Blue Prism Reviews

Our use cases are account receivables and account payable. In insurance, our use cases are for vetting beneficiaries, upgrading client portfolios, and updating customer's policies.

The entire tool is valuable because it is an enterprise tool. It is on par with other tools like Automation Anywhere or UiPath with the OCR/ICR facilities, analytics, and the entire package for enterprise-level security. It has the highest level of security as compared to any other tool. 

There are a lot of things coming up, such as Discovery Bot and Process Discovery. A lot of other aspects are also maturing. We have definitely started using it for our clients, and it is maturing as a solution, but it is all about how you integrate the enterprise with all the automation projects, such as your chatbot, Conversational AI, and robotics. How they are integrated and talk to each other creates a very good business case with all three aspects. The next level should be about integrating it with other automation tools as well. It can have integration with other tools or automation projects, such as your chatbot, Conversational AI, and robotics.

I am in robotics for the last seven to eight years, and I have been using Blue Prism for about three to four years.

Stability-wise, it is a good tool. 

It is definitely scalable. The whole market of RPA is definitely scalable, but it again depends on your feasibility and complexity when you study a particular environment and process. It also depends on whether you want to scale in the whole organization or different departments or you want to scale up into different areas. All RPA solutions are on par in terms of scalability. There is no difference between them.

I don't have any direct experience with them. My solution architect used to handle that. I haven't seen many technical issues because if you are going to deploy the solution and if you've studied enough about the organization and the architecture, then something major is not going to come up. Anything minor, such as securities, passwords, or anything else, can be easily managed.

It is completely run by the solution architects, which is the support team from the RPA side. All technical issues definitely involve the IT team, which is your internal architecture support team and the application support team. You need the support team from the architecture and the IT perspective to manage the technical follow-ups.

I have also used UiPath and Automation Anywhere. All these three solutions stand out because they are at the enterprise level. As compared to UiPath and Automation Anywhere, to use Blue Prism, you need developers who have hardcore development experience. It requires quite a bit on the development side. In Blue Prism, you can also code separately and write a script, which adds more value to it.

Blue Prism came too late into the market with its analytics and process discovery features, whereas Automation Anywhere and UiPath were the first ones in the market. Blue Prism is catching up, and it is in the Gartner quadrant, Forrester, etc. It is not lagging far behind.

In Europe, Blue Prism has captured a lot of markets. In the US and Asia, you will see Automation Anywhere and UiPath in the front race. Microsoft, WorkFusion, and Pega are also catching up now.

It is not that complex. It is about how you study an organization and how an organization's architecture runs through. If it is a big organization or an enterprise, then you have to have solution architects from the customer side and also from our side. Solution architects will go and study the customer's architecture. Based on that, we can select which tools are going to be used and how complex it is going to be. It is very much dependent on how the architecture of an organization is because you are going to place the automation tool into that particular organization. Therefore, the initial feasibility and study play a major role in defining the complexity of your design and the entire format or automation.

Initially, the deployment used to take quite long. Now, it is not client-based; it is web-based, and the installation process has been reduced. You just download, and there is no starting a client and all that kind of stuff. It is much easier now than it was before.

In terms of the staff required for the deployment and maintenance of Blue Prism, it depends on what kind of process you're managing. It is not about the tools; it is about the processes. You need to know:

• How complex they are?
• What is the risk factor for these processes?
• How do they impact the entire automation in terms of cost? That is a very important aspect of support because it is in production, and it is going to have a straight impact on the client's revenue.
  

Generally, one person can easily support around five processes if they fall into the simple category. If the processes fall into the complex category, then you need at least two people managing five processes. By complex, I mean when you have applications that are lengthy and the number of steps of the process are more than 500 or so, and you have to monitor the bots very closely. When the bot or the process breaks, the support team needs to take over and act accordingly. 

The roles and responsibilities and the kind of people needed for maintaining the solution vary based on whether you have agile project management or a lot of projects going on. Typically, you will need a solution architect. You would require an analyst only in the first two or three months or whatever is the period for taking care of the process you want to deploy. After that, you don't require the analysts because it only needs to be overseen from the business side, which will begin with SMEs and the production support team.

Any changes or optimization after 90 days, six months, or a year, due to multiple factors such as legislation changes or anything else, have to be done in the process that is robotized. At this stage, the SMEs and the support team play a very vital role. There should definitely be a very good support function because a lot of follow-ups happen in the process and the production in robotics. To manage them, there should be a very good ticketing system in place. The Agile methodology works perfectly fine, and it adds great value to run your process effectively and having an efficient process, but you definitely need the solution architect, application owner, project management team, and the COE team to manage the entire workflow, work items, or backlog items coming into the support function.

It is a bit higher in cost as compared to Automation Anywhere and UiPath. The rate also differs from client to client. Margins are also important when it comes to costing and licensing. There are some additional costs involved besides the standard licensing costs. You have the development team cost, which includes the project manager, development team, analyst, and testers. You also need a team manager. You also have the tools cost, architecture cost, platform cost, and the licensing cost of each bot.

You should suggest a tool only after you study the architecture of an enterprise. Every tool has its own features, upside, and downside. It is not about necessarily going for Blue Prism, Automation Anywhere, or UiPath. For implementing a solution, you definitely need to look in the market to find out what suits you. You can then go for it.  

Blue Prism, Automation Anywhere, or UiPath are on par. There is not much difference in those tools at an enterprise level. The early development cost and the cost of the platform differ in these three tools. There are some clients who say that "We want only Blue Prism. We don't want to look at anything else." In such a scenario, you can definitely go for Blue Prism because it is on par with other competitors. 

The biggest lesson that we have learned from using Blue Prism is that it is important to choose the right processes and the right complexity of the processes. You can't choose highly complex processes where you have around 800,000 steps or very volatile processes where the team is involved in the application layer or at the process level very frequently. These kinds of things could be avoided.

I would rate Blue Prism an eight out of ten because it is a very old tool. It has been around in the market for quite a while, and they have their own learnings. It is a complete package at an enterprise level, where you can have analytics and attended and unattended automation. You can run your scripts, and at an enterprise level, even security aspects are very strong as compared to what is generally required by a client. There is room for improvement. All the new features that are coming up are not being used by many clients, and a lot of learning has to happen.

We have about 20 use cases in production. Probably half of them are related to finance, monthly closures in our company, invoices, and bank reconciliations. On the IT side, use cases are about audit requirements with user attestations, user reviews, and schedules.

We're currently using the on-premises version, but we're internally moving to Azure cloud rather than moving to Blue Prism cloud.

The ease of development is the most valuable. Standard VBOs are pretty useful there with Excel and different things. Our custom developments for SAP and things like that are pretty easy to set up and quick to get going.

The control room is its worst feature. It can be laggy, and it is not as user-friendly.

We're with staying Blue Prism, but we're moving it from on-premises to Microsoft cloud for cost savings. We looked into Blue Prism cloud. It has a lot of features, but it comes with a lot of costs. Right now, we have six spots, and we're only at 13% utilization. The cost didn't really weigh out for us for moving to Blue Prism cloud, but on-premises, it is working for what we need.

Once it is set up and gets the steamroll, it seems pretty good to stay. It is self-sufficient in many ways with the processes. Change control and password are a bit of a struggle sometimes, but that's general with automation and trying to be fast-moving. Overall, it is pretty stable and self-sustaining.

It is scalable. We are using some central objects.

We probably haven't gone through their standard support channels, but we reach out to our contact there when needed, and he gets us in touch with somebody right away. So, within a week, we're talking to an expert and getting some assistance.

We just started with Blue Prism. We didn't deploy anything else previously.

I'm more on the production side. I didn't really do any of the setup functions.

I don't recall what it was. Initially, we had our licensing through the consultant, and when we stopped using them, we renegotiated licensing. Blue Prism gave us temporary licenses during the negotiation. When all things were said and done, it came out to a decent price even without the vendor. So, our management has been happy with that.

Try to think of standard automation questions related to security, change control, and things like that before you get started because once you get developing, it is hard to go back and implement those things.

I would rate Blue Prism an eight out of ten.

We are a relatively new company, which specializes primarily in finance. I believe roughly 5% of our company uses this solution, which is quite low.

Some fields in our company require the use of this solution daily, but other fields use it only monthly. So, we use it on-demand.

When we initially started using Bue Prism, it was actually acquired by the financial department in our company, but soon after, it was put across as a legacy to IT. We then expanded our use cases to other areas of IT throughout our company, but primarily, our major footprint in Baxter has been in finance. Blue Prism dominates in finance at the moment. We also have a few use cases relating to HR.

Blue Prism was our first automation platform. Originally, we used version 6.2, which was very geared toward core development. You need to have some development background to develop the bots, and they were pretty much heavy in terms of the monolithic way of the solution. But from version 6.4 onwards, there became a feature known as an API call. Technically speaking, they have actually increased their capability in API calls, which means that Blue Prism has a lot of flexibility to integrate with other enterprise applications. This API feature, which is available in version 6.4, has made our lives a lot easier compared to version 6.2.

I have been speaking directly with Blue Prism's engagement manager about making the solution more web-based. It's not quite there yet. Currently, the latest version is still under the beta version, so, as a customer, we don't have access to it. They are making it much more web-based, but for now, everything you have to log into requires an enterprise server — It's still more client-based than web-based. They are aware of these issues, but it's not available yet. If they would have done this earlier, it would have helped them occupy the market space better.

In the next release of Blue Prism, they are bringing in some great features, like deployment. I believe it's really going to focus on centralized monitoring. They are making it web-based. I think the scalability and the ease of installation are also going to get an upgrade in the new version. They are working on merging technology, like OCR capabilities — they are bringing everything under one banner. That's definitely going to help. This reboot of Blue Prism is definitely required. It's a little late, but at least they're doing it.

We have been using Blue Prism for roughly three years.

We used to have some issues with the older version of Blue Prism, which required technical support, but this has been addressed in the newer versions. Overall, after the upgrade, I'd say it's very stable.

Is it scalable? Yes and no. From Blue Prism's perspective, it's easy: you spin up a server and start deploying your blocked runners, making sure to keep them running; but from an organization's point of view, there is a lot to do on the infrastructure side — you have to pay special attention to the infrastructure where you can run your bots. So, it's scalable, but there is a cost associated with it. Every organization needs to be very careful in regard to how they're scaling it: are you going to scale it horizontally? Are you going to scale it vertically? Are you going to scale out? These are the questions that must be carefully considered when scaling it up. Otherwise, your cost will be exponentially higher if you don't pay attention to these factors.

As I mentioned earlier, we get our support from a third-party vendor and our partner — they log the tickets with Blue Prism. They engage all of the support that we are entitled to, for example, tier one, two, and three. Also, we have client engagement from Blue Prism who is constantly in touch with us, and they are always open to our feedback surrounding areas of improvement. Overall, I would say our relationship has been good with Blue Prism.

We also have experience with Automation Anywhere. From a marketing perspective, Automation Anywhere has done a lot, but since we have just started using Automation Anywhere, our lower environments are built, but our higher environment is yet to be built. 

So, why did we make the choice to use Automation Anywhere when we have Blue Prism? The simple answer is because the marketing of Automation Anywhere is better. They were offering IQ bots and attended bot runners; Blue Prism wasn't really offering these. These were big areas of consideration between the two, because when we were actually evaluating, Blue Prism didn't have a similar offering for IQ bots or attended bots that Automation Anywhere had.

The initial setup sounded simple when we started, but when we were upgrading to version 6.4, we needed our vendor partner and Blue Prism to come together. Originally, the upgrading process was estimated to take eight weeks, but we almost spent four to five months getting it set up. I think there's still a lot of complexity involved, It's not that simple. They are not very lightweight yet. There is a lot of heavy software involved, which makes the set up a little complex.

The maintenance is primarily done by us. We do have a complete license, including support, and we are in a tough IT agreement with the vendors, so we do have premium support with Blue Prism. If we require assistance, we write a ticket on the vendor platform and they will eventually hook up the Blue Prism guide. In short, we do have content enterprise support with them.

We got a discounted price after negotiating with Blue Prism, as well as Automation Anywhere through our procurement. From a list-price perspective (due to the marketing strategy of Automation Anywhere), Automation Anywhere appears to be much cheaper compared to Blue Prism; however, if you do a detailed analysis in regards to the total pricing, I think both are pretty much at war with each other. Automation Anywhere has broken down the licensing costs into multiple factors, whereas Blue Prism is very straightforward — you purchase a production license, that's it. This looks much more expensive compared to Automation Anywhere prices, but with Automation Anywhere, you have to start from scratch. I'd say they are pretty much head-to-head with each other. 

With Blue Prism, there are no additional fees. The price depends on the number of processes that you run in production and you get a license for that. Also, the lower environments are free of cost. It's pretty straightforward.

I think it's very important for an organization to evaluate what kind of use cases they have: what's their roadmap and how long is the journey that they're looking at. As the market says, most organizations are looking for this digital transformation, and Blue RP is only part of it. For any organization that needs to adapt to a digital transformation, automation RP does play a good role. They need to evaluate what exactly they want to do and then engage with Blue Prism about how to go about doing it. Remember to always bring in the experts in the market at the beginning of your journey, and work together. That helps a lot.

On a scale from one to ten, I would give Blue Prism a rating of seven.

Blue Prism takes good security measures and is user friendly.

The domain in regards to cognitive abilities and the use of processing activity needs improvement. They have added this capability, but that's not really big in the public. It is more also available for gold partners. So they should improve the user activity for the public or even the regular customer. It can add a good amount of scalability.

I have been using Blue Prism since 2014.

It is stable.

We have 300 resources that are using Blue Prism at different levels.

It can be maintained by three people and it can be done by our IT team as well. It is not hard to maintain

If you are a customer or a gold partner, you'll be aligned with a customer success manager who can escalate the case quickly and you'll receive a resolution in no time.

After I started using Blue Prism, I also started working with Automation Anywhere and Ui Path.

Blue Prism has its own market share. The large three or four organizations use Blue Prism's security and scalability features, which can be applied at an enterprise level. Some things need to be improved. These are things that are lacking in other tools as well, so it is a fair competition.

The initial setup was straightforward. 

If everything is set up well like the restrictions that are on the PCs are up to mark, it will take 20 to 25 minutes for the complete installation.

My advice is that not all activities can be automated by using Blue Prism. There are certain levels of criteria that need to be calculated before choosing a particular RPA tool. There are things that need to be considered before choosing economically.

In the next release, I would like to see improvement in cognitive abilities, AI, and document processing.

I would rate Blue Prism an eight out of ten. 

The first automated processes were mainly backoffice procedures. Accordingly, unattended robots have been used to do the job. To me however, a big portion of the potential value added from RPA comes from attended automation, especially in a people-intensive professional services company like the one I`m working at. Typical examples for solutions desired by the staff are digital assistants taking care of the tedious and error-prone data transfer processes reaching from HR and Marketing to Finance.

Of course, Blue Prism is capable of improving one´s processes, especially in terms of efficiency. I´m not saying that it didn´t improve things at all at my company. However, my personal opinion is that improvement is behind what´s possible nowadays. As desribed before, attended automation and digital assistants keep becoming more important - if not crucial for a company´s RPA journey. And that´s exactly where Blue Prism in my opinion fails. Developing processes, you can feel that the solution is not made for attended automation. 

Valuable feature are for sure the modelers. They are quite easy to understand and use. I think they are what people mean when they say Blue Prism is a bit easier than UiPath. Whereas I definitely like the ease of use, this comes at a cost. In direct comparison to UiPath, the Studios feel like Kindergarden to me. Trying to make robot development accessible to people with limited technical understanding, they are taking away the endless possibilities resulting from the fact that a software robot is still a mature computer program. Not being able to insert code - or even complex expressions - is not a feature to me. Summing up, I like the ease of use of BP but to me, the sacrifice is too high.

When I am comparing Blue Prism to UiPath, it lacks many features. For example, I am missing all variable types that I am used to having in UiPath.

I don't like that it is so limited, anything that you do feels limited in your capabilities.

Usually, you have dropdown menus with 10 choices but if you need that 11th or 12th one it is so difficult to work around it. 

For me, I feel that it is lacking in features.

It consists of simple actions that work quite well together, and the integration is good but the scope of things that you can do is too narrow.

The interface could be brought to a more modern state of the art interface. It still has this gray Windows 95 style, which is outdated.

The way that humans interact with robots is a feature that is very poor in Blue Prism. 

The focus is on the unattended automation, for example, robots running in the background at some bank. If you have more digital assistance, assisting humans in their daily work is something that is very difficult and I would like to see this improved.

I have been using Blue Prism for two months.

The stability is quite good.

This solution is scalable, but I don't have a lot of experience with this area. I am basing this only on what I have heard.

We have approximately 500 end-users.

Due to the limitations, we don't have plans to increase our usage. We are considering a change.

I don't have a lot of experience with technical support. At this time, I cannot say anything good or bad.

Previously, I was using UiPath and because of a change in job, I started using Blue Prism.

This solution was already in place when I joined the company. 

The setup and deployment were already complete.

We have a team of five to maintain this solution.

We did the implementation internally.

We have a three-year contract that is paid on a yearly basis.

To my knowledge, there are no additional costs other than the standard licensing fee.

I don't think that I could recommend this solution. I prefer working with UiPath.

We have a lot of use cases for automation, including testing our website.

The most valuable feature is that you can create automations without coding.

The web-based designer is very user-friendly and easy to use.

I would like to see machine learning functionality integrated with the automation.

We have been using Blue Prism for about three years.

At this point, it is hard to say how scalable it is. We have more than 200 employees using it.

This product is very easy to maintain, so we haven't had to contact technical support.

Prior to using Blue Prism, we gained experience using UiPath. We have now started using Automation Anywhere, as well. Each of these RPA products has different features and we choose the one that best meets the needs of the project.

For example, UiPath is very good at text file automation, whereas Automation Anywhere is better at web-based or cloud-based automation.

The initial setup is not complex. I would say that it is really easy.

We had assistance implementing Blue Prism from SAP.

Blue Prism is less expensive than some of the other RPA solutions. The licensing fees depend on the number of users that you have.

I would rate this solution an eight out of ten.

Anything which is redundant and has the same steps can be easily automated with Blue prism hence reducing manual operation and manpower.

We have a project in which a user requests through an email, Blue prism pickups that email and according to the request finds out which access has to be provided and follows the same procedure to give access. Once access is provided a business notification is reverted back. In case of an exception the business is notified in such scenarios after maximum retries. 

We started with a very small team and small projects. As the project started getting success with Blue Prism we have a large number of teams now just for automating all the business procedures. Larger time was saved after automating the processes.

The business was very much satisfied with the results. Many projects involving Java, Mainframe SAP, Web browsers, and Windows were made. We did also use PDF automation using OCR and Surface automation which helped tremendously as our company is payroll-based and involves lots of file processing in which the toughest is interacting with PDFs. 

• Automating: Blue prism helps in reducing manual operation and manpower.
• Reporting: As cases are handled by Blue Prism we can extract all the logs and provide reports and analyze reports as per the need. We can use the reporting and dashboard feature of Blue Prism. And if the business needs a separated report we can create a separate report for such cases also by creating a process.
• Higher Productivity: Blue Prism can run in unattended mode for 27*7. No manual person needed other than Support.
• Cost-effective: As manpower is reduced.
• Higher Security: Blue Prism has inbuilt security features.
  

It can be improved more in :

1. Surface automation techniques: using region mode. Identifying images more properly.

2.OCR: Can improve more in OCR, to read text more correctly, currently can say OCR in blue prism only works for less cases and is only effective 50%. so mostly OCR's of Blue prism is very less used and other API's or tools are integrated with Blue prism for OCR techniques. 

3. Integration Support: To integrate any tool, API with blue prism. the team support is very less and also no proper details are available in Blue Prism. This can be improved much more.

4. AI: AI techniques will make Blue prism more powerful which is currently not done. 

I have been using Blue Prism for three years until now.

I was trained in .Net, and from then working in Blue Prism.

We used UiPath which was not so much effective than Blue Prism.

For simple processes use UiPath and Automation Anywhere.

For medium to high complexity processes use Blue Prism.

For much complex process involving decision making and much more of AI use Work fusin.

We did evaluate other options:

• Automation Anywhere 
• Work fusion

We are primarily using Blue Prism for automating repetitive Excel tasks and preparing reports. This involves downloading reports and data from websites, followed by data massaging. Most of the automation is within Excel. 

The studio is very easy to use. It is not just for coders, as you can have a diagrammatic representation of the process.

The debugging is great because you can step into the code during the process, and you can also re-step, which means returning to a previous one. You can also change the code while the process is running and see the effect without having to stop the execution.

Blue Prism is expensive to scale because there are costs associated with additional licenses and improvements to infrastructure. In general, it should be easier to expand my user base.

The assisted automation functionality needs improvement. Right now, it does not support it very well. As a person who uses a computer, I want to have my email categorized or perhaps have some attachments saved from my emails, the minute I start my day. I don't want a server to do it, and I don't want a separate license for that, either.

I have been using Blue Prism for the past three years.

Blue Prism is working fine and the stability is fantastic.

It is difficult to expand the use of Blue Prism in an environment. For example, if I have 10 members in my team and I decide that it isn't enough, and in response, I want to onboard 100 more people, it's difficult to do. This is related to the costs of licenses and infrastructure.

The difficult question becomes if I want to get 100 more people involved in automation, how do I scale the team?

When it comes to scalability, nowadays, it's about citizen development models. Everyone wants to use RPA, which means that any number of people might be doing it. As a center of excellence, if I tell them that they need additional infrastructure, licenses, and training to accommodate it, then onboarding 100 people is a large commitment.

Improvements could be made by supplying a URL to the website for training, creating group licenses, and using a plug-in instead of a dedicated machine or virtual machine. If we could install an agent on a machine without any license for development purposes then it would be helpful.

Currently, we have approximately 100 users.

I have been in contact with technical support many times, and I would say that they are good. It is robust I would say, although not very quick. There seems to be a lack in terms of regional representation, which means that it takes longer because the support is online.

We also use UiPath and Automation Anywhere.

Our adoption of Blue Prism is an expansion in our automation efforts, and we did not switch from using these other products.

Most of the RPA solutions are very similar, although the debugging is better in Blue Prism than other products. Instead of being able to change the code while it is running and then have it continue, with other products you have to restart the process and monitor it after each change is made. Debugging in Blue Prism saves a lot of time.

The initial setup is simple and it took us approximately half an hour to complete.

Our in-house team handled the implementation and deployment.

Maintenance is required and it is handled by our "Run and Maintain" team. Their primary job is to make sure that the bot runs at the right time.

Our licensing fees are approximately $5,000 USD per year. The price is based upon the licensing model, where clients are assigned categories such as platinum, gold, and silver customers.

Everything is included with the cost of the license. 

This is a good RPA product and definitely one that I recommend. When I want to automate stuff with the web site, perform web scraping, or interacting with Excel and SAP, it is quite stable. The bot does not just fail. Once you capture the underlying application control, it's there and will not just break.

I've seen other RPA tools wherein you do the automation, do the recording, and once you replay it, it doesn't work because of some random lag in the timing of the application. Similarly, if something changes then it may not work. In Blue Prism, you have complete control over that.

Overall, I would say that this tool is very good. It is one of the best in the market.

I would rate this solution an eight out of ten.