Blue Prism Reviews

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.   .