We use UiPath for claims processing, enrollment, and interpreting what's on documents, and then we use the data that's in them for different purposes. I'm sure there are many other use cases. We're still brainstorming and giving our leaders some ideas. Frontline employees also have process improvement ideas.
UiPath Robot
UiPath Inc.External reviews
External reviews are not included in the AWS star rating for the product.
Low-code solution that allows us to build automations fairly quickly and see the results promptly
What is our primary use case?
How has it helped my organization?
UiPath has improved efficiency, turnaround time, and accuracy while eliminating repetitive tasks.
With generative AI, we can take on even more complex tasks. We've seen a return in claims and enrollment, which has freed up time and resources. There are lots of other possibilities. Our frontline people have seen how it can supplement and focus on more important tasks, and business leaders like seeing the resources freed for various reasons. The growth potential is immense, and we're only in the early stages.
What is most valuable?
UiPath is a low-code solution that allows us to build automations fairly quickly and see the results promptly.
What needs improvement?
Overall, UiPath is relatively straightforward, but there are opportunities to simplify activities. Sometimes, I've hit roadblocks while developing RPA jobs and found it difficult to find the answer. I can usually resolve a problem through a support ticket or an online search.
For how long have I used the solution?
We have used UiPath for about a year and a half.
How are customer service and support?
I rate UiPath support eight out of 10. UiPath support is good, but sometimes they give generic users. Maybe I need to take the initiative and give a little more information and context
How would you rate customer service and support?
Positive
What was our ROI?
There has been a return on investment, though I'm unsure of the specific amount. We've already saved time and thousands of dollars.
What other advice do I have?
I rate UiPath eight out of 10.
Offers UI, web, and Excel automation and has the ability to package all of these in one software suite
What is our primary use case?
We have been using the RPA functionality in UiPath mostly for cash management. Our biggest use case is submitting wires and payments.
How has it helped my organization?
We aim to reduce routine tasks and allow people more time to do more important things. We were mainly looking at time savings for employees, and we may not have gotten all of the time savings that we wanted, but we definitely have found some. In addition to saving time, we also hope to mitigate risks for some of the tasks we've implemented and reduce human error in some of these processes,
In bot development, we have had a lot of conversations about what we want bots to do, how to process exceptions, who exceptions go to, and who needs to be aware. Once the bot goes live, we have to keep the chats and lines of communication open to ensure everything's working.
What is most valuable?
The most valuable features are UI, web, and Excel automation, as well as the ability to package all of these in one software suite.
What needs improvement?
Setting up the infrastructure with different virtual desktops and making the connections stable in our environment present challenges. More direction on cleaning up these issues would be useful.
For how long have I used the solution?
I have been using UiPath for about two years.
What do I think about the stability of the solution?
We've had some stability issues, but we're unsure whether UiPath caused them or if it was our company's older internal infrastructure. We haven't had any downtime caused by UiPath.
What do I think about the scalability of the solution?
UiPath has been able to scale as our environment grows and keeps up with demand.
How are customer service and support?
I rate UiPath support eight out of 10. We receive good support from UiPath when we need it.
How would you rate customer service and support?
Positive
Which solution did I use previously and why did I switch?
Personally, I did not use a different solution before UiPath, but some departments at the corporation have used other RPA tools, and some still do. We chose UiPath because we worked with some consulting firms that were familiar with the development capabilities of the solution. They could help with the initial development of the bots. We like the direction of the tool.
What about the implementation team?
We worked with consulting firms familiar with the development capabilities of UiPath to assist with the development of bots.
What was our ROI?
We have seen a return on investment due to time savings with high-value employees. However, as we continue to make new things, it's hard to determine the exact return at this point.
What's my experience with pricing, setup cost, and licensing?
I am not involved in the purchasing, but people have been generally happy with the pricing so far. Some pieces we use now may not provide expected value, and we might remove those in the future.
What other advice do I have?
I rate UiPath nine out of 10.
We have realized productivity increases, financial savings, error reductions, and streamlining of many processes
What is our primary use case?
We use AI mainly around sales processing and document understanding. Our current use cases involve traditional automation, processing different orders, order formats, languages, and language translation, and creating actual orders in any ERP solution.
We've done a Communications Mining POC, and we think that's promising, but we haven't used UiPath's process mining because we have another solution for that.
How has it helped my organization?
We were already using a competing automation platform when we implemented UiPath. UiPath is a more cloud-based solution. We're biotech regulators, so we're trying to adopt new innovations as quickly as they are released. Regarding challenges, we're trying to simplify and automate processes to achieve a higher value and make problem-solving more seamless.
We engage our employees in automation in two ways. At the enterprise level, it's more about making it easy for there to be a centralized intake of opportunities and focus on the value of what comes through. Citizen automation is about empowering and training them on how to use it so they can build more.
Our organization has experienced productivity increases, financial savings, error reductions, and streamlining of many processes in finance and accounting with UiPath automation. It has helped free up staff time so that they can focus on more value-added work, and when automations don't function as expected, employees can be upset because they don't want to return to previous manual methods.
I don't know about shareholders, but employees who learn to build automation can do more value-added work. It makes them happy. Customers within the company can have people in their teams spend their time on more value-added work, and they have better transparency.
What is most valuable?
RPA is always good, and UiPath's Document Understanding is interesting. We used the old model, but the new modern Document Understanding is much easier.
What needs improvement?
UiPath could offer better support for operations. It has all these cool features, but when you still need to build and run these bots. You need to have more features that make it easier to run bots, and they require fewer people to maintain.
For how long have I used the solution?
We have used UiPath since 2020, so it has been nearly four years.
What do I think about the stability of the solution?
The solution is stable, with, for example, only a thirty-minute outage in three years.
What do I think about the scalability of the solution?
It is scalable, but successful scalability depends on how you build automations.
How are customer service and support?
We have premium support, which provides excellent customer service. Our technical account manager is amazing, and that's one reason we keep paying for premium support.
How would you rate customer service and support?
Positive
Which solution did I use previously and why did I switch?
We previously used Automation Anywhere and switched to UiPath because it was easier for developers to use and could integrate with more products.
How was the initial setup?
It was complex because UiPath didn't have a biotech-specific offering. We were the first biotech company to use this, so we had to develop a product that would work for companies under regulation. We needed something called delayering. We had to educate UiPath on what it means to do this for health care and biotech.
What was our ROI?
UiPath helped us save around 500,000 thousand hours. Over our entire automation journey, that amounts to an estimated $25 million worth of productivity hours.
What's my experience with pricing, setup cost, and licensing?
The pricing is very expensive, making it challenging to continue using UiPath when competitors like Microsoft offer cheaper alternatives like Power Automate. Why continue to use UiPath when you're paying three to five times more?
What other advice do I have?
I would rate UiPath a nine out of ten.
Which deployment model are you using for this solution?
If public cloud, private cloud, or hybrid cloud, which cloud provider do you use?
I am incredibly impressed with the pace of new features that have come out
What is our primary use case?
I currently work for a data center company serving real estate clients. Our primary use case for UiPath involves large-scale automation using Document Understanding to process invoices.
I have two models running. One is for our general invoices, including everything we pay for people coming on-site at all data centers worldwide. There's a separate model for utilities. Accuracy in our utilities spending is crucial for our data center business, where power costs are passed on to customers.
Currently, we still use traditional machine learning from when we initially developed these models three years ago. However, we are creating a company strategy to implement GenAI and deal with the legal implications. GenAI is something we're considering as an enhancement to our document processing and data collection. We're still trying to figure out how that happened. We're figuring out which documents and data to include in an internal model and draw conclusions from.
When working with data, our top priority is ensuring that the data is updated, accurate, and well-maintained. There's a structure involved because a ton of our information is in SharePoint, which is a mess. We have two SharePoint sites for every employee.
How has it helped my organization?
Some large-scale invoice-related tasks were overwhelming our existing processes and attempts to handle them manually. We are in the data center industry and dealing with all these technology companies, but many processes in the real estate business are a bit more outdated. Many of our people are comfortable working in Excel, and some teams are highly siloed. One significant challenge I've faced as a UiPath developer is acting as an evangelist within the company. We want to demonstrate the platform's capabilities and get buy-in from these different teams across the enterprise to raise the level of what we're trying to do.
UiPath has been helpful with that first step of getting the information off the invoice. I've been learning and expanding my skill set on the workflow side. Many of our automations have a workflow with a human in the loop doing manual review. I look forward to automating between different departments, and that's one thing I want to develop at this conference.
We used to bring on seasonal contractors during peak seasons, and now we no longer need to do that because the existing staff have more capability. That was a big thing when we started. Our accounting team was so busy for the two weeks before and the one week after closing. There was a tiny window when they could engage with any process improvement or look ahead at what we could change because they were so busy keeping up with how things work. We've freed up these people who are intimately familiar with our business and give them more time to apply that knowledge instead of filling out forms.
We were processing about 2,000 invoices a month when I started. Now we're up to about three thousand. It took about 15 minutes per invoice to process because there were so many different elements. Working with Yardi is challenging. There was a big issue with getting these into Yardi and uploading them in batches. If one invoice in the batch failed, it would kick them all out. We spent all this extra effort troubleshooting and doing all of this.
Now, the bot can execute this work and upload them individually. If there's a single error, it can be isolated and kicked out as an exception. Someone can manually review it, and the bot can keep putting the rest of the invoices into the system. We've also had a great ROI on the monthly reporting. We generated reports from around 50 sites every week and then distributed them to a long list of different people on different projects. It's straightforward to do and only requires 10 clicks for each report, but it saves massive amounts of time for people. Now, all I need to do is maintain a list of who should get the emails and what projects need reports to run.
I love developing automations. I often directly help people by improving the part of their job that is time-consuming and dull. In addition to saving time, we reduce errors caused by manually typing things in. I've demonstrated that in different departments at our company.
We won an award for our ESG efforts. I developed an automation to help us report our ESG metrics because all of these customers want reports to give their shareholders about green initiatives. We wanted to take all the data on energy reductions in data centers and distribute it to each of our customers. We had a very complex template that we wanted to iterate on until we delivered the report. I developed a bot that could generate the source data and template of these files for our customers by data center and aggregate them.
Before I joined the company, they had no automation solution. They tried to do this with mail merge, which struggled because of the variability across our sites. We wanted to achieve greater complexity and offer this table of information when it's available or update it when the final file we're generating varies significantly. We wanted to be able to convert a Word doc into PDF format and aggregate all of those different PDFs at the site level and aggregate those per customer.
What is most valuable?
UiPath's Object Repository was huge. I could build these libraries because our industry works with many of the same systems. It's hard to integrate with Yardi's core CRM, and many of our automation efforts focus on getting information in and out of that system. The ability to build these libraries of reusable selectors has dramatically benefited me over the past couple of years.
I'm excited about all the new stuff around document understanding because I think that is a large area. We can continue expanding and delivering large-scale automations.
What needs improvement?
The messages and alerts that Orchestrator generates are a little overwhelming. I'd like them to be filtered down to the most actionable things I need to look at. For many things, we set up an automation that will send an email summarizing things to the stakeholders for the automation. With any of these types of things, you're generating notices, emails, and things, so you want to focus on some things that need your attention.
For how long have I used the solution?
I started using UiPath while interning and pursuing an MBA. I've always been a huge fan of Excel, Visual Basic, and automation in general. I've been in my current role for about three and a half years, but I began tinkering with UiPath for a couple of years before that.
What do I think about the stability of the solution?
I have not experienced any performance or uptime issues with UiPath.
What do I think about the scalability of the solution?
In my current role, it's been challenging to demonstrate the need to grow and bring on more developers. We're processing a high volume of invoices, but the rest of the business has around 200 employees. We have large capital expenditures building these data centers but not a high volume of back office processes.
I have not necessarily been able to evaluate what it would look like to grow with 20 automations. We could keep a steady pace of new smaller-scale processes and look for new large-scale opportunities, especially with some of these new technologies. However, I don't think we'll be a large enough business to need these massive deployments.
How are customer service and support?
I rate UiPath support 10 out of 10. I have submitted tickets periodically for a specific issue, or when I'm trying to solve a new problem, I haven't faced before. I am the only UiPath-focused employee at my company. I can work on iterating, researching, and troubleshooting.
I've always been able to put in a ticket and get on a call with some people. They're able to connect me with someone and help me understand either the problem I'm facing or the fact that we've been able to have more calls recently about new potential. The online community is also an excellent resource for finding ways to approach and solve problems. Their support has been great.
How would you rate customer service and support?
Positive
Which solution did I use previously and why did I switch?
Prior to UiPath, there was no different solution implemented at my current company. At a previous company, we conducted a comparison between Automation Anywhere and UiPath and opted for UiPath due to its greater flexibility, capabilities, and entry offerings. At the start of my career, UiPath was one of the first to offer free online training and a lower entry point for businesses just starting out.
Automation Anywhere followed suit. While reviewing them, I built the same process in both systems and presented it to our executives. Automation Anywhere seemed focused on the financial industry. It had some excellent features if that's what you were what you cared about, but I greatly preferred the UiPath's general flexibility, capabilities, and breadth of integration. I've done some small-scale things with Microsoft Power Automate. That tool is hard to work with. They try to make it easy for non-technical people, but it means that I have a hell of a time trying to get it to do what I want.
How was the initial setup?
The initial setup was straightforward, and it was conducted in-house. We host our own virtual machines for running automations and we are a cloud customer.
What about the implementation team?
The implementation was done in-house.
What was our ROI?
We've seen the greatest ROI from large-scale invoice processing, but small-scale operations have had great returns. Before automation, we were processing 3,000 invoices monthly, which took 15 minutes each. It still requires time to review them in the Action Center manually.
What's my experience with pricing, setup cost, and licensing?
UiPath's pricing and licensing have been reasonable and manageable for us. Despite challenges in constantly monitoring SharePoint folders, UiPath has worked well within our resources. We have a fully dedicated, unattended license for our invoice processing, which needs to be a top priority and is always running throughout the day. We have another one for all of our other scheduled automations, and we've been pleased with that so far.
What other advice do I have?
I rate UiPath 10 out of 10. I'm incredibly impressed with the pace of new features that have come out. I have been working with UiPath for six years since I graduated college, and I'm blown away by what's coming out every year.
Which deployment model are you using for this solution?
If public cloud, private cloud, or hybrid cloud, which cloud provider do you use?
The document understanding feature can handle a significant amount of handwritten notes and efficiently extract information
What is our primary use case?
We use UiPath across departments, including HR, IT, procurement, and the supply chain. One use case is hiring and other simple HR-related tasks. We also automate complex processes, like using Document Understanding and machine learning to extract vendor contract information and input it into our procurement system.
How has it helped my organization?
Many applications don't have built-in APIs, and some repetitive processes require a lot of staff to perform. We try to identify those processes and automate them. At the end of the day, it's about how quickly a particular process can be implemented, what kind of ROI we can realize, and the speed of completing the process.
These processes take forever if you're doing it manually. For example, let's take something as simple as hiring. Evaluating a candidate probably takes 30 to 45 minutes to complete all the steps, and large organizations are constantly hiring. Another challenge is the number of staff you have. By automating using robots, you can reduce the number of people you need to hire and complete the work much faster. It also helps resolve turnover. You can run the automation 24/7, and robots don't take vacations, so things happen faster.
Another benefit is SLA compliance. We have SLAs to meet for data, and we need to complete some tasks within 48 or 72 hours. Automation helps us meet those targets by completing jobs faster. UiPath frees staff to work on other tasks. Just one process that we use for hiring has easily freed two or three people. Now, they're doing tasks that require human intelligence and knowledge.
What is most valuable?
Any solution, such as Power Automate, can do traditional RPA functions, but UiPath's Document Understanding sets it apart. The document understanding feature can handle a significant amount of handwritten notes and efficiently extract information. While there is a human-in-the-loop component for validation, it is still faster than manually extracting information.
What needs improvement?
My biggest problem is that UiPath is growing so fast and adding integration with so many different products that it's hard to keep up. The COEs at various companies and our developers aren't able to keep pace with what's happening. It's a good problem to have. I'm not complaining, but there are so many features and little time for developers to learn and implement them.
If you need something new like a CICD pipeline or somebody for a test suite or to work with Document Understanding, you can't use our existing staff because they don't have the skills. Now, I need to go out and hire more people. I need to reduce the company's size to save money but also spend more to hire.
For how long have I used the solution?
I have used UiPath for about seven years.
What do I think about the stability of the solution?
We have not encountered any stability issues with UiPath. The cloud-based deployment has been stable, and we have not experienced any unexpected robot shutdowns. Issues tend to arise from other SaaS applications rather than UiPath.
What do I think about the scalability of the solution?
UiPath has been able to scale effectively as our organization grows. Scaling with UiPath has been easy and efficient.
How are customer service and support?
The customer service has always been good. However, it takes longer to reach support now than it did four to five years ago, this can be attributed to their increased customer base.
How would you rate customer service and support?
Positive
Which solution did I use previously and why did I switch?
At my current organization, we didn't use a different solution before UiPath. However, I have previous experience with Blue Prism and Automation Anywhere.
How was the initial setup?
The initial setup was straightforward. Despite using a partner, we managed most of the work in-house due to my previous experience with UiPath.
What about the implementation team?
We worked with a partner for the implementation. Although the partner helped, we managed most of the work ourselves to tailor the solution to our needs.
What was our ROI?
When you start a program, it takes a while to reach the point where you achieve an ROI. Still, if you're not seeing an ROI with UiPath by the second year, you're doing it wrong. We are doing that right now.
We've found a lot of processes working across different teams and departments. We spoke to the leads of various COEs and found processes that would realize the highest ROI or SLA compliance. A department might have only one or two procurement processes, but they are sizeable. Automating those will help you achieve an ROI faster.
What's my experience with pricing, setup cost, and licensing?
UiPath isn't cheap, but it's priced competitively with other automation solutions, and it offers more resources.
Which other solutions did I evaluate?
I was not part of the organization during the evaluation phase, but I know they chose UiPath because it was easier to set up with comparable costs to other solutions, more resources available, and robust training material for basic RPA functions. It's easier to train people to perform basic RPA functions.
What other advice do I have?
I rate UiPath nine out of 10.
Which deployment model are you using for this solution?
If public cloud, private cloud, or hybrid cloud, which cloud provider do you use?
Increases the dependability of our operations team but should have alternative coding methods
What is our primary use case?
We use UiPath for backend office automation and website integration.
How has it helped my organization?
UiPath increases the dependability of our operations team and simplifies the coding process for novice developers. It has freed up your staff time to work on other projects.
What is most valuable?
It's easy to automate rote tasks with UiPath.
What needs improvement?
UiPath Studio could offer alternative coding methods. You could invoke the code with VB or C#, but I'm unfamiliar with either of those languages, and I don't have time to explore them.
For how long have I used the solution?
I have used UiPath for a little over a year.
What do I think about the stability of the solution?
My impression of the stability of UiPath is decent.
What do I think about the scalability of the solution?
The scalability performance is yet to be fully assessed as the environment grows.
How are customer service and support?
The documentation is not impressive, warranting a rating of five out of 10. It is neither bad nor great.
How would you rate customer service and support?
Neutral
Which solution did I use previously and why did I switch?
I did not use a different solution before UiPath. The acquisition happened before my time.
Which other solutions did I evaluate?
I do not know of any alternate solutions evaluated as the acquisition was before my time.
What other advice do I have?
I rate UiPath five out of 10.
The out-of-the-box libraries are extensive
What is our primary use case?
Our primary use case is IDP. We're in the Fed market, so a lot of it is all IDP driven. AI and automation are priorities. We're not exclusively a UiPath shop, but we're shifting to utilize it more because we know there are opportunities, especially in the realm of document capture.
How has it helped my organization?
For us, it requires fewer resources, and the time to get to the production environment is quicker. It hasn't significantly impacted our stakeholders yet, but people know the brand. When we talk with customers, they ask if we know about about UiPath and if we're a partner.
We're moving away from the current platforms because they're less robust. The RPA tools we've used previously haven't kept up with the pace of change. UiPath is a leader that has continued to progress with RPA development and invest in improvements.
What is most valuable?
We're still in the early stages with UiPath, but two things that will help are the Copilot and the Autopilot. We'll be able to generate new processes based on the learning that's taken place. It will have a significant impact on the things we do. Generative AI is not new to us. We've had these discussions for a while, and our CEO is well-versed in generative AI. Software companies are coming to realize the value and implement it.
UiPath has spent the money on research and generating libraries. The out-of-the-box libraries are extensive. In the past, we used standard capture products, where we had to create all of the extractions in the zones and all those things. UiPath offers faster implementation.
What needs improvement?
UiPath's pricing could be improved. The margins for us as a bottom-level tier partner are not great, which can be a hindrance, particularly when we present it to the customer. Other than that, I don't have any areas of improvement at the moment due to our limited experience. Maybe after six months to a year, we might have more feedback.
For how long have I used the solution?
I have been using UiPath for several years, although I only started with this company a couple of months ago. Previously, I led a team for four years with another organization.
What do I think about the stability of the solution?
The stability of the solution has been good. I haven't experienced any platform issues. Any issues that arise typically relate to coding or interactions with third-party vendors.
What do I think about the scalability of the solution?
Reflecting on my previous organization, UiPath was able to scale effectively.
How are customer service and support?
I rate UiPath support eight out of 10. My previous experience with UiPath's customer service was really good. The support from the sales and presales levels and the technical specialists was excellent. They were all willing to help and work with us.
How would you rate customer service and support?
Positive
Which solution did I use previously and why did I switch?
We eventually switched from our previous solution because it did not keep up with the pace of change. The company did not invest in their product and failed to keep up with the latest and greatest technologies.
What was our ROI?
It's too early to tell if there's been a return on investment with UiPath.
What's my experience with pricing, setup cost, and licensing?
Pricing is a significant area for improvement. We see little margin as a bottom-level tier partner, which makes it challenging when communicating pricing to the customer.
What other advice do I have?
I would rate UiPath an eight out of ten.
It improves the efficiency of our operational and analytical work without the need to hire more staff
What is our primary use case?
We are considering implementing AI as we are a healthcare staffing company in the education sector. Our use case focuses on processing a large number of emails and resumes. We aim to mine resumes to determine which are best for rapid and successful placements. On the communication side, we wish to perform sentiment analysis to assess how well our salespeople respond to clients.
How has it helped my organization?
We want to mine, structure, and analyze data using data science methods. We also hope to use generative AI and large language models to perform some of the data analysis, saving us lots of time. My company tripled in size in the last three years, so we have a lot more people, but the backend operations haven't grown at the same pace as the number of salespeople.
Automation helps us with operational and analytical work because we lack enough talent for that. By using AI, we can do the same amount of work without hiring more people, so we save money and improve productivity. Generative AI is part of our discussion. We had to decide whether to develop our own model or use existing software like UiPath to get things done faster and easier.
We have about 15,000 consultants working for us during the school year, and to fill those positions, we may need to interview five times that many. A lot of them might drop out by the time school starts. Using UiPath and AI, we can speed up processing and onboarding because that might be why people quit. They might leave for another job if we don't onboard them fast enough. We can save more candidates and prevent revenue loss from a potential placement by making the processing time faster.
After implementing UiPath, we automated many manual tasks. We save a lot of time, and those people who used to do manual work are doing more knowledge work. A lot of them now see what bots can do, so they're more open to the idea of developing bots. That set the stage for them to trust AI-powered bots in the future.
What is most valuable?
The most valuable featire is the whole automation suite that helps develop automation processes. In the future, we might further explore Communications Mining and Process Mining.
What needs improvement?
There's a push for cloud-based operations, but I prefer to develop things on the desktop. I'd appreciate the ability to develop things on the desktop and roll them out concurrently on the cloud.
For how long have I used the solution?
My company has used UiPath for about two years, but I've used it for about a year.
What do I think about the stability of the solution?
UiPath is very stable.
What do I think about the scalability of the solution?
UiPath has kept up with our growth. However, there's a limitation with licensing.
Which solution did I use previously and why did I switch?
I previously used Blue Prism in a different company. However, for the current company, they had no prior automation solution.
What about the implementation team?
Our IT support company, Coretelligence's parent company, helped with the initial implementation. There were renewal delays prompting a desire to work directly with UiPath.
What was our ROI?
From a cost-saving perspective, we are seeing a lot of returns, including internal staffing cost savings and HR bot efficiencies.
What's my experience with pricing, setup cost, and licensing?
UiPath's licensing could be cheaper and more dynamic. The licensing can sometimes feel high, especially for smaller companies, but generally, the pricing is reasonable when considering the time saved and corresponding costs.
Which other solutions did I evaluate?
I wasn't the decision maker, but my CFO considered industry leaders and attended the Forward Conference. He was impressed and chose UiPath. One thing that he liked was that it was easy to learn and use.
What other advice do I have?
I rate UiPath eight out of 10. I enjoy working with it, and it seems to have everything we need. They're adding new features at a reasonable rate while not deprecating old stuff too fast. It's a smooth transition from classic to modern activities.
The solution enables intelligent document processing, improving productivity and reducing our backlogs
What is our primary use case?
We're a food ingredient distribution company that receives documents on ingredients' nutrition, allergens, microbial testing, etc. We primarily use UiPath to process these documents. It was our proof of concept for using the system initially, and we'll expand it to process invoices and other related use cases.
We operate using an enterprise operating system. It's not a technological thing. It's how you determine project priorities. Soon, we'll set up process mining. Then, the IT team and technology group will decide what we do. Right now, the business units effectively vote on the next quarter's priorities.
How has it helped my organization?
We're a high-tenure organization. The average tenure is 15 years, so we want to avoid growing our headcount. We're continuously growing by 10 to 15 percent annually, so we've had to add enough staff to process the documents. Our primary concern was to stop the increase in staff. Even after we added staff, we were falling behind because they were much slower at processing those documents.
We get documents from our suppliers and, as a distributor, send them to our customers. If the supplier hasn't sent them, we need to hound them. We were falling behind on our backlog of 250,000 documents. UiPath enabled us to avoid adding more employees. Automation was the way to go. We haven't added any more headcount, and the backlog is going down, but it isn't as much as we had hoped.
The automation has allowed us to provide customers with better-quality documents faster. It has also given employees more time to locate the documents we don't have, freeing them from mundane tasks. It's freed them from the work of typing data on a form into an ERP system.
We are talking about using it for our environmental and social governance initiatives. We're considering bringing together some of those pieces through automation to track our energy usage or what we've spent on some of the other bits and pieces and have a better ESG profile.
What is most valuable?
I find the intelligent document processing features extremely interesting. They're fun and represent an actual practical use of AI. There are so many impractical ways to use AI, but this offers a tangible ROI, and you can see its benefits directly.
What needs improvement?
There are small issues, such as the Action Center not auto-refreshing. The user has to keep clicking "refresh." It's minor, but if you're waiting for something in your queue, you don't want to sit there and keep clicking. Logging could be improved, and there are a few connectors where I would like to see enhancements, but nothing major.
For how long have I used the solution?
We started using UiPath in January of this year, so we've used it for less than a year.
What do I think about the stability of the solution?
The solution is solid, and I've had no issues with stability. The one issue encountered was due to a version change, where the changes in that version were unexpected.
What do I think about the scalability of the solution?
The solution is great for scalability, and we can always add more bots as needed. We haven’t found it limiting at all.
How are customer service and support?
Our experience with UiPath support has been mixed. The responses take a little long, which isn't bad when we only need a question answered. However, our system went down twice, and it took four to eight hours to get our first response from support. If I submit a ticket at 2 pm, I might not get a response until 10 pm. That's still relatively soon, but I might not be paying attention that late at night or be available to respond.
How would you rate customer service and support?
Positive
Which solution did I use previously and why did I switch?
We did not use a different solution for document processing before this.
How was the initial setup?
The initial setup was pretty easy and straightforward. It didn’t take much time to get UiPath running.
What about the implementation team?
We implemented the solution in-house ourselves. We do have a partner, Empower dot AI, which we plan to work with on future projects.
What was our ROI?
We are probably just starting to see a positive dollar ROI versus what we spent implementing UiPath. We only started this in January, and it was fully implemented by late June or early July. Hence, we are still in the infancy phase of experiencing ROI.
What's my experience with pricing, setup cost, and licensing?
UiPath's pricing is reasonable. The model of charging per AI unit makes sense, and the licensing for Action Center and other parts is good. The cost does not seem excessive.
Which other solutions did I evaluate?
The orchestration is better than competing solutions offer
What is our primary use case?
How has it helped my organization?
We are automating rule-based, repetitive business processes, but we're interested in the automation opportunities AI capabilities present. Of course, transactional automation has limitations, but in areas where it is applicable, we have been able to use it effectively.
What is most valuable?
The overall UiPath platform, including the Orchestrator, Studio, and the robots, is valuable. UiPath's competitors don't do orchestration as well.
What needs improvement?
The licensing policies and concepts change almost yearly, leading to difficult negotiations. All components are licensed differently, and it would be more straightforward to adopt new features if they were included in the same bundle.
For how long have I used the solution?
I have used UiPath for six or seven years.
What do I think about the stability of the solution?
The solution is very stable for us.
What do I think about the scalability of the solution?
It is scalable according to our needs.
How are customer service and support?
I rate UiPath support eight out of 10. UiPath is customer-oriented and attends to the customers well. They're helpful when we have challenges and are open to our ideas. We've had challenges with technical support solving some tickets, but it's been excellent overall.
How would you rate customer service and support?
Positive
How was the initial setup?
We installed the on-premise version in our environment seven years ago. It was very straightforward at that time.
What about the implementation team?
I was involved in the deployment process by overseeing it.
What was our ROI?
We have seen a significant return on investment. The easiest to measure is the hours saved from manual work. We've saved the equivalent of 200 FTEs worth of hours each year. There are also less measurable benefits, such as improved quality and faster throughput.