Blue Prism Reviews

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 a service provider and I develop RPA solutions for my clients.

Blue Prism is one of the RPA products that I develop bots for.

Most of our clients are interested in automating processes that are related to payroll and other aspects of finance.

Using Blue Prism takes away from the work required to complete manual tasks. Also, repetitive tasks that are completed using RPA are more accurate, compared to those done manually.

The most valuable feature is that people with zero coding knowledge can use Blue Prism very well.

The user interface is good.

Blue Prism is lacking in document processing capabilities.

The addition of better testing tools, or some kind of test suite, would be an improvement.

If this solution had a framework for exception handling then it would be very helpful. As a developer, we have to put exceptions in as the first step.

This product does not have AI Fabric or process mining tools.

I have been using Blue Prism for about a year and a half.

There are no issues in terms of stability. It is as stable as any other tool.

The scalability depends on the code that we write. For example, there are business objects as well as processes. If they are architected and coded properly then it is very easy to scale with less effort. I have no complaints regarding scalability and it is as good as other tools.

I have only been in contact with technical support one time when I had some issues writing Blue Prism certifications. They responded within one day.

For any technical questions that we have, we look at the forums for answers. Blue Prism have their own community and the forums are very good.

I am proficient in UiPath as well as Blue Prism, and I have just started using Kofax RPA. I am also looking into Automation Anywhere.

Of all of these solutions, I prefer to work with UiPath. Blue Prism does have an advantage that non-coders can work with it. However, it lacks in document processing features that are available in Automation Anywhere and UiPath.

I am not involved in the installation of the RPA tools, although my understanding is that the initial setup is quite easy and doesn't take long.

My IT team handles the deployment of Blue Prism.

The licensing fees are low compared to other tools.

The suitability of this product depends on the use cases. For example, if you are looking into processing invoices then Blue Prism is not the tool that I would choose because the others have better OCR capabilities.

If document processing capabilities and a test suite were added then it would be great because our customers who need these features would not be forced to use other products.

If I were to rate this tool in isolation then I would score it a six or seven out of ten. However, as I am comparing it to other similar solutions, I have to score it less.

I would rate this solution a four out of ten.

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.

Across different business areas, the use cases differ.  The back-office, for example, are more along the lines of reconciliation of data, the back-end operations. We have use cases in our dispatching department as well, where use cases can be like data is gathered for traders to make intelligent decisions, or nominations power plants to the website. 

Some use cases in our procurement area and our financial services.

Our goal is to free our employees to do more value-added tasks, while the robots do the manual activities. That way, employees can move on to more sophisticated tasks. The robot does its work but the employees are still in control. For example, the dispatcher is still on the desk and looking at what a robot has nominated, for example.

We have use cases where RPA is integrating it with machine learning, with chat bots. . Our idea was to start with the basic robot and then make them more sophisticated by adding natural-language processing or machine learning. We have a couple of use cases there, as well. But the repetitive-task use cases are more common.

Our application server and our database are on Azure cloud. But you have to use a virtual machine to access it and that virtual desktop environment was on-prem. Currently, a project is going on to move them to virtual machines as well. So the Blue Prism hosting is currently on our private cloud, Azure, and the virtual machines are on-prem and will be moved to Azure in two months.

There are multiple advantages. 

Time saving is definitely one of them. We do not build robots if they are not going to be effective; Process Improvement is key. You don't want to automate a non effective process.

it can be quality, it can be 24/7 operations, it can be compliance. 

For example, in terms of time, a back-office operations guy would spend, let's say, a number of hours doing reconciliation activities from one system to another, which is something that can be done by a robot quite quickly.

When you look at the front-office, for example, the advantages are more quality-based — less human error. Our dispatching desk , a human error in entering values/nomination can cause imbalance/penalty costs. So five minutes of dispatcher time is different than five minutes in back-office operations. That's why we never say it's only time-savings. The benefit could be avoiding the cost of error. And the opportunity, to do more value adding tasks in the time saved.

As for 24/7 operations, for example a billing robot which can generate the bills before employees are in office.  Then there are some compliance or audit-related situations, where you need to prove auditability of some of the processes. It used to be a human saying, "Yes, I have done the check," but now, if you have a robot checking it, you have everything in the system so an auditor can look into it. I would not say time is the main motivation; the motivations are multiple.

Another advantage, is future of work and modernising the workplace.

And then some are really not technology-related, is that business and IT are coming closer together. Business understands IT and IT understands the business.  We have a federated COE. I am the head of the COE and it is more like a matrix organization where people from different organizations report to me functionally, and I just run an end-to-end customer journey. The way we implement has also changed. It's not that you build a robot and it's with IT, and IT maintains it. No. The business is still accountable for the result of the robot. these are not quantifiable advantages but you see them at the organizational level.

The ease of use is quite good. We have some internal developers so some of our training is more an introduction to robotics. The second module of training is more delivery-related, using the robotic operating model. The last one is Blue Prism-related training and that phase is already available via the Blue Prism portal. We have access to the portal with Blueprism. if somebody is interested in developing, they can learn that via the portal. I make the environment available to them. But the ease of use is really good because a lot of business people, who have some idea about logic and who can think in logic, can configure things, because there is no coding.

The other features are quite comparable to what is in the market right now. There's nothing special about them. But ease of use is important because the business can also handle it.

There are some weaknesses of the tool as well. For example, Blue Prism has been a little bit slow when it comes to the commitments on their roadmap. They had some delays last year, so I hope they make it up this year. They promise, but they are not meeting everything they promise in their roadmap. For example, they were launching a Decipher tool. It was delayed by more than a year. It has still not launched.

Also, the Control Room  for the robots is not very sophisticated. That can be improved. 

We are now going to some attended bots, as well. How do you make attended robots work? It is something that is counterintuitive. On the one hand, I'm saying I need an enterprise tool, and on the other hand, I want attended bots because some cases deserve it. While I need an enterprise tool, I now have some use cases where I want to have an attended bot as well and the tool is not very sophisticated on that end right now.

I have been using Blue Prism for a little more than three years.

It's stable. We haven't faced any problems with it.

We haven't faced any issues. We are in the scaling phase and we are scaling well. We don't have a problem there. It's scalable.

We have > 60 robots that are live and the demand is high. There are multiple business areas that are live, and there are many more in the pipeline. 

Blue Prism's technical support is really good. If you raise a ticket you get an answer within 24 hours, and we have not paid anything extra for support. The maximum I have had to wait was two days. Getting an answer in one or two days is really good. And we generally get an answer from the product team, which is very good. And if they can't solve it via the support ticket in writing, they call you and discuss it.

You also have account partners so if something needs to be addressed quickly, you can make a call. Blue Prism has also visited us two or three times and that is really good. We have a good relationship.

We did not have a previous solution.

One of the major features, and it's why we selected Blue Prism, is that it's an enterprise-level automation. We wanted something that would be enterprise software, so we could monitor it centrally and maintain it centrally, while giving people the freedom to work independently as well. We didn't want a situation where I build a robot and now I'm looking at it on my screen. The idea was to free up peoples' time so that they could do something value-add while the robot is running on its own machine. This enterprise-level type of software was the need and Blue Prism fulfills that.

I have been involved right from the beginning and the initial setup was okay. It was not something that IT could not handle. We didn't run into a lot of trouble.

Setting up our infrastructure was not a problem from the Blue Prism side, but it was more with our infrastructure. Our company is a little bit complex. But it did not take more than four to six weeks for the infrastructure setup, and that was three-and-a-half years ago, so it might be even faster now. 

For maintenance of the solution I have an application manager. I have somebody who does service-enabling so that the robots can move to production. For delivery, I have a project manager, and there are BAs and developers and, for each business area, I have an implementation lead and, of course, a process expert/owner. In my COE I also have these roles and I also have a deployment lead who takes care of the policies and the procedures around the robotics for the entire organization. I also have a solution architect and another role called dependency manager, because there are a lot of different engines we have to manage since we're working with a lot of applications.

We used a consultant in the beginning and we also now use an integrator.

The use cases I outlined are the areas where we are seeing ROI: Quality, compliance, error-avoidance, opportunity cost, and time-saving.

The pricing is scalable for a enterprise-level solution. It's quite scalable and it's quite comparable with the market. If you really scale well over the number of licenses you have, you can achieve economies of scale and it comes out to be very cheap.

There are no costs in addition to the standard licensing fees. There is an option to increase your support levels by paying another 10 percent or 20 percent on your licenses, depending on how much support you want. We are still happy with the support.

There were three leaders at the time we did our evaluation three years ago and were quite equal in terms of their functionalities. One of the factors that led us to choose Blue Prism was the enterprise-level functionality. 

My advice is "go for it." It's good. We are satisfied that we have achieved with the tool, and we are continuing with it. 

Having said that, I would advise that you are free to explore the market and do a study, but in the end all the tools are very similar. It's more about how you will handle it in your organization. That is what is more important. There is not just the tooling around it. There is also the people management aspect, and process management. So there's a lot that goes along with it; more than just the tool. One of the things that I like about Blue Prism is that their operating model is quite good.

The biggest lesson I've learned is not about Blue Prism, it's about RPA as a whole. As I said, it's not just the tool or the technology, it's about how you bring in change management in the company. How do you take people along with you? How do you explain the journey? How do you set up the operating model? Because for scaling, your operating model is really important. You can't just put two robots in place and then think that you will scale because there are a lot of considerations around it. How will your organization adapt to it? For example, when a human joins your company he or she needs an ID. What about robots? Do they need an ID? How do those processes fit in when they operate? How will they communicate with humans? There's a lot of change management around it for the whole organization. 

It's a digital transformation, or you could just call it a transformation. You need to think about a lot of moving parts around it. The tool and the technology are quite easy actually, because all the companies are quite experienced in it. But change management and the transformation part are quite difficult. 

Another thing to think about is how do you choose the right processes to automate? You could think about just automating randomly, or you could think about whether a process is even needed for the organization. Why is somebody doing it? Maybe that process is not even needed; it's obsolete. You might get rid of some processes. We did that as well, and sometimes RPA is not the right solution. So think about automation as a whole. These are some of the things that I was given advice on.

I'm not a technology specialist, I'm a process transformation expert. It's not about technology in the end, it's about what you have done as a transformation to the company. The ways of working have changed. The way you look at a process has changed. A back-office analyst is now building robots himself, for himself. The way he's looking at the process has totally changed. 

We do a lot of RPA training as well. We have a in-house-built curriculum where we have multiple training modules. When people do the training, they change the way they look at processes. They are already thinking about robots or digitalization. You can call it the future of work. When you began this journey, you never thought you would have these kinds of advantages. But now you have them.

I would have given Blue Prism a nine out of 10 if they had delivered on their roadmap, especially Decipher.

We use the solution as an RPA tool to automate business processes.

The solution's most valuable feature is optical character recognition.

The solution's UI, control panel, and technical support could improve. Also, they should add more OCR engines to it.

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

I rate the solution's stability as an eight.

I rate the solution's scalability as an eight.

The solution's initial setup was straightforward. Although, the control panel installation requires some time as we need to connect it to SQL servers.

The solution generates a high return on investment.

I rate the solution as an eight.

The tool's user interface is very intuitive. 

The solution is pretty high priced. The tool's support also needs to be better. 

I would rate the tool's stability a nine out of ten. 

I would rate the product's scalability a nine out of ten. 

I would rate the product's setup an eight out of ten. 

I would rate the product's ROI an eight out of ten. 

I would rate the solution's pricing a seven out of ten. 

The end users are happy about the solution.

Our clients are typically medium-sized enterprise companies. 

I think Blue Prism is a wonderful product. It compliments each client as to what best suits them — budget and implementation-wise. Last year was not exactly a great year for many of these things. 

I have been using Blue Prism for roughly two and a half years. 

Stability-wise, I haven't heard any complaints from our clients. 

Our clients seem to be happy with the technical support. I haven't heard any complaints. 

My clients report that there is a little bit of a challenge regarding the cost-benefit ratio. My clients tend to feel that the overall implementation cost is a little high.

With Blue Prism, there are lots of possibilities. For this reason, one needs to really understand it from a process perspective. Map it with what is most pressing and then figure out a process, because most automation companies, including Automation Anywhere, Blue Prism, and UiPath come with a huge set of tools for automating processes. It's very important that companies also have a clear understanding of which areas are priority one, priority two, etc. 

Overall, on a scale from one to ten, I would give Blue Prism a rating of eight.