Blue Prism Reviews

I work with an insurance organization and we are currently using it to automate our back-end office processes. For example, within insurance, you have claims and you have policy owner services, and you have different business units. We are looking at those processes and automating them through Blue Prism robotics.

Mostly we use the Design Studio to develop the automation. It's great. We put them into deployment and have the automated process running. It's essentially the Design Studio for Blue Prism and the entire methodology of delivery that is the most useful or valuable to us.

The solution can scale. 

Technical support is very helpful.

It's not very easy to use. There is some learning curve that you need to manage as an individual.

In the past we have had platform challenges with Blue Prism, like the scheduler functionality doesn't always work as expected and there are content downtimes as well. On the stability, I will probably rate it a little lower than medium.

If they could have process recording and task recording also in place, that will help expedite the delivery for the automation.

I've been using the solution for about six years. It's been a while. 

The stability could be better. The scheduler functionality doesn't always work as expected and there is content downtime as well. It's okay, however, they could work on improving it. 

The scalability is not an issue. Scalability is good. We are using it for around 500 robots, and the scalability is not an issue at all.

In terms of users, we have around 50 odd configurators that actually use Blue Prism on a daily basis. Within the technical team, there you have a few project managers and within each project team, you have a business analyst and a configurator and then, you have a setup process controller who manages the processes.

At this point, we do not intend to increase usage.

Blue Prism provides us with the technical support we need. They even have a monthly catch-up with our team and we are able to raise our technical queries during that time if we have any. There are no issues at all. We've been very satisfied with their level of attention and assistance.

I wouldn't know about the setup process. That's really more for the infrastructure team. I can't comment on it mostly due to the fact I wasn't a part of it.

We have an enterprise-grade license with Blue Prism and it depends upon your requirements. We ask for additional production bots, which is the main parameter for the license cost.

We're customers and end-users.

There are multiple tools in the market for RPA - Blue Prism, UiPath, Automation Anywhere, et cetera. I wouldn't rate it better than anyone else, and yet, I wouldn't rate it less either. It's as good as any other tool. Therefore, every company will need to do its own analysis and select the tool that makes the most sense for them.

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

We are primarily using the solution to automate the enterprise processes that are so widely used by many staff and where we want to reduce the specific deviation where FTE may be high. 

The solution has been quite stable so far.

The new features that have come out have been great.

So far, the solution has been faultless. We've been very happy with it.

The solution has been very good in terms of helping us automate processes.

If that bot is running 24/7, we have to allocate people 24/7, 24 hours a day. The cost of support can be quite high.

If there was a way that robots could self-heal if they stopped running for whatever reason, that would be helpful.

I've been using the solution for about two years at this point. It's been a while.

We've found the stability to be very good. there are no bugs or glitches. It doesn't crash or freeze. It's reliable.

The solution might be scalable. It depends on the process that we want to automate, actually. It looks to be pretty scalable overall, however.

We only have about 50 users on the solution currently.

We do plan to continue usage.

We don't really use support, It can be expensive. We need it to be 24/7 as our processes run 24/7 and if something goes wrong, we need to have access to them at any time, which means we need to pay more.

That also means we need to have our own staff on 24/7 to make sure the bots are working as they should.

We didn't previously use a different solution. This is our first and only product for the purpose of automation.

The initial setup is pretty straightforward.

The specific developer or team is doing the deployment. Then, we often go live, and after we stabilize, we hand it over to our support team to continue the operation. Overall, we have had around six to eight people for the support portion. It must match the size of the project. Typically, you need two to four people with different roles per project.

We tend to sign two or three-year contracts for licenses. Afterward, we may renew or tender a new company.

We're using the latest version of the solution.

I'd recommend the solution to other companies. That said, companies should venture out and try other tools as well. You want to compare to ensure you're getting a comprehensive solution that covers your needs as an organization.

I'd rate the solution eight out of ten.

We are an independent consulting group.

It is used in a lot of healthcare-related processes, and healthcare manufacturing.

There should be permanence across all of the automation technologies, such as UiPath, Blue Prism, and Automation Anywhere. It would allow the client to have automated processing of manual data work.

Currently, we are automating all of the manual processes. Once you have the bot built, you deploy it and it is obvious that it is going to help the client with reducing the man-hours, leaving them to focus on better quality work.

This is applicable for all RPA, not just Blue Prism.

The development interface is quite easy to work with.

The deployment is easy.

They have OCR technology, but it's not that great.

They need to come up with better OCR technology.

In the next release, the OCR features need to be improved. This is an area that I would love Blue Prism to work on.

I have been using Blue Prism for almost two years.

It is stable and it doesn't break down easily. 

If it is deployed in the right server and based on the requirements, and the comments they have documented on the site, it's pretty stable.

We have not scaled that high for any of our clients yet. We have four or five bots that have been running with no issues.

I have not reached out to technical support, but my teammate has.

It is easy to deploy.

If you are not doing any kind of smoke testing, it can be deployed in less than three days. You can just deploy to the production server minus the testing.

This is an area that I don't have any visibility to. I am not accountable for any kind of licensing and pricing. Our sales team takes care of this.

It is very important that you have a good design in place because it gets tricky when you are building the bots, otherwise, there will be a lot of propping and changing. 

There are many flows needed to build in Blue Prism.

It is always advisable to have a good stable design in place before you build the bot in Blue Prism.

I would rate Blue Prism a seven out of ten.

We have multiple systems here that are integrated. We have our SAP system, and then we have the vendor portals that are running on some web applications. If somebody puts an order in the portal, there used to be some kind of verifications for which we had employed some people, but now, the same verification is done by Blue Prism.  

We have also been using it for automation for invoice verification. We use Blue Prism to do the verification of the scanned invoices sent by people. We are using the latest minus one version of this solution.

Blue Prism is very good at doing background processing. 

As a user, I cannot directly work with the bot. On a daily basis, I use and do some work in Microsoft Excel, which cannot be directly taken into Blue Prism. Our company majorly runs on Microsoft Excel. Everybody has Excel sheets as their working sheets. Therefore, we need a kind of automation to be able to do things with this program. This bot is almost like an invisible staff that works between the servers but not with the users. This bot works well with SAP and things like that, but it doesn't work with Excel sheets. It doesn't work with the bots that we have, and I cannot invoke an RPA right now as a user. It has to be done by an administrator who has better control than me. It needs better integration with Microsoft Excel.

Its price can be improved. It is expensive for us. It should be cheaper for a market like ours. We are based in India.

I have been using this solution off and on for a year.

It is a stable product. On the stability front, we haven't found any issues.

It is scalable, but scaling this product is a little bit expensive for us. We are based in India, and it is not fitting in the budget. To add more bots, we have to put in a lot more money. 

So far, we have automated almost 13 processes. In terms of the number of users, we have our partner and four to five technical people who are being led by a manager. I am from the client's side, and we have three people in our team. So, there are seven to eight people who are working on it.

It is pretty good.

We weren't using any such product previously. We were new to RPA, and this was the product that was chosen by our team. This decision was taken one or two years ago. At that time, I wasn't with this organization.

Blue Prism are our partners, and we did not face any challenges in installation. In a week's time, we were able to develop our first bot.

Blue Prism helped us in installing this.

It is expensive for us. It should be cheaper for a market like ours. We are based in India.

We will keep on using this solution in the near future because we have invested in this, but I wish to go for Automation Anywhere, and down the line, we might be exploring that. It is currently not a fully-grown application, whereas many features in the Automation Anywhere are full-grown automation features.

The Blue Prism sales team gave us a demonstration of the upcoming features a couple of weeks ago. They are coming up with a lot of features that are currently not there. I would recommend this solution only if the features they have planned in the upcoming version are there, and they are stable. Blue Prism currently cannot be compared with other products such as Automation Anywhere and UiPath. The full-grown kind of bot is something that is relevant for RPA use cases, but it is not there right now. It is there on the roadmap, but they have to take care of the stability. Right now, other products have definitely got an edge over this.

Without considering the roadmap and features that they have promised in the next version, I would rate Blue Prism a five out of ten.

We use it mostly to mimic what our operation agents are repetitively doing so that they don't have to do the same thing over and over again. We are using it to eliminate the repetitive tasks that require no thinking or intelligent decision making. We are using the latest version of Blue Prism.

It is able to eliminate repetitive tasks and bring efficiency. At any point in time, the bank needs to hire 10 to 15 operation agents. In operation teams, the turnaround rate is always very high, so we are constantly understaffed. Capacity has always been an issue. With Blue Prism, we are able to automate a lot of tasks. 

We can also scale up and down. We can scale up our operations when we see larger volumes and scale down when we have lower volumes. We can have new bots, licenses, virtual machines within days, but we cannot have an agent trained up within days. It takes weeks to hire people and train them.

Its ability to talk to different systems that we have is a valuable feature. We use Pega, which is like a credit card processing system. We also use a Debit Process Manager, which is like the Visa debit application. In the bank, we have credit card and debit card sections, and we need to kind of investigate some of the transactions when customers are complaining about the charges. Blue Prism can log in to a different system to perform the exact actions that the agents are doing. This feature has been very helpful.

Its ability to engage with external systems and websites is also very valuable. Each of our RPA projects could go across different systems. We have an in-house banking system. We also use the Visa network, and we have to go to different sites to do a lot of data scraping to ensure the data in our system matches the data in the Visa systems, and we just deal with some of the charges.

It isn't very easy or intuitive for our developers to program the bot to make intelligent decisions. A bot, for the lack of a better word, is stupid, and it can only do what we program it to do. It cannot make intelligent decisions. For example, if we are reviewing Uber charges, they could be posting their transactions under different corporation names, even though they are under the same parent company or group. A human can easily understand that it is the name of the same company, and it just has an asterisk or space, but a bot cannot do that. When a bot cannot complete the transaction, it sends out an exception rate, business exception, or system exception for a human to do a manual review. The exception rate has been high because the bots cannot make decisions that we think are very simple, which is understandable because that's how they were programmed. There is potential in utilizing the higher intelligence side of the tool, but it is not easy to code higher intelligent actions.

It is a very lengthy process to get the provisioning to ensure that it is kind of doing what it needs to do. Provisioning involves multiple things, and it is quite complicated and not the best experience, but it is not just because of Blue Prism. Blue Prism is easy, but it takes a long time to onboard into our in-house system. 

I have been using Blue Prism for one year. I started doing the RPA project a year ago. I am providing consultancy to a specific business unit to ensure that the tool is deployed in the right way and meets the business need.

I'm involved with in-house systems as well as external systems. For provisioning, I get new bots. It involves multiple things, and it is quite complicated. It is not the best experience, but it is not just because of Blue Prism. Blue Prism is easy, but it takes a long time to onboard into our in-house system. The provisioning of our in-house system or external systems is a challenge that we have internally.

In terms of users, on the technology side, there are three main roles. We have developers, delivery managers, and business analysts. Business analysts gather different requirements of the business unit to ensure that developers know how to program our bots. The delivery manager is like a project manager who ensures that the projects run smoothly and prioritizes different tasks when any change requests come in or there is any change in the schedule. 

On the business side, there is the subject matter expert and a manager for the operation team. There is also an operation agent who does the demo of how humans are performing their day-to-day job so that the technology team can understand what a bot needs to do. There is also the redesign component of it to ensure the bot is not just mimicking what the human is doing. It is also doing something more and better. 

I don't think that there was a tool that we used before Blue Prism. There were various things that people were doing in silos on their computers. Blue Prism is probably the only automation tool that was rolled out at an enterprise level. We are also rolling out Power Automate.

We have different teams that do the provisioning. It is not my area to do the setup. In terms of the setup of the application, it is not hard to set up. The bank will have everything resourced and pushed into our computer. All I do is just click a button and install it, but there are a lot of things that happen in the background, which I don't know.

We have to do our business case before we wrote out RPA projects. Based on our tracking, the business benefits for the last three years have been on track. Most of our projects get returns within one year based on the human capacity that we are saving, and we have seen and are on track for the business benefit.

The billing is on a yearly basis. They send us the bill every year. My business unit is billed by the technology team, so I don't know exactly how much they pay. In my business unit, we have our first-year license costs, and then we have our ongoing costs. Our bots cost projected per license is $8,600. Our projected support cost for every year is about $38,000. Our operation agent costs anywhere between $50,000 to $55,000, so the saving is there, but it is still kind of expensive for us, but I'm looking at it from the technology kind of billing us for it. This is the cost that we have for our technology team, which is different from the licensing of Blue Prism.

I would rate Blue Prism a six out of ten, which I consider as a good rating. Seven is very good, eight is excellent, nine is outstanding, and ten is perfect as per my standards.

We've started to use some of the new features such as translation, cognitive, and we are finding them useful. We are also finding API integrations very useful.

We would like to have something, not particularly within the tool, that gives flexibility to the end-users to schedule the bots themselves. There should be some kind of control room flexibility so that they can go in. We don't have to always keep that centralized with us. 

We would also like to have inbuilt scheduling and resource pooling to distribute the bots on servers from within the platform. I should be able to distribute or orchestrate them internally so that if one bot takes a little longer than planned, it automatically shifts to another server. 

We would also like its price to be lower.

I have been using this solution for about one and a half years.

It is stable.

It is absolutely scalable. We have close to 200 automations written in Blue Prism. We have five to six people who work on this solution.

They're good. We didn't find any issues.

This was our first platform for automation. We have used other tools such as K2, but Blue Prism is the only full-fledged RPA platform that we've used.

The initial setup was easy.

Its price should be lower.

I have heard that UiPath is catching up in a big way and offers a lot of flexibility. You can also evaluate UiPath.

I would rate Blue Prism an eight out of ten.

I'm an IT consultant and I implement Blue Prism for my clients.

The only good thing about Blue Prism is the execution speed.

The interface is okay; it is like drawing a workflow map, which some people prefer.

For developers, they should have some kind of recording feature. Their competitors have this capability, so it is a big thing.

If you execute too fast then your code dies.

The stability can be improved by building something on top of it, code-wise. When you are running the software, it needs to attach to whatever window you are on, and then you need to build it separately. This is where you get stability.

This solution is scalable because they have an object library, which others do not have. In terms of reusability, it's great.

My clients are enterprise-level organizations.

In terms of support, they have almost everything for Blue Prism. They have tutorials and other such materials.

I haven't raised any tickets with them, so I do not know about their real support model.

I use UiPath for the most part.

I have some experience with Pega RPA but it's garbage, so I don't use it.

The initial setup is straightforward. You just need SQL and then you can install it.

Ultimately, this should be set up on the cloud using Azure or another provider. however, there are lots of companies that haven't brought their automation off-site, so they are on-premises deployments.

This is a very expensive product and this is the reason that they're losing their market share.

I know that Blue Prism is trying to improve because they have acquired some other vendors.

To summarize, I think that this product is good for business but it's terrible for developers.

I would rate this solution a seven out of ten.

The primary use case of Blue Prism is for financial services. It can't be accessed via a simple web application like you can do with its competitors. For financial services where the main requirement is to retain data in-house, Blue Prism is the way to go. I'm an RPA engineer and we are customers of Blue Prism. 

Blue Prism has helped the company in areas such as invoicing, requests on an augment coming from customers and things like that.

I love the development phase of Blue Prism because there are simple things you can put in place that help you understand workflow and how implementation acts. I love how Blue Prism can use the same variables and objects used on other processes, the really key value is the object sharing. I like that you can forward so you can speed up the process while it's executing which you can do on other RPA tools, but you can also simulate the feed tool from two to four and reach the output quite nicely.

For me, a web application that can improve the connection between robot and human, and share information simply without any file sharing, without any access from the machine, that has the tower controlling it, is the easiest way to share information.

The user interface could be improved and I would like to see a web interface to easily access robot information. The key value of Blue Prism is also its main weakness because Blue Prism is quite connected to its data, so anything you do on Blue Prism is logged on the database. It's quite difficult to read these logs, so I would like to have a more valuable way of understanding how robots work on the environment. Blue Prism doesn't manage variables well. It's annoying because you have to declare visually every variable but there's not a list of the variables. You have to open the graphical elements and check the variables.

I've been using this solution for one year. 

It's a stable solution. It has a quite simple architecture and is very connected to the machine on which Blue Prism works. The RPA tools are connected with the machine, with the applications, with the credentials, and that improves stability.

The solution is very scalable because you can deploy a robot on the machine and with the same licenses you can deploy another robot on another machine. 

Technical support is quite good although I think not as good as with some other solutions. UiPath, for example, has great support, great speed, and they're right on the issues. Blue Prism has that too but they're not as good as the others. 

The initial setup is quite straightforward and similar to other solutions. 

This is an expensive solution. I think Blue Prism has a licensing mode quite different from the other RPA tools.

Blue Prism is a very secure solution because you can implement a structure as a high availability infrastructure. If you have, for example, three machines and one license, you can put this license on any of the machines. If the first machine is down, then you can put that license on another machine.

I would rate this solution a seven out of 10.