other than being a customer: Partner and Reseller
    PeerSpot user
    Software Engineering Director at a financial services firm with 10,001+ employees
    Real User
    Great RPA capabilities that frees up employee time and has helpful training
    Pros and Cons
    • "The solution has improved our organization, specifically around all the operational aspects of the bot. Once we deploy them through the orchestrator we use insights to see how the bots are performing, what errors are referring, and just the general health insights would be the biggest lift that we've gotten out of the solution. Building the automation is a little bit easier and quicker on the platform than where we were at before."
    • "With all the different tools that they have in their arsenal, sometimes it's hard to know how we can get the most out of them."

    What is our primary use case?

    It's widely used across the bank. Some are dealing with regulatory issues, for example, taking documents out of one system, moving them into another. Others are opening new accounts for clients. Some are doing payment transactions and that involves looking at emails that come in and determining what type of document that is so it gets routed and processed correctly. We've touched every line of business within the bank.

    How has it helped my organization?

    The solution has improved our organization, specifically around all the operational aspects of the bot. Once we deploy them through the orchestrator we use insights to see how the bots are performing, what errors are referring to, and just the general health insights would be the biggest lift that we've gotten out of the solution. Building the automation is a little bit easier and quicker on the platform than where we were before.

    What is most valuable?

    The RPA is the most valuable aspect of the solution.

    We are really getting into using AI Center and we use Insights.

    The solution saved costs for our organization. That said, I can't quantify it.

    UiPath has reduced human error.

    In the initial automation that we're doing, we're migrating the ones that have run on another platform. Therefore, we already know how valuable they are to the bank. Sometime in 2022, we'll really be getting into new opportunities.

    UiPath has freed up employee time. In my specific job, I’m responsible for the running of the platform, making sure it's up and available. The other teams actually take care of the delivery and are more in tune with the business side and can speak more to the freeing of time in quantitative terms. I’m a degree away from that. I'm aware of what's going on over there, however, I don't track it so closely.

    We’ve used the UiPath Academy courses. The Academy is a really good platform to start training on. It really gets you into the platform and allows you to start exploring other things. Generally, they're really good courses.

    The number of courses and the variety of the topics all seem to touch on whatever aspect you're looking to do with the platform.

    What needs improvement?

    With all the different tools that they have in their arsenal, sometimes it's hard to know how we can get the most out of them. We see it as a kid going into a candy store. There are all sorts of choices. However, we don't necessarily understand, you would take this, but not that? You seem to need to mix and match certain things. We don't necessarily understand that. We need them to be more clear in saying, for example, "if you want to do process mining, great, however, these are its strengths and these are its limitations." If we know the pros and cons, then we can make a decision about what we need to adjust in terms of how we go after new opportunities. Basically, we are seeking better guidance on how to use the suite of the products together.

    For how long have I used the solution?

    I've been using the solution for a year. 

    What do I think about the stability of the solution?

    The solution is very stable. 

    What do I think about the scalability of the solution?

    The scalability is good. 

    We have a team collectively between developers and product owners and general users, so the users are comprised of roughly 100 different people. At different points, our in-orchestrator has 30 or so developers across several teams. In general, in terms of human people using it, it's likely 80 to 100 users or somewhere in there.

    We are looking to increase the usage.

    How are customer service and support?

    Technical support is okay. They have some gaps that they need to close. I know some of their folks from firsthand experience aren't necessarily used to using the new modern folders. Therefore, when we get on the phone and say "Hey, we're having this problem". The support staff will say "Oh, well you're a modern folder set up. I mostly work with classic." That doesn't matter from my perspective. I still need help.

    Which solution did I use previously and why did I switch?

    We used to use Blue Prism. Blue Prism only does RPA. Our goal was to consolidate, to have one platform for automation as a long-term solution for the bank. We went through a selection process and UiPath came out on top.

    How was the initial setup?

    I wasn't directly part of the setup team, however, from the outside looking in, it seems it was a little more involved than we had initially thought.

    Some of it may have been internal. Bank processes and having to have so many different people involved to install a server and configure it on the network and all that could have added difficulty.

    The deployment was probably close to three or four months. We have four environments. Over the course of about three months, all four environments eventually got stood up. The first took the longest. We noted what went right and wrong and went from there. 

    What was our ROI?

    We probably have seen an ROI, based on the initial cost to stand it up. That pricing structure is increasing now from the initial offering, however, overall, we're probably seeing some benefit out of it.

    What's my experience with pricing, setup cost, and licensing?

    The pricing is pretty fair for the size per the number of licenses. It's my understanding that part of that was influenced by the fact that they won their business from one of their competitors, Blue Prism. That probably helped.

    Which other solutions did I evaluate?

    We looked at Automation Anywhere. They had recently upgraded from their desktop to a web-based client. In the meantime, they dropped functions in the conversion and when I used it on the desktop, I noticed that there were certain functions that they didn't bring over onto the web version yet, which kind of surprised me. As far as just overall usability, integration with other technologies, whether it's Python or writing .net custom code, UiPath just kind of seamlessly works within the platform.

    What other advice do I have?

    We are not yet utilizing AI.

    I'd advise potential new users to do the due diligence and don't expect that UiPath is going to always outline the best ways to use it. A company just has to understand there's a lot there and try to be as specific in what they want to do. 

    On a scale from one to ten, I'd rate the solution at a nine.

    Which deployment model are you using for this solution?

    On-premises
    Disclosure: I am a real user, and this review is based on my own experience and opinions.
    PeerSpot user
    Vice President, IT Analyst Robotic Process Automation at DA Davidson
    Real User
    Has the ability to bridge various applications that users are using
    Pros and Cons
    • "It's definitely saving time for employees. One of our most successful automations frees them up from doing an entire task. Their quality of life has had a big improvement. It also happens to save a lot of hours. It saves a little over 2,000 hours annually."
    • "Insights is a little clumsy. StudioX is a great start but needs more functionality. They should bring the document understanding into StudioX and make it go a little bit further. There's a pretty clear point at which you really need to switch over to Studio, but in the case of some of our citizen developers, they'd like to stay in StudioX. They just need more features."

    What is our primary use case?

    We're in the financial services industry, so we target the operations. We use it in finance but we're also going after our wealth management group, capital markets group, and fixed income capital markets group.

    In one year we've done 17 automations in about 3,500 hours. We're just getting started. 

    We use mostly unattended automation, but we do have both.

    How has it helped my organization?

    It's still early for us so we're selecting specific areas and items to automate based on areas that we believe will provide strategic importance for us.

    We're now going to start expanding that and going after some of the larger jobs that we want to try to tackle, now that we've got some experience under our belt.

    We have saved costs in terms of employee hours saved. There are definitely going to be costs associated with that. Some of those are pretty high net worth individuals that UiPath is doing tasks that they just didn't need to do.

    It's definitely saving time for employees. One of our most successful automations frees them up from doing an entire task. Their quality of life has had a big improvement. It also happens to save a lot of hours. It saves a little over 2,000 hours annually.

    We are still learning how to build automations but I'm a fan of the RA framework. We use StudioX to help with citizen developers to help fill our pipeline. The tools are pretty good and evolving.

    What is most valuable?

    The ability to bridge various applications that users are using is the most valuable feature. If we have a process that's entered in multiple locations, we can send a robot to do one of those processes on behalf of the person. We've had good success there.

    Everybody on the team goes through Academy courses and continues to go back there for continuing education. Citizen developers are directed in that location as well. So we try to get them to complete StudioX. We like its ability to extend the life and the usability of some applications that by themselves can be a little cumbersome to use. I would like to make those apps and those experiences better for the user. And actually do more with them by extending parts through APIs that are passed to other applications.

    We're looking to start to modify the meat of the process and then tag on pieces to the beginning and ends. 

    What needs improvement?

    Insights is a little clumsy. StudioX is a great start but needs more functionality. They should bring the document understanding into StudioX and make it go a little bit further. There's a pretty clear point at which you really need to switch over to Studio, but in the case of some of our citizen developers, they'd like to stay in StudioX. They just need more features. 

    For how long have I used the solution?

    We have been using UiPath for a year. 

    What do I think about the stability of the solution?

    It's been very stable. The only problem we had were some digital certificates and those aren't UiPath's fault. It's partly our fault and how we manage them. One of those got in the way and shut some stuff down. It's not really the UiPath platform. That really hasn't gone down on us at all. It was the certificates. 

    What do I think about the scalability of the solution?

    We're only at 17 automations now. We have a lot of headroom in the bots that we currently own and the licensing that we have. We're getting ready to put the necessary pieces in place so that we can scale it up.

    How are customer service and support?

    The technical advisor is very good. 

    How would you rate customer service and support?

    Positive

    Which solution did I use previously and why did I switch?

     We have plenty of solutions that fall in the surrounding area, like various CTL things, automated software, and the types of things that are primarily used by IT.

    How was the initial setup?

    We had a strategic partner help us with the setup because we knew nothing about it. They helped set up our COE and the basic frameworks that we were going to be using within IT. I came in about four or five months into the project as an analyst so I wasn't there when they did it. 

    What about the implementation team?

    The strategic partner we used was very good.  They got us up and running and got our initial test trial into play.

    The setup process was not straightforward. They purposely gave them some things that were a bit of a challenge. 

    We are happy with what we got as a result.

    The first deployment took quite a while. If you're considering standing up a whole COE in all those environments, they did that fairly quickly. I believe it was in about three months. It has then continued to evolve from there. That was the learning experience. If you look at our development, that first automation, there's a long flat line. Then it started to ramp up pretty significantly in the back half of the year.

    What's my experience with pricing, setup cost, and licensing?

    Pricing is working for what we have right now. We set up two Orchestrator environments and we're unable to use our single license of the analytics on both. That's a bit of a problem. We'd like to see a dev environment for us that is free of licensing. It's development versus production. Charge us for production, don't charge us for dev. That's about the only complaint I would have.

    What other advice do I have?

    Don't be afraid to jump in. Get the IT department involved early, get the security department at the table. As long as you have top-down management that's there to mandate and make sure everybody does what they should be doing, the proper sponsorship, and the proper buy-in from the people that have to execute.

    I would rate it a ten out of ten. 

    Which deployment model are you using for this solution?

    On-premises
    Disclosure: I am a real user, and this review is based on my own experience and opinions.
    PeerSpot user
    RPA Architect at AXA Equitable
    Real User
    Way ahead in terms of providing features, customer support, ease of use, and in the development of robots

    What is our primary use case?

    We use all three of the UiPath components which include: Studio, Roboyo, and Orchestrator. There are a bunch of use cases that we explored for the POC (Proof of Concept) to be sure the product fits with our expectations for automation. For example, one use case is reconciliation processes for insurance group retirement and LOB (Law on Occupational Benefits) plans. We built it, tested it, and now that is one of the primary things we use the product for.

    How has it helped my organization?

    This solution has improved the way our organization functions in several ways. It has helped to eliminate human errors. It already saves 20 hours per month for reconciliation and LOB. It helped clients schedule their transactions before the end of the month. All of that automates tasks and makes financial processing faster in the insurance industry. That works out great for us.

    What is most valuable?

    The most valuable features provide solutions for when I am using OCR (Optical Character Recognition) technology. It easily integrates with Google OCR, Microsoft OCR, and ABBYY OCR. We are using that integration feature to incorporate OCR mostly for reading scans. To interact with Google OCR, Microsoft OCR, or ABBYY OCR, you don't need to implement a separate component but you can just — in a blink of an eye — integrate those peripheral solutions into the UiPath Studio and use them in your automated processes.

    If we can integrate other features that are not part of UiPath, it makes it far more useful in automation. In this case, UiPath is not building out an actual OCR component but they are just giving you an option to incorporate the other OCRs. That is very valuable.

    What needs improvement?

    In the next release of the solution, I would like to see the ability to grant permission to users at the job level. Some jobs or processes may need to belong to only one person. Right now, I believe we don't have that feature in UiPath and we can't assign a job to a user. We can give permissions on a tenant level, or we can give permissions on the environment level, but not at the job or process level. 

    I would like to see the ability in UiPath to be able to assign each job or each process to a particular user and give that user some specific access and privilege. For example, maybe they should only be able to run or stop a particular job or a particular process, but they can not do anything else. That makes a lot of sense because all users may not need to see all the processes in Orchestrator in one instance or have access to administrative features. The same goes for a tenant or even in an environment. If UiPath can make that happen at the user-level or process-level for a robot, that helps a lot to enable customized bots.

    What do I think about the stability of the solution?

    On a scale from one to five where five is the best and one the worst, I would rate the stability of the UiPath platform at a four-out-of-five. The stability is a four instead of a five because the stability is not completely dependent on only UiPath. Underlying obligations play a part too. Sometimes when I am writing applications, I'm not up on how to handle every exception. That is not possible because a developer does not know all the scenarios an application can become involved with. In that scenario, the product can lag. But, otherwise, it is really a very good solution that is dependable and stable.

    What do I think about the scalability of the solution?

    Approximately five people in our organization are involved in our automation program working in the CoE (Center of Excellence). There are four developers and there are 200 users including business users. So, you can say there are around 250 people currently involved in this. I don't think scalability is an issue.

    How are customer service and technical support?

    We did have the opportunity to use UiPath Academy RPA training. On a scale from one to five where five is the most beneficial, I would rate the training as a four-out-of-five. It is good for basic understanding. We have usually had UiPath foundation training for all of our developers. Really, I think you can say that we have not put fully utilized it.

    Other parts of technical support we have only used very minimally. For example, we have not used premium support or licensed support levels. Sometimes we called customer support on tickets to integrate with mainframe obligations the first time or some more involved issues. But that type of situation was unusual. We have barely used the customer support because most of the information is available in Academy, in the portals, or the user forums. A few times when we left a ticket, it was not even necessary for us to get back to technical support because we resolved the issue on our own.

    Which solution did I use previously and why did I switch?

    We knew that we had an opportunity to invest in a new solution when we heard about RPA three years back. UiPath and WorkFusion came to us at the same time and saying, "We have a solution to improve your work processes."

    We spent some time evaluating which tool was right for us by doing a study inside our organization to determine how much manual work could be automated. With some analysis, we found out that there is a huge opportunity for implementing this type of RPA solution in AXA (global insurance, not an acronym) as it is a large organization with a lot of repeated processes.

    Because there was a lot of manual work, people in our organization had to work for more hours at times to properly complete a job. Sometimes they had to stay overnight and work additional hours on weekends to complete processing on time. To avoid that we requested that operations consider our proposal for automation.

    We showed operations where we could automate repeatable and mundane tasks. The response was very positive and they realized we need to implement these solutions to help us to buy some time for employees to properly do their work and reduce labor intensity.

    Our previous solution was either no solution at all except for manual labor or some experience we had with one tool called OpenSpan. OpenSpan did not have a proper management console and was difficult to use so it mostly remained unimplemented. When we introduced the potential solution for seriously pursuing RPA to reducing the workload, that is when we started looking at UiPath.

    How was the initial setup?

    The set up for the product is straightforward. It is seamless. In fact, you just need to know the server where it will reside. There is material available in UiPath guides and the UiPath forum where you can just follow along step-by-step and install your Orchestrator. So it is very straightforward. 

    From the time we purchased the UiPath license until we had our first robot in production is not exactly clear. We had developed a POC, which was ready to be put into production and then we bought a license. After we bought the license, we just put it into production and it had already been built.

    What about the implementation team?

    We did the entire implementation ourselves with some contact with UiPath.

    What was our ROI?

    We are not yet really realizing a return on investment as our deployment continues to be in progress. How much money we have saved is what we are hoping to eventually count in the ROI. In terms of the calculations that we started last year, we asked that the KPI (Key Performance Indicator) points look at time-saving and not really the dollar saving. The time saving you can say approximately 20 hours per month, which we have achieved consistently up until now. We have achieved something but we are expecting that to grow a lot.

    The solution has also helped to eliminate human errors. I cannot say exactly what that percentage is —  say even 20% or something like that. There are a couple of instances before we automated the reconciliation process last month — before we actually put the bot into production — where people were getting the wrong details by mistake. I would say we have reduced the human error because those situations are being handled by the bot and they will not be repeated now. 

    What's my experience with pricing, setup cost, and licensing?

    We license the product on a yearly basis and it costs us around $80,000. We are a very large organization. We have unattended bots and there is a pricing structure surrounding that but I'm not involved in the licensing terms.

    Which other solutions did I evaluate?

    What made us choose UiPath to automate our processes was evaluating the capabilities of competition and deciding on the best solution for us. We compared UiPath, WorkFusion and other products — and even other types of tools — in terms of infrastructure, setup, how easily it could be scaled, etcetera. UiPath stood out a little as it had the capability to invoke virtual machines automatically without any human intervention. A lot of other tools didn't have that capability at that point. But the time we had to come down to a decision, UiPath had features that were not available in any of the other tools. With other research into the company and product, we saw that UiPath listened to the customers' needs and was often upgrading. Now all the competition has seen them as the leader and they have tried to incorporate features UiPath had already deployed.

    That initial difference we saw between UiPath and the other tools we compared was the reason we took this direction. We believed UiPath and we decided that this was our theater for RPA. Now, if we see some enhancements that need to be made in the product, we just communicate to UiPath and we know they will look at the idea and maybe implement it. UiPath has the capability of adding features immediately. They are releasing around 10 or more versions in a year with important new features. 

    What other advice do I have?

    We do use a virtual environment such as Citrix when it is appropriate and that works out pretty well. The obvious advantage is there is no dependency on a physical machine being available and they are available 24/7 from anywhere. I am actually comfortable developing anything and everything in Citrix via virtual machines.

    On a scale from one to five where one is very difficult and five is very easy, I would rate the ease-of-use of the platform as a five. Ease of use is one other thing that I like a lot about UiPath.

    Going a step further, on a scale from one to ten, I would rate this product overall as a ten compared to other RPA solutions. In comparison to its nearest competitor — Blue Prism — UiPath is way ahead in terms of providing features, giving customer support, ease of use, ease of access to our personal history, and surely in the development of robots.

    Everybody can understand easily what exactly the product is doing and can become familiar with it quickly. With other competitors, there is a huge infrastructure to set up. Some of the products make it so each bot needs a control room. Those products are not centralized, which makes them more confusing to use.

    People have to manage on their own how they are going to build all their RPA management solutions. When you are using UiPath, you just get Orchestrator instead of multiple robots and control panels, then you just scale whenever you want.

    I definitely recommend UiPath for simplicity and ease-of-use. If somebody was getting an RPA solution, the advice I would give them is to definitely go for it. Setting up RPAs eliminates human error in tasks and lightens workloads for menial jobs. This lets people focus on more innovative work and it can lead to further integration. What I would think is the natural path for UiPath is that it can integrate the AI in the future. Right now, people think that this is already cognitive or AI integrated, but there is a very long way to go in the future for it to become truly like artificial intelligence.

    So, what I am saying is I would take it as a first step towards the AI. I would definitely recommend people use it so that in future when AI comes in, you can just grab an AI solution from UiPath and improve your implementations further.

    Which deployment model are you using for this solution?

    On-premises
    Disclosure: I am a real user, and this review is based on my own experience and opinions.
    PeerSpot user
    Buyer's Guide
    Download our free UiPath Report and get advice and tips from experienced pros sharing their opinions.
    Updated: March 2024
    Buyer's Guide
    Download our free UiPath Report and get advice and tips from experienced pros sharing their opinions.