Blue Prism Reviews

We were using this solution for two main purposes. The first was to leverage the OCR capabilities, and the second was integration with Outlook to check email and retrieve attachments from email.

We were also looking at the workflow component, and how to orchestrate the bot and the process flow within Blue Prism.

This is all being done as a pilot project by one of our departments to assess the impact of implementing RPA.

An example of how this solution helped us is with our ticket creation process. When a client raises a ticket with us, we receive an attachment by email. We have to first read the content of the email and then the attachment. Next, we have to identify who the customer is, and based on that, we create a ticket and assign it to the appropriate team.

By using the automation in Blue Prism, we have reduced the manual activities of somebody reading those emails, figuring out whose account it is, deciding where it should go, and creating the ticket. All of these activities are automated.

The most valuable feature for us was the orchestration of the workflow. The way you design the flow and configure the activities for the bot is very useful if you are working with any of the BPM or local platforms. It made it very easy for the developers to work with assets.

I would like to see wider integration with other products. That way, while we work on other core systems like SAP or Salesforce, there are ready-made connectors that can get the data. It would make it easier for people to work with Blue Prism.

The next release would benefit from integration with artificial intelligence and machine learning technologies. For example, the OCR can populate fields in variables and proceed with a workflow. But adding intelligence to this, or integrating with a service such as AWS, would be useful.

We did not find any issues with respect to stability or performance. We performed testing around the number of emails that were coming in and tried to see how fast the bot was able to process them. We also tried scheduling the bot to run at a specific time and checked to see if it was able to do so.

We did not perform extensive load testing efforts.

An RPA scales as you add bots to your ecosystem.

We don't consider the number of users with respect to utilization. Rather, the solution is used by one of our departments. They have adopted RPA to handle one of its processes as a pilot project.

We have seen a lot of use cases, but it is still picking up. Not too many departments are coming up with RPA as a strategy, but I believe it will soon pick up.

The only contact we had with technical support was during our initial setup. It was a minor issue that was solved pretty quickly.

We did not use another RPA prior to this one. 

I do not want to call it complex, but it is not simple either. It is somewhere in between.

We set up our own sandbox environment to do the trial run and the POC. We did the initial setup, but we needed help from Blue Prism to some extent. I rate the complexity as medium-level because we needed help in setting up our infrastructure.

We had one developer involved, and there was a QA tester for the entire process. There was a back and forth mechanism between the developer and our tester. For deployment, there was an admin role who was taking care of our other system assets, such as the BPM and other platforms. The Blue Prism administration was taken over by the same person, so it does not require a specific admin.

We handled the deployment ourselves and did not hire anybody from outside of the company.

Other than your infrastructure, in terms of servers that you have to set up, I don't think that there are any costs in addition to the standard licensing fees.

We did not do any formal evaluation of other products. We chose this solution because we are working with Appian BPM, and Blue Prism is a partner. This is what influenced us to look at this solution, and they work well hand in hand.

We performed quite a few POCs to help understand the platform.

One of the most important things while working with RPA is choosing the right process, understanding the process, and ensuring that you pick the right process for RPA activities. That was the key to our success.

The process should not be too complex, and not be too simple. If it is too complex then it will take too much time to implement. At the same time, it should cater to your immediate needs so that you can demonstrate the tool's features to the leadership.

My advice is to do a pilot project before adopting any RPA platform. Try one or two key integrations, such as the Outlook and OCR integration that we have chosen.

Another important point is that there might be some fear in the team. Some people are concerned that bots are taking away jobs. It is important to ensure confidence in the team that the RPA will not replace humans. Rather, it will enhance their capabilities in terms of resources that are being used for mundane tasks. The message to take to the organization is that bots will handle the simple tasks, while humans can do more intelligent activities.

We have not fully explored the platform, but it is enough to capture our requirements.

I would rate this solution an eight out of ten.

I use Blue Prism mainly for backend operations where I don't need a lot of manual intervention coming in. Blue Prism is mainly for backend operations like auditing, reporting, compliance, and regulatory requirements.

I use Blue Prism for my customers. I really don't use Blue Prism in my own company or for my own automation. I do automation for my clients. 

If you look at the banking sector, there is a lot of regulatory compliance to be adhered to, and that's where Blue Prism has helped me a lot. Because of automatic compliance checking and auditing, Blue Prism actually gives my clients a lot of benefits, i.e. as an auditor which can check up to 100 transactions a day.

I can now basically sit back and look at over 100 transactions being checked per day. Blue Prism really brings down the number of people required, and it increases the speed. 

Blue Prism assists us in risk management through our compliance to regulations where the cost has been brought down to a very large extent.

The feature of Blue Prism that I find most valuable is the ability to build my own custom objects or use custom logic for doing the particular task. If there is a task that Blue Prism cannot do out of the box, Blue Prism provides me the facility of designing one and integrating it into the application. 

This process is called Visual Basic Objects. I can do all I like because I can add to the functionality of the Blue Prism tool as and when I require it.

Since Blue Prism gives me a lot of flexibility, I don't want the vendor to make any changes out of the box. I believe that there could be more community support, or there could be more support for developers like us from Blue Prism. 

Blue Prism provides a lot of documentation, but there is a lack of support. This is missing. A lot of times, you get stuck and have to solve the problem yourself. If there is a community that is working together and Blue Prism could support that, it would be very nice.

I really don't need any additional features because most of the time we create our own features to work on top of Blue Prism. I would really be happy if Blue Prism can integrate some kind of OCR and machine learning capabilities that are now commonly available in the market.

The solution is actually based on the previous technologies which are very stable from Microsoft. This is the SQL server and the WPF. I don't see problems with the stability of the solution. It's really pretty good.

The scalability's actually in the hands of the person who is developing the bots. Blue Prism out of the box is good enough to provide a platform. After that, the developer's creativity is to really scale it up. I don't see any problems with the scalability in Blue Prism. It's one of the finest compared to the other products.

In my customer organization, we use 15 developers. Everybody works on Blue Prism. In our customer organization, when we've written the bots, there are not a lot of people working on it because the work has been automated. 

The bots run on hundreds of machines right now, but there are very few people required to monitor that execution.

There are two roles. One is the person who is executing the bots and monitoring the results. That is a very small number, but the beneficiaries of this automation are multiple. 

We have a client where they have over 200 auditors. It's an insurance company. All of these auditors actually get the results from the automation which we have written in Blue Prism. 

The number of beneficiaries is much larger than the number of people we require to execute the bots.

When we deploy, we actually send in three people at the customer side to deploy the bots. We normally take about a week to have these three people on site, who will set up everything and we can also train on how these bots run, i.e. how these bots are to be maintained, automated, and monitored. 

It takes about a week. These three guys are there for a week for this particular exercise. Then we basically leave one person there for a month or so. By this time the customer's personnel are trained enough to take over from our guy. Then our guy comes back.

We have been in this for quite a long time. I myself have put in 33 years in the IT industry. Most of the time it happens that we are able to solve the problem on our own. We normally don't need to go to Blue Prism, but there have been situations that we wish that the technical support could have been better. 

Because we ran into technical problems, then the solution had to be found on our own. We basically had to create a workaround for getting the job done.

We have the background experience in the base technology which Blue Prism uses. Blue Prism doesn't do a lot of OCR, Optical Character Recognition, out of the box so we built our own. 

We tried to get in touch with the technical support, and then finally we figured out that it's not available out of the box. We built OCR functionality for Blue Prism ourselves and we extended the tool.

We work with almost every solution: Automation Anywhere, WorkFusion, WinAutomation, etc. We work with everything. Sometimes it happens that the tool which is needed for the client is Blue Prism.

Sometimes the client wants us to use Blue Prism. Sometimes we propose that we use Blue Prism for the client. We don't distinguish between which tool is good, bad or ugly. We basically go by which tool is specifically required for the job.

The setup was straightforward. There are scripts that do the installation and setup. The only thing that I want Blue Prism to look at is the deployment scenario. 

When we deploy this Blue Prism based bot, if we can get some sort of scripting help from Blue Prism in deployment, that would be nice.

The development takes about a month for a particular project, but we need a couple of days to set up the whole thing at the customer's side. I think that can be reduced a bit. 

We have our own scripts written, but our strategy is to write scripts and then install them at the customer's side. Still, there is more that could be done.

We do the Blue Prism installation ourselves. We don't use anyone from the outside.

We really don't bear the costs. The cost is borne by the customer. It runs into about $100,000 per year per customer for Blue Prism. 

We need to add the hardware costs to set up the servers for the SQL server, and then we need to budget for about a week to set up the entire infrastructure. 

We need to add the cost of the people who will be working during this week. There are other costs, but it is the same for any tool. 

We normally budget around $30,000 for the first year for the hardware, setup, and people cost.

We evaluate other options every time. It's not that we do it only once. We have experience with seven tools. We basically look at all seven tools in terms of the features provided, the flexibility, the resources that we have, and also the cost of the tool. It also depends on the budget the customer has. 

Then we select which tool we are using based on an assessment matrix. We figure out which tool actually fits into all the criteria of the project.

We've evaluated WinAutomation, Automation Anywhere, Kofax Kapow, and WorkFusion. Those are the main tools.

Most of my customers, which are large financial services/institutions, supply chain, and logistics companies, are now looking to scale up by a factor of 10. 

We have a customer who is a bank in South East Asia. We have developed about 32 bots and now they are looking at around 200+ more to be deployed.

It depends on how much it costs them to automate, how much budget they have, how much time they have, and what the benefit is that will come in. Most of the time the benefits are huge as long as they are able to create the budget for it.

There's only one piece of advice, and it's not dependent on Blue Prism. The advice is actually to get two different sorts of people who are good at the job:

• One is your designer of the automation system.
• The second one is the developer of your automation. 

If everybody is looking at automation, the first investment should be into getting the right people onto the team.

Blue Prism comes in at a 9/10. It comes in at nine because it's a mix of everything that a developer would want from a platform and from a solution. 

Blue Prism gives you flexibility. It gives you scalability. It can basically go and do large data processing in the back end without disturbing anybody very efficiently. 

That's why I give it nine because like all other tools, the moment you bring in the front end with all of the manual intervention, you run into delays. You run into problems. You run into risks of creating mistakes and errors, then getting lost within the automation. Blue Prism can handle large volumes and that's why I give it a nine.

I am an RPA consultant and the use case varies depending on my client. Basically, it is a tool that helps users to automate repetitive tasks.

We do not automate in our own company but we do help our clients to implement it.

I do not have any IT training, but I am still able to master this skill and develop Blue Prism solutions. It has a very user-friendly interface for a non-technical person.

The most valuable feature is the work queue. This helps the user to create a workflow, and it is a very powerful tool for generating management reports.

One area that needs to be improved is the resource monitoring with respect to queuing processes. Specifically, if the user is trying to schedule more than one process then the product will reject it, saying that the process cannot be run due to license limitations. However, competing products do not have this problem. Rather, the processes will be queued and then completed once the resource is available. The robot will automatically pick up the process and run it. I think that this is an area where Blue Prism can do better.

In the next release of this solution, I would like to see support for attended robots.

The stability of this solution is very good.

The scalability is dependent on the design. If the process is designed, in advance, such that the capability of expansion is in place, then it will be very easy and simple. Otherwise, it will be quite difficult.

Our client's roles vary. Some of them are developers, others are business users, and the end user will be the process controller. Some of our clients are looking into purchasing additional licenses because they are using this solution extensively.

The technical support is quite helpful. Whenever we raise a support ticket, they respond to it in a timely manner.

We did not use a solution prior to this one.

The initial setup is very dependent on the company's policies. If the company policy does not have heavy restrictions then the implementation will be very fast. However, if the company has a very tight IT policy then sometimes it will take more time to configure.

Normally, the deployment should not take more than two months. Part of the process is identifying the correct opportunities that are suitable for automation. Some clients fail because they do not know how to pick which processes, or which activities can be automated. 

A minimum of two people is required for deployment and maintenance, but it will depend on the company itself. If they have deployment applications then they will not need a controller to deploy. Also, it depends on how many processes there are.

If it is a good design that is developed, following best practices, then the support may be minimal because the processes will be stable and not require attention.

We perform the implementation for our clients.

This solution provides a good user experience for the target audience. The non-technical users may not be able to appreciate the competing products.

My advice to those looking to implement this solution is to have a clear understanding of what RPA is. Some of our clients are confused between RPA and AI, so before planning to implement any automation, they have to have a full understanding of what RPA can do, and what the limitations of it are.

This solution does not have support for attended robots. Most of our solutions are for unattended robots that perform unmonitored tasks. In some of the departments, they have a need to automate tasks that are in front of them, and without this feature, there are certain operations that cannot be handled.

I would rate this solution an eight out of ten.

We are using Blue Prism's process automation software to eliminate low-return, high-risk, manual data entry, and processing work for our financial processing in manufacturing. We are not a direct partner with Blue Prism, what we do is when our clients have bought the Blue Prism solution for someone we implement Blue Prism for them. We are acting as the integrator.

Blue Prism has improved process efficiencies. We can get some maximum optimization with ticket processing. Blue Prism provides a large variety of robots that can automate and manipulate processes with very few problems. Furthermore, we can program multiple methods within a single bot.

We found the unassisted bots very useful because they can program a variety of different processes. This is a valuable feature of Blue Prism, especially when compared to other tools on the market.

Blue Prism needs to provide better customer support because there are some bugs in the product that make implementation tricky.

It is designed more for operational than transactional processes. If Blue Prism incorporated a lot of IQ bots and cognitive processing, then it might be of better value at a lower cost. 

The issue of the cost of the tool needs to be addressed. To become a Blue Prism partner, it's costly. I think that this is one of the negative aspects of using Blue Prism. 

In terms of the stability of the solution, I think that Blue Prism is a really good tool. It's a stable solution.

Blue Prism scalability is good. 

The requirements for deployment and maintenance differs from process to process. Certain processes take around three programmers and one solution architect and technical architect. It really depends on the project scope.

In total, we require a minimum of four to five people for deployment and maintenance. 

Technical support has a local team, but they have not been very supportive. We manage our technical support through our internal team. We have not received a sufficient level of support from the Blue Prism's professional support team. They don't respond, and when they do respond, they say that it's the job of the implementors to do whatever it is we are requesting from them. Blue Prism is good at selling the product, but implementation support, technical support is not that good.

The initial setup was a little complex. We needed a specialist with good coding experience to implement it.

Blue Prism is by and large a standalone type of tool, with quite a lot of optimization required. I think that this is an issue, especially when compared to some other solutions on the market that don't require any coding knowledge. With Blue Prism, you need somebody with good coding experience for implementation.

Our initial implementation strategy for Blue Prism took between two to three months per process. For the implementation strategy, we used both a technical architect and a solutions architect, both experts in implementing Blue Prism.
For deployment, we have been using partners who already bought directly from Blue Prism. 

Pricing is on an annual basis. Blue Prism is around 8,000 GBP while other tools vary between 3,000 to 6,000 USD. 

The standard licensing fees for Blue Prism are around 3,000 to 4,000 USD for a partner. In addition to the tools, you have implementation costs to consider. There are no additional fees. 

Before choosing, we didn't evaluate other options. But now we are looking at a lot of competing tools in the market. We have considered migrating to EdgeVerve.

My advice to others would be to let them start with the standard enterprise-wide robotic automation solution. If they're looking for fewer process automation bots, Blue Prism would be incredibly expensive. They should have a ballpark figure of the number of people under the processes, then Blue Prism is an excellent tool, but if you lessen the number of processes then it's costly.

On a scale of one to ten, one being the worst and ten being the best, I would rate this product around seven. Blue Prism is the same for enterprise-wide implementation but if you're considering the entire tool, technical support, implementation needs all these things; I would adjust my rating.

I have used this solution to automate the business processes in the life insurance space which includes the policy admin processes like underwriting processing, claims processing and commission processing.

Automating these processes enhances the accuracy of processing the traditional process without any manual interventions. These processes can be reused which proved to be cost-effective and time to market also reduced.

• It is easy to automate complex business processes and can be highly robust. 
• It can be easily integrated with new technologies. 
• Since the processes can be reused, the time to market is less, and the possibility of human error is reduced drastically.

With Blue Prism user cannot automate processes on virtual machines or citrix, for that, user need to use surface automation. If this issue could be overcome, then it would be a super product for automating traditional business processes.

This is a highly scalable tool and can be used to automate various traditional business processes from various industries, be it IT, financial, manufacturing, etc.

No, I have not used a different solution.

No.

No.

This is a highly scalable tool and can be used to automate various traditional business processes from various industries, be it IT, financial, manufacturing, etc.

In the financial environment, such as in the banking and insurance sectors, we use them to automate mundane tasks, the kinds that require repetitive human work with not much thought process involved.

We use it for simple things like automating the processing of work queues, reading information from an email, extracting the attachments and forwarding those to available people.

It helps us reduce the number of people involved in mundane tasks.

In the case of Absa, it has really impacted them, the way the customer interacts with the organization when it comes to certain processes. They have become one of the better banks in terms of technology now.

When having to fill out an application, for example, there's an app. In the back-end of that app, the whole process is automated. They get an acknowledgment within a couple of seconds. That is the way it has a positive impact on the organization. If the end-user or the client is happy about the way things are going now, as oppose to the way things were before, then that's a big win.

The automation in version 6 seems to be a lot better than it was in previous versions. In my opinion, that is great. 

The matrix in terms of reporting is becoming more friendly. It can be used with other analytics tools and that too is a great thing. You can pull stuff into stats, you can pull stuff into any kind of data analytics tool, like Tableau for example.

You can easily see where all your problems lie, in a visual way. It's always nice to have a visual representation of things, whether you're a kid in school or whether you're a professor at a university. Seeing things at one glance makes a lot of difference, instead of having to read through the fine print and see where the issues are.

Another feature I like about Blue Prism is the Control Room and how easy it is to find exceptions, to find common issues, and to troubleshoot your exceptions. Your Control Room person, without any development skills, can easily pick up what the problem is, with the exceptions, especially when there are a lot of exceptions related to one use case or process.

Blue Prism is lagging in terms of artificial intelligence. There is no artificial intelligence in version 4 or 5, which most people are still using as far as I'm aware. To be fair, they do have AI in version 6. Still, it's lagging terribly. Blue Prism is the inventor of the name of the term "RPA," and it's disappointing to see they are sitting around.

Blue Prism, in my opinion, is very solid because it has so many years of evolution and backing. It's more solid than the other platforms but I feel that the intelligent automation needs to be jacked up to where the other platforms are, at least.

Cognitive learning, for example, where it can actually follow your movements on the screen, is not there in Blue Prism. The bot will only do what you program it to do, whatever processes and objects that you refer to. It only follows that. There is no cognitive learning happening, whereas Automation Anywhere or UiPath can actually follow your movements, follow the steps that you're doing and then, bang, can go ahead and repeat those processes. And at the same time, it will learn to do it better as well.

Also, when exceptions are being passed to Excel, there's a huge issue dealing with the date format. You actually have to program your date as a text, as opposed to as a date, and that is something I would like to see improved. I cannot say whether it has been fixed, as I don't have exposure to the new version.

We have had the odd case of the robot falling for no reason. Then you restart the whole thing and you find it runs okay. To me, that's a very big problem with stability.

The stability issue is there, especially when you scale it up. If you're doing 1000 processes a minute or every 10 minutes, and then you scale it up to 10,000, I think Blue Prism has a problem with that. Guys from the banks have told me they really don't look at Blue Prism as being scalable enterprise-wide because it does tend to fall over.

Having said that, I haven't necessarily heard of issues like that in the international environment, but I have heard of issues like that here in South Africa. Having read of the success stories, worldwide, and the extent to which they've been involved in enterprise-level, I wouldn't necessarily say this issue has come to the fore.

I'm sorry to say their technical support is very bad.

The technical support, the client support, the academic support, are almost nonexistent, if you ask me. I have had very nasty experiences where we're stuck in a deployment and we are about to go live and there's an issue and we ask for help and we get a reply a day later or two days later, if they reply at all. In my case, I had to rely on the community that I'm involved in - the LinkedIn group and WhatsApp groups that I have connections with. I was able to solve problems that way. If I have a problem with Blue Prism I won't go to Blue Prism for help. That's how bad it is.

I would generously rate technical support at four out of 10.

Blue Prims was the first tool that I used in automation and, in some ways, I got stuck with it. There was a huge demand for it in South Africa so I have always followed the Blue Prism path. But after having used Blue Prism, I used Automation Anywhere and am extremely happy with it. Their support is extremely good.

Depending on your environment, setup can become very complex, especially if the permissions and access are not dealt with correctly. Your change management has to be very clearly outlined and mapped out before you even go into an environment where you try to implement Blue Prism.

You have to have access to a SQL Database and if that is not all sorted out, you're going to struggle. Even just deploying it, and your bot access and your VDI access, etc., it's really quite difficult to do in a very secure, locked up environment.

Blue Prism is pretty steep compared to the others, much more than Automation Anywhere. That can be a hindrance as well.

In terms of world usage, the market slice Blue Prism has, it is only in third place now, simply because it has been lacking in certain areas. The lackluster Robotic Process Automation Blue Prism is a dumb robot, as opposed to Automation Anywhere which is capable of cognitive learning - and that's a big plus. Even if it's in a very simple manner, even if it's not an IQ Bot, there is a lot of cognitive learning that's built into the other platforms which I find much better to use.

Even if you take out UiPath which is bigger - it now has a huge amount of money that was invested by Israeli investors who have pushed UiPath to a point where it has expanded to almost every country now, including trying to get themselves established in South Africa. Even if you take them out of the picture, and they are the biggest threat, Automation Anywhere, which is much younger than Blue Prism, is still way better and rated much higher than Blue Prism in terms of market share and popularity, ease, etc.

If I wanted to choose a platform, depending on the environment, I would not be fixed on one platform. The companies that I worked for previously only focused on Blue Prism while others only focused on Automation Anywhere. That's the wrong approach. You should be agnostic, you should use a tool that is appropriate for the scenario. There are some things that, obviously, Blue Prism will do way better, way faster than Automation Anywhere and there are some cases where Automation Anywhere would be more suitable.

For example, if you are looking into natural language processing, Automation Anywhere does a far better job of it in terms of reading an email and making a decision based on the content of the email. Blue Prism can't do that.

I would also say you need to get your planning right. Once you have that right, you'll have no issues with implementation. Seek advice from people that have successfully implemented it. There are many community groups and a lot of people in the Blue Prism community, so become part of the community; there's a lot to be learned from that.

Overall, it's pretty solid, it's pretty good if you want to start doing things in robotics or process automation, but it's definitely not the end of it. I would suggest that people always look at other platforms and see where they could be used in a given situation.

The primary use case is having bots manage, schedule, and build other bots seamlessly within a bespoke dashboard. There is no need for a first line team monitoring the system as it reports and assigns tickets.

ROI and efficiency savings. 

1 FTE can manage hundreds of bots via my GP RPA design and build methodology. Master processes can easily control subprocesses, such as load, work, and report.

Access to the SQL database allows for extra capabilities.

I would like to see bespoke dashboards allow the front-end to display what is required.   .

It is a very stable tool that allows very complex automations.

It lacks integration with proper AI, and it is a very complex tool to use in general.

It was quite good.

I also work with UiPath, Automation Anywhere, and Power Automate. Functionality-wise, Blue Prism and Power Automate are two completely different tools, but they share the common RPA target. Blue Prism can work in the same area as Power Automate, and it can automate things in all of the areas that are available within an office environment. They can be used interchangeably, but at the same time, Blue Prism allows for more complex automations to be performed.

Its pricing is okay. Its price is pretty similar to the price of other tools.

I would rate it a seven out of ten.