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.

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. 

We use Blue Prism to target the financial service industry. Our core use cases are specifically in insurance and banking.

Within our company, there are two developers that use this solution. 

Whether we increase our usage of this solution is going to be a market-based or market-driven decision. 

Although it's very simple to work with, it's a bit limited in terms of capability compared to similar solutions. 

I have been using Blue Prism since the beginning of 2021.

Blue Prism is stable enough. 

Blue Prism could be more scalable. 

Most of our use cases are back office-based. They usually don't interfere with our day-to-day operations. We tend to run most of our robots in the evening after working hours. The support is mainly remote. So it's not really a big deal.

We started with UiPath and Automation Anywhere.

Before we started using this solution, we were programming directly from things like Python, which was really cumbersome and complicated. The mid-levels specifically around continuity, and plus one capability internally. That's why we decided to use existing development tools like UiPath, Automation Anywhere, and Blue Prism. From an implementation perspective, they're a lot simpler to use. We no longer have to do a full-on manual implementation and develop from scratch.

The big vendors should consider some sort of unbundled pricing model that allows them to price accordingly to a customer's needs. Because developing robots manually took too long, this solution gave us a lot of flexibility when it came to pricing. A lot of global vendors have a very big problem understanding the price structure or price requirements of frontier markets, like Africa.

Compared to UiPath and Automation Anywhere, on a scale from one to ten, I would give Blue Prism a rating of six. 

I would recommend Blue Prism to others. From a tool perspective, UiPath is by far and away the best tool to use. Unfortunately, it's rigid around its pricing. Blue Prism is more affordable, but it won't provide you with the same features and functionality.

I'm working with an investment bank domain with multiple processes, both post-trade and marketing. I am trying to automate all of the operation work into an automation solution.  You can include a reconciliation process and invoice processing.

We use it for operations-related processes and other operational processes for analyzing and researching comments and reconciliation. These are all of the post-market trades we have. 

We find all features valuable.

I like the error handling, it's very good. The reuseable components are very helpful.

I am now analyzing the Decipher components, which is a new feature for me to use and utilize.

The OCR capability, along with the connectivity with some of the legacy tools, needs to be improved.

I found a few connection issues. I'm not sure whether it is a system issue or maybe the Blue Prism connectivity or connection string is not available there, but in some of the applications, we do face challenges to connect with another application. For example, the Chrome extension doesn't work on an unattended bot, which is why we have installed the upgraded version of Blue Prism.

In the next release, I would like to see the OCR capability increased, have a built-in solution to enhance the hyper capability itself. 

It should be compatible with all of the Internet Explorer options, such as Internet Explorer, along with Chrome and any others. 

Also, the cloud-based installation option, for example, there should be an option to set up in-house, along with cloud-based, that can be operated from anywhere.

I have been working with Blue Prism for a year and a half.

We are working with version 6.3, which is the latest upgraded version of Blue Prism.

We do follow good practice to create reusable components and at the same time, while being a part of COE. For a complex project, we target three months to complete any of the complex projects. So even in terms of scalability from the critical.

We have plans to increase our usage.

There have been a few complex issues, where we followed up with the support team. One example of that was the Chrome extension. We are still in the process of implementing the upgraded version to resolve that issue.

We have almost 80 to 90 percent of our issue resolved. But we have a few components that we are still not able to capture on Chrome. We are trying to analyze whether it is an issue with Blue Prism or is it with Chrome to upgrade.

So far, the technical support is good.

There might be issues with our legacy system, we are not sure what the cause is exactly, but the support has been there to help us.

I am working with UiPath and Automation Anywhere.

The initial setup is simple. We did not find any complexity.

We have an infer team to take care of the installation and deployment.

The licensing is approximately $1,100.

I provide a warranty period of one year to any of the profits as an automation solution, it gives me a little less profit, but for a long-term perspective for example two to three years, I would say it is much more affordable as compared to the other.

It is possible but I was not part of this process. We have a technical team who makes the decisions.

There is always room for improvement. I am expecting a lot.

I would rate Blue Prism a seven out of ten.

We have got the Blue Prism license for financial auditing purposes. 

The whole auditing activity is run at the backend without any screen scraping activity and other stuff that generally requires human involvement. It was deployed for this purpose, and it has been working perfectly well so far. There are certain hiccups that come in between, but our team is able to handle them. So, it is mainly being used for high-volume backend batch processing.

It works very well for batch processing at the backend. Scalability-wise, it is very robust. It is also stable.

Its front end is not very good for things like screen scraping. UiPath and AA are very good for that. Blue Prism's license is costlier than UiPath and AA. They should be improving its price.

Its artificial intelligence and cognitive features are not that strong enough. Cognitive automation should be their next area of improvement.

The decoding of the bot is a highly painful activity, and this is an area of improvement for Blue Prism. It is tough to find variables and get the code in place. You have to open the whole bonnet of the car to get things in place. 

Their training should also be improved. UiPath and AA have their learning communities. They provide free of cost basic certification. As a result, you get trained workforce in the market that can directly work on projects, but this is not the case with Blue Prism. It is costly to get the resources trained, which increases the overall cost of getting a resource for Blue Prism.

Their tech support can also be improved. Many times, the issues that should have been addressed by L1 have gone to L2.

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

It is stable. There are no issues.

Scalability is not at all a problem. It works perfectly well for a batch operation.

In terms of usage, we have seven users who use this solution.

Their tech support is good but can be improved. Every ticket first goes to L1, and then it goes to L2. Many times, the issues that should have been addressed by L1 have gone to L2.

It was a bit complex because we were already using AA, and we were more habitual of that interface. That's why it took us some time with Blue Prism.

It took around two months to set it up and get the first use case in place from the development perspective.

Its license is costlier than UiPath and AA. They should improve its price.

We have a two-year contract with them.

Blue Prism is best for backend processing, but its artificial intelligence and cognitive features are not strong enough. It could be because we have not explored it that much. My experience with this solution is more related to backend processing. If you are looking for backend processing that is quite heavy in nature and you have a team that is trained in Blue Prism, you should go for it without any doubt.

I would rate Blue Prism a seven out of ten.

We implemented Blue Prism some time back. I'm not using it right now. 

I get most involved during the evaluation and the deployment phase.

With Blue Prism, we automated back-end processes. Blue Prism is more like service-side automation. It is not good for attended automation.

Blue Prism can lower the average handling time immediately by 20-40%.

You also need to look at what is the long term goal. A long term goal could be that you want to keep, not integrate, with anything else. 

Blue Prism has a long learning curve because the coding is complicated. You need to be a very highly skilled developer. Blue Prism has a high coding skill and certification requirement that hinders your ability to automate quickly. 

Blue Prism moves out new versions very fast and their back-up compatibility is not good as compared to their competition. Essentially, this means you spend a lot of money just upgrading the bots.

Blue Prism is quite stable. It has the interactive client that is really good. The licensing model is very simple as well.

The user interface is okay. I don't think there is much of a problem.They need to also have a better capability in attended automation. Blue Prism has not invested enough in AI development.

They need to have a Bot store. If they can introduce AI bots that will automatically diagnose why something failed and keep sending data back to admins, it would be an improvement.

We have been using the Blue Prism RPA ( /categories/robotic-process-automation-rpa ) solution for almost one year.

Blue Prism is quite stable.

When you need to run more processes, you buy more licenses, but you will spin up more VM. Scaling not is a problem for Blue Prism.

We started with Blue Prism.

The initial setup of Blue Prism is standard and not difficult. The instructions are very clear and easy. It doesn't take long to implement. The setup is not difficult.

Changing the board and getting it deployed didn't take too long. The deployment into production and moving to the environment took somewhere between eight to ten weeks. It could have been a little less.

reduction of Operations effort

These prices are deal-specific, it will probably not be right to review negotiations with the vendor. Currently, there are no new licensing agreement changes for us.

We evaluated Automation Anywhere.

If you need only server-side back-end process automation, use Blue Prism. If you need assisted automation or services automation, use Automation Anywhere or UiPath. On a scale from 1 to 10, I would rate Blue Prism with an 8.

In our case, all use cases are relevant to the telecom industry. In the telecom industry, we are the service providers for various telecoms such as Vodafone, AT&T, et cetera. We are the service providers. We are doing some processes and we are doing support in the networks as well. In terms of the internet, when it comes to supporting the network, there are some processes that need to be completed manually. Therefore, we will take those processes from all the verticals. For example, we did this project for Telus, and we identified the processes to where we can implement automation. We sought out processes that were good areas for automation adoption.

We identify those areas for clients and map them out.

The solution's most valuable aspect is the fact that it is systematic. It's a very systematic tool. We can do all these things like array and cache. It's very useful.

We were able to create a few new processes which we automated. 

The mapping is very good. On mapping, we can order the tools required for automation.

The analysis itself is very good. We're able to say which areas can be improved and which are the easiest areas to automate. Typically, it's good at revealing which decision-making areas could be automated effectively.

The tool is very technically sound.

The product is very secure. 

The solution is not user-friendly. It has a very high learning curve. People should be able to learn it easily so that they will get interested in using it. 

While the solution is more secure, it's very hard to find people trained on that. I need different people, not only those who are trained on RPA tools. I cannot get people in Blue Prism. Without the resources, people just move to Automation Anywhere or UiPath which are more user-friendly. In comparison, UiPath is much easier to use and you can find people who are well-versed in it.

The product needs to put out more videos, similar to Automation Anywhere, which does that a lot. You can find a lot of videos online in relation to Automation Anywhere and UiPath, however, this is not the case with Blue Prism. There's just less information available. 

Blue Prism needs to provide better training. They need to start something similar to Automation Anywhere University or UiPath Academy. If they had some courses at different levels (basic, advanced, and master), there would be more educated personnel available.

The solution needs to provide a trial license - whether it is on cloud or on-premises. They need to provide a standard environment to work with. We need to have practice in installing the data center and connecting it to the database. 

We need to understand how we can migrate from one lesser version to the higher version and what is the load balance and how we can manage that. We need to understand better how our core system is managing that. Proper training would help with understanding.

I've been using the solution for about two years at this point.

The solution is quite stable. We haven't had any issues with it. It isn't buggy or glitchy. It doesn't crash or freeze. 

I'm strongly involved with Automation Anywhere. I've been working with Automation Anywhere since 2019.

While Blue Prism and Automation Anywhere are very similar to each other in terms of capabilities, Automation Anywhere is much easier to use. 

Even in Blue Prism or UiPath or Automation Anywhere, the attributes are very similar to each other. However, Blue Prism is got a larger barrier to entry due to its high learning curve and lack of strong training.

We prefer the fact that, for example, on Automation Anywhere, we can use trial versions and we can use that time to train employees on how to use it. With Blue Prison, there doesn't seem to be a trial option.

We are not very familiar with the Blue Prism installation or if it's easy or not. Those areas are a bit of a gray area for me as I'm not doing many installations. 

The setup and installation we didn't do ourselves. We did these projects in the client end roadmap. The client has the Blue Prism tool. They set up everything themselves. Our job is to go there and to be able to provide the roadmap.

Likely, the installation takes about two or three hours, I would estimate.

The product has its own database, such as an SQL server. We often install supporting tools, however. There are some coming out now, such as Python, Java, and VBScript editors. Certain items, such as Java Runtime Focus should be installed. There are different installations depending on the client. If it is not on the cloud, the installations definitely take some time. It might take two hours or more.

Our clients handle the initial setup themselves.

Unlike other options, you need to buy a license. You cannot do a trial. At least, that was always the case a few years ago. With UiPath or Automation Anywhere, there are trial versions. It's a drawback for clients if it is still true that no trial option is on the table.

I'm no longer using Blue Prism. I deal more with UiPath now. However, I am certified in Blue Prism. I tend to take care of the delivery part. We talk with the clients and understanding the clients' requirements, understand the project, then divide the project into activities and map them out. I will help to architect it. If there is any trouble in capturing those areas then I will analyze this in Blue Prism or Automation Anywhere. 

So far, in those Blue Prism projects, it's very straightforward with rule-based - straightforward in the process automation. We will concentrate on low-hanging areas first and we will identify only those areas that we can automate easily. I'm sorry. In terms of automating end-to-end process, we will concentrate only on to 60% to 70% for our automation.



Premarajan:
So come back to the courses, in that way, we are not much familiar with the Blue Prism installation, how this installation takes time, it's easy or not. Those areas are a little gray area for me because I'm not doing much in the installation. But if you ask us if in the installation of Automation Anywhere, definitely, I can say I'll answer that. I can see that screen by screen. When we install it, the watch screen will come first like that. I can say that because I personally did installation Automation Anywhere installation.

Premarajan:
I set up a lab system in Tata so that our employees can train. I did a lot of things. Like that, I installed a UiPath as well in my system. I installed even [inaudible 00:26:08] also they provided, Microsoft has. They also provided a trial license to me when I asked. They also provided.

Premarajan:
But Blue Prism, those days, didn't provide me the trial version and they didn't help me, how to install it. No idea. That is a shortfall I can say about Blue Prism. [crosstalk 00:26:29]-

Emma:
So you were-
Premarajan:
It's very limited when we needed the license or those who purchased the Blue Prism people can work on Blue Prism tool. Others had no chance to learn. That I can say one way it's good. In the other way, people were not aware of the tool. That is, I can say it's good except for one drawback.

I'd rate the solution at a seven out of ten.

One key feature is the workflow design is able to be customized according to the way that you want the automation to work.

I have found that community support is lacking for this solution compared to competitors.

I have been using this solution for approximately one year.

The initial setup is not easy and it is more difficult than other solutions.

There is a one-time purchase fee for this solution. Other competitors have more additional fees and we have found this solution to be the best cost-saving in the long run.

It would be a benefit if this solution had a trial version because currently, you have to pay in full to try it.

We are currently comparing this solution with UiPath.

I rate Blue Prism a seven out of ten.

We use Blue Prism for different industries such as insurance, banks and financial corporations. We help to automate different kinds of processes, such as data validation when it comes to insurance. The solution compares data between documents and the portal. We are partners with Blue Prism and also resellers. I'm a solutions architect. 

It's beneficial that the solution is object oriented so you can create objects. In larger projects, where multiple developers are involved, it's hard to develop tasks and RPA platforms. With Blue Prism you can create a process. For example, automating data validation, which would be a framework where you can assign an object developer so they can work in parallel, enabling project completion in a shorter space of time.

Unfortunately, developing with Blue Prism takes more time than developing with UiPath or other platforms, because each action requires multiple actions. If you need to open an Excel file and collect the data from it, UiPath can do it with two or three clicks, like drag and drop the Excel application scope. With Blue Prism, you need to open the workbook, then open an instance, then get the sheet and then close that instance. It takes more time to develop things in Blue Prism. The dashboards are not excellent, they could be improved enabling more information.

I've been using this solution for four years.

It's a stable and reliable solution, we haven't had any issues with instability. 

Blue Prism is designed to be scalable. You need to properly design the automation so that if you want to expand it and use multiple robots, it will work without issues. 

Technical support is very good. They respond quickly.

The initial setup is straightforward. 

Licensing is on an annual basis. The pricing is better than other platforms. 

I would recommend UiPath because it is easier to use and faster to implement. But if a company has budget limitations and because UiPath has more licenses, if you want to acquire Orchestrator, for example, it requires another license. Blue Prism gives you a license for a robot, then a license for everything else. If there are no strict limitations on budget, I would recommend UiPath. 

I have been using this solution to develop internal web-based applications. Some of the applications are interacting with desktop applications.

It saves time. By automating repetitive tasks, we are able to save a lot of time. There are also fewer human errors.

The credential manager and logs are most valuable. We are using Blue Prism for complex processes because it is easier to troubleshoot in Blue Prism, and the logs are very accurate. It provides the ability to create smaller tasks, which makes it easier to troubleshoot.

Its image recognition or the OCR part should be improved. The quality has improved in the latest version, but some of the handwritten documents are not that accurate. 

Its interaction with the Citrix environment should also be improved. Their technical support should also be improved.

I have been using this solution for at least three years. 

It is pretty stable as compared to other RPA solutions. Its stability also depends on other applications.

Their technical support is not that reliable. They are quite slow, and their response is not that proactive for our questions or issues.

For other RPA tools, you can just search the web for information, but for Blue Prism, there isn't that much information.

It is not hard to install. You just need to design the database. 

Deployment is pretty fast. For deployment within our team, the server is the same, and we just configure it to run on our machine. For deployment outside our team, we just need to install the server and then configure the machines. It is not that complicated.

We did it on our own.

In the Philippines, fewer companies are using Blue Prism because of its cost. I don't know the price, but I know that its price is higher than UiPath.

It has good stability, and it is easier to troubleshoot. We don't have a need to increase its usage because we are currently using it for complex processes, and our number of users isn't going to change.

I would rate Blue Prism an eight out of ten because it has some room for improvement.

We primarily use the solution for finance, specifically accounts payable.

The solution has improved our organization in that our AP administrators and AP clerks don't have to put the information into the ERP. The RPA does the transfer upon approval over to the ERP system. You don't have to code and create backend APIs or custom code to integrate the systems. It makes things much easier overall.

The object modeling is the solution's most valuable aspect. It's been quite helpful for our organization. The reusability of it has been great. Being able to create an object and use it for multiple processes has been very useful for us.

The initial setup is straightforward.

The reporting system, specifically the system admin reporting could be improved.

If there were more business analytics, that would be quite helpful.

In general, however, the solution isn't really lacking any features.

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

The solution is very stable. There are no bugs or glitches. It doesn't crash or freeze. It's extremely reliable in terms of performance. 

The scalability has been good so far. If a company needs to expand it, it can do so with ease. It's not a problem.

We have several hundred users on the solution currently. Blue Prism operates on the enterprise level and the activities of the digital workers happen on the servers. So virtually no one needs to interact with it directly. It's mostly on an administrative level that there are some people accessing the application and its reviews, exceptions, and things like that.

I have limited familiarity with other RPA products.

The initial setup is very straightforward. It's not overly complex. A company shouldn't have any issues with the process.

The installation itself takes maybe a couple of hours, however, the customization, depending on the complexity of the process, can be anywhere from six weeks to eight months. It really depends on the complexity.

Per five digital workers, you need one or two individuals for maintenance.

We are an integrator. We are able to help our clients set up the solution.

We are a reseller of the product.

We've been working with the most recent version of the solution in our organization.

I have been happy with this solution overall. I'd rate it at a ten 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.

I run a company that is a Blue Prism partner. We have ten Blue Prism developers. We use it for invoice automation, order processing automation, and internal back office and front office automation. That is a good collection of things that we do. It can be deployed on-premises as well as on the cloud.

I like the cloud features such as IADA and Decipher.

The upgrades could be managed better. I would also like to see more true AI development and machine learning.

I have been using this solution for two years.

Their technical support is quite good.

It is pretty straightforward. It normally takes a couple of hours. 

We're a consultancy, and we've got about 12 clients who use this solution. There are a few thousand users across those. For its deployment, you need managers, admins, and engineers for about three or four days each.

Licensing is on a yearly basis.

I would rate Blue Prism a nine out of ten. We quite like this product.

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. 

I work for the healthcare industry, and I use it for claims orders. We have claims orders, and we have integrated service manager tickets to bring tickets from different locations or websites and update them to the SharePoint tracker. From there, we send any notifications to the concerned person.

I am currently working with an on-premise solution that is connected to the cloud UI.

We are trying to speed up the process for our client because, being in the healthcare industry, they do have a lot of defects and issues. They are working on the latest products, which have different defects and issues. Being able to speed up this process, provide information to different business people, and make things easy is the value add. These tickets are also related to claims audits, so it would also speed up the claim process.

Blue Prism supports the multi-bot architecture, which is really good. It is also really good at OCR. Blue Prism is integrated with Abbey OCR, and it provides at least 90% right information on period documents. This is something that is really good in Blue Prism.

Blue Prism can deal with a huge amount of data. We can track each and every record, and then we can see the data. If you don't have much coding experience, it makes it easy to build automations and deploy them. It is also easy to learn and easy to work with. It has a lot of features, which makes it reliable for any sort of automation.

The activities that we do are a bit difficult to do in Blue Prism as compared to UiPath. UiPath provides create activities and create packages related to AI analytical skills. This is something that Blue Prism doesn't have.

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

We don't interact with their technical support. I work in an environment where we implement use cases and give them to the clients. We build use cases, do UAT for these use cases, and then deploy them for our clients. The clients already have their production support team for support. If there is any issue in the production, we do support the clients.

All these use cases are something on which we work with a fixed scope. These are not things that can be built on long-term projects. We just focus on trying to get the use cases from them, and we then build, implement, and deploy them.

I also use UiPath. When comparing Blue Prism and UiPath, there are some pros and cons in both tools. UiPath does some of the things really well but lags behind in some aspects and vice versa. Blue Prism is really good at something like multi-bot architecture and tracking of the tickets for the records. UiPath provides create activities and create packages related to AI analytical skills, which is where Blue Prism lags behind.

It was a bit complex because when I started with RPA in 2018, Blue Prism was not a free source tool for us, which is where I found difficulty in learning things and becoming familiar with all the products in Blue Prism. UiPath was a free source tool, and they provided most of the training and made it easy for us. They also provided a free community version for us, which was helpful in learning it.

I don't have an idea about Blue Prism, but I have an idea about UiPath. UiPath is scaling its business in different products. It has got products for intelligent document processing (IDP) to test or log integrations for chatbots. If you want to work on something like a true test automation, you have to buy a test book. In such cases, they have a predefined way of working with, implementing, or running things. This is where I see that UiPath might be a bit costly or expensive when compared to Blue Prism because UiPath charges for each and every product.

I would rate Blue Prism an eight out of ten. It is a good tool. 

We were trying to integrate Blue Prism for an insurance solutions company. Without manual intervention, they wanted some bots to qualify and make some selection procedures easier for certain customers and integrate them with the CTI, which is a computer technology exchange. This means that when somebody calls up, they will go to a bot and CTI. They run a bot, and the bot will guide them about how they can answer some queries for the insurance customer.

It has a centrally managed infrastructure, and it is secure. Our client was using it because of its ease of use. They had already identified some workflows that were trained on Blue Prism RPAs. It was much more convenient for them to preselect Blue Prism as compared to other vendors.

Its pricing is sometimes higher. Its price can be better.

Its presale support should be increased. Currently, its presale support is very less. System integrators generally position Blue Prism in front of customers. Though they have an ecosystem, they don't have people who can train for the partner ecosystem. They have to increase the presales consultants for partners. In addition, their L1 and L2 support can also be improved. 

Its stability is pretty good. That's the reason why they have 98% of renewals.

It depends on how you code this.

People find it difficult to get L1 and L2 support. They're pretty weak at L1 and L2 support, so you have to have your own people for that. They don't have people to answer the queries. They want system integrators to do that for them.

It depends on the use case. Some use cases are pretty simple, and some use cases are pretty complex. It also depends on how the consultant would choose to configure it, but generally, it is pretty okay in terms of configuration. 

Its price is sometimes higher.

I would rate Blue Prism an eight out of ten.

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 are using this solution for invoicing and some other allocations in our organization.

The flexibility is not that great, but it's a stable product.

The integration has improved a lot in terms of SAP, and other screens.

The recording of the transaction is missing in this solution.

The pricing could always be better.

We cannot record inactivity, we need an actual program or we need to design it. 

In the next release, I would like it to be able to record the transaction instead of designing it. It would be very helpful and easier to roll-out the product.

The interface is okay as long as we can design it. The studio is fine.

I have been using Blue Prism for two years.

We have the license for the latest version.

It's a stable product. We have a very small team of three users who are support administrators.

We have three users in our organization who are using this solution.

We have a team of three people.

We have not contacted technical support. We haven't had the need to.

Previously, we did not use another solution.

The initial setup was straightforward. We didn't have any issues.

We were able to complete the deployment in one day.

The implementation was done through consultants.

The price is on par with other products in the market.

Pricing could be better but everyone is charging based on the number of users.

I would recommend this solution to others who are interested in using it.

I would rate this solution a seven out of ten.

The only feature that stands out in Blue Prism, as compared to other tools, is security. This is the only reason for still having Blue Prism in our bucket. It is very secure and reliable, and it has also been in the market for a very long time. We automated a lot of federal and government automation processes very recently with this solution.

There are many reasons why many companies don't go for Blue Prism. It is not open, and the community addition is not available. Blue Prism provides support through partnership. You need to do a partnership with them, which is a major disadvantage. You contact a Blue Prism team, and they will schedule a meeting with you. They will give you a demo and help you set up everything, whereas with UiPath and Automation Anywhere, you can try the community edition, and if it fits your needs, you simply buy a license for that.

The initial setup of Blue Prism is complex. They simply provide a PDF or documentation for you to go through it, whereas, if you go with UiPath or Automation Anywhere, they have several videos and community support to guide you.

The documentation of Blue Prism is static. They don't have any sort of videos or open forums. Other tools have got a lot of community support, but Blue Prism doesn't have that. Its training is also hard to attain, and they also don't provide any certification.

Stability-wise, it is a good solution.

It has good scalability.

I never got a chance to contact their technical support.

Its initial setup is complex. It is not easy. 

They work on a big partnership kind of program with our organization, and they also give us a lot of discounts. Its price is pretty much comparable to the other solutions like UiPath and Automation Anywhere.

We primarily use UiPath, and we also use Blue Prism and Automation Anywhere. UiPath, Blue Prism, and Automation Anywhere are the three leaders in RPA. We kind of make sure that we include all the pros and cons. Blue Prism provides a lot more reliability and security as compared to others. That's the reason it is still in the game.

I would rate Blue Prism a seven out of ten.

We are using Blue Prism to automate any of your manual tasks, that are related to desktop, or web-based, email, and Excel. Any kind of automation for that matter.

Also, for any two handled records that have been created with many items and have been automated, we would use Blue Prism to manage them.

The initial setup and deployment could be simplified.

The stability could be improved.

They could add more AI-related technology. 

With their free version, they should provide some sort of community link where you can learn for free. It would be better. 

I have been using Blue Prism for approximately one year.

We are not using the latest version, when we used it last, it was version 5.

It is stable, but we faced some issues while we were automating web applications.

This is a scalable product. We were a team of 10 or 11 who were using this solution.

We did require support, but we got it from the website.

If you compare it with UiPath and you require support, there is a lot of help available from the forum, but while I was using it, Blue Prism didn't have an updated forum.

I did receive a few answers but the forum needs to be updated.

I was not a part of the initial setup up, but I believe that the initial setup may be moderate, it's not that easy. It requires some SQL connection.

It only requires one team member to maintain this solution.

Blue Prism is quite costly.

The free version provides you with a free forum for a month, where UiPath provides you with a community edition with their free version.

I would recommend this solution to others.

I would rate this solution a seven out of ten.

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.

Normally, we work with the insurance and financial sectors. We create automations for reconciliation, account opening, account closing, and similar processes. Mostly, we work with Windows and mainframe applications.

The most valuable features are the exception handling and embedded control room.

This is an all-in-one product, so you don't need to have another application.

The debugging in Blue Prism is very nice.

They introduced AI and machine learning capabilities in-house, rather than third-party.

The intelligent automation, like document processing, is lacking and should be improved. I would like to see PDF processing capabilities, and invoice automation templates.

Technical support is in need of improvement.

We have been using Blue Prism for the past four and a half years.

The stability is fantastic and is one of the great points of this solution.

This product is easy to scale.

We have seven or eight people in the company who use Blue Prism on a daily basis.

I would rate the technical support a five out of ten. Sometimes we have problems because we understand the technical aspects, and they will give us a workaround instead of explaining that something does not work.

Technical support is an area that needs to improve.

In addition to Blue Prism, we use UiPath and Power Automate as well.

UiPath is more advanced, technology-wise, than Blue Prism, and they have more functionality. That said, Blue Prism has a beauty of its own.

Blue Prism is cheaper than UiPath.

The initial setup is really simple. Most of our clients already have their VMs up and running, so it normally takes a day to deploy, or a day and a half at the maximum.

We do the implementation in-house.

The DBA can perform the maintenance because we have a script running, and it's really easy maintenance.

Blue Prism has a really simple licensing model, where the licenses are not confusing and there are no hidden costs the way there are in UiPath. 

My advice for anybody who is implementing Blue Prism to first think about what their reason is. Based on that, see how they want to bring the product into the sphere. They have to think about infrastructure and then what kinds of applications they want to automate. This will dictate how they need to configure their hardware and environment.

I would rate this solution a ten out of ten.

We use it to automate various backend processes in our company, such as PO processes and finance processes. We are using the latest version. It is deployed on the cloud as well as on-premises.

It is good for transactions that are very straightforward. It works very nicely with the structured data. 

It is user-friendly. It is easy to implement and easy to understand.

We didn't find it much useful for unstructured data. It is not easy to do the automation with Blue Prism if you have unstructured data. It should have better automation processes or connectors for unstructured data such as PDFs or pictures.

It has a connector for different applications, such as SAP, but we use a few other applications for which it doesn't have a connector.

It should have a more comprehensive dashboard that we can use to see the processes that are running and control the parameters.

I have been using Blue Prism for almost two years.

There are some issues with its stability. On a scale of five, I would give it a four.

There is a partner who is doing the automation for us, and they contact the technical support. We don't have any visibility on that.

I wasn't there when we did the initial setup at the company, but from what I know, it was not that painful. We were able to set it up quickly.

I would recommend this solution to others. I would rate Blue Prism an eight out of ten. 

Our primary uses for Blue Prism are Solution Design, SDD, PDD, and Coding.

It has improved our organization in that we have been able to reduce manpower a lot, as lots of manual tasks have now been automated. It has really been helpful in the field of insurance.

Blue Prism MAPIEx and the Java Bridge are really great features provided for automating Java-based applications and for allowing mail to send and receive smoothly.

It can be improved more in the field of Medicine.

Lotus Notes automation should be easier to understand.

Improvement is required with the DLLs for MAPIEx.

We have been using Blue Prism for five years.

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 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.

Our primary use case is automating data entry-intensive tasks interacting with in-house applications.

This solution has allowed us to free up time for more "value add" tasks, increased quality through a reduction in data entry errors, and has benefitted us with shorter turnaround times for some processes.

The most valuable feature is the ability to do surface automation, allowing interaction with legacy systems where terminal emulation is still in use.

I would like to see the vendor improve the efficiency of Blue Prism interaction with applications. There are instances where the human user can complete the process faster than the "bot". It does not support (at least not well) scenarios where attended automation (back and forth hand-off between human and bot) is required.  

This solution has increased the speed, accuracy, and happiness of staff involved in the activities for which RPA has been deployed. 

The most valuable features are the exception handling and versatility with interfacing to existing systems.

We would like to see intelligent process automation that integrates RPA and machine learning. 

We use this solution in all area of our business. The most common use case is related to our financial sector and loan applications.

The most valuable improvement in utilizing process automation is the cost savings, but we have also had cases where the customer experience is enhanced.

The most valuable feature for us is that our developers find it quite simple to develop processes, and they like to use this solution.

The licensing models for this product need improvement. Compared to other tools on the market, it is one of the most expensive.

We understand that they will be launching an OCR tool, and we are looking forward to this.

We would like to see some desktop automation, although we have been told that the product is not going to be taken in that direction. Rather, they will continue to focus on product automation and we will have to incorporate other solutions.

We have had some problems in the Blue Prism environment. For the tasks our robots are doing, our success rate is between ninety-two and ninety-eight percent. So, there are some things that are not being successfully created.

We have managed to scale it up quite well, so scalability is ok.

There are approximately twelve thousand people who benefit from this solution. We have around twenty developers, and there are between one and two hundred people who have a direct connection to the RPA deployments.

We have had problems with the solution, but between our vendor and the Blue Prism technical support, we have managed to solve them.

This was the first tool that we started to utilize when it comes to RPA deployments.

I found this initial setup to be complex.

Our implementation was done using both our in-house experts and some external manpower.

My advice for anybody who is implementing this solution is to have some expertise in-house, and not rely solely on the vendor. Similarly, I don't think that it is a good idea to develop and manage your infrastructure based entirely on advice or direction from the vendor.

This is the first RPA tool that we have implemented, and we do not have a lot of experience with other tools. We are satisfied, but there is room for improvement. 

I would rate this solution an eight out of ten.

Our primary use for this solution is to automate and run our mundane operational processes.

This solution has helped us become more efficient, as we have been able to automate certain processes, up to 85% of the work in some claims processing areas. We've been able to use it to very successfully transform data from one system to another. We have also used it for underwriting new client take-ons.

The most valuable feature is the design studio and its ease of use. The security and control room features are also very good.

I would like to see it better integrated with, or layered over, Java-based systems.

A feature that I would like to see in the next release is the ability to easily call on the robots to fulfill part of the process, and be run by the users in the business, where the robot can simply be activated rather than running mass processes from a control room. Essentially, I think that keeping the human in the loop is important. Blue Prism does have some vendors that partner to accomplish this, but it would be nice to have it built-in, rather than have a separate vendor with a separate license contract.

We don't have problems with stability. It is one's own IT infrastructure that lets you down, whether it is networking or otherwise. The system itself hasn't been a problem.

We're only in the process of scaling so it is difficult to say. One of the things that the developers have said is that it's quite slow, and quite cumbersome when layered over Java-based solutions. Whether it is scalable in that space, or not, is to be determined.

We have fifteen robots running.

We have had to contact technical support from time to time, and they are responsive. We've always received feedback from them. Typically, the only time that we've needed them is when our own IT support has had problems in the Blue Prism space. Sometimes, after we've contacted them, they pointed us in the right direction and actually found that the problem was on our end. These are some of the types of problems that they have helped us to solve.

We did not use another solution prior to this one.

The initial setup was relatively straightforward. The system itself is not overly complex. Rather, it's more of how you get your own internal IT infrastructure geared to be able to handle the new technology.

Deployment can take between four and six weeks per process.

Our implementation strategy has been to first focus on those processes that are going to deliver the greatest return on investment to ourselves and our clients. Typically, it's a small team that is supported by a vendor. Over time, they take over the development of the robots and they manage the control room.

The number of staff required for deployment and maintenance depends on the number of robots that you have running. Our entire team is six people, including business analysts, an engineer, a control room operator, and two developers. One of the developers is a senior developer who is able to validate and sign off on what is developed.

We used a consultant for the deployment.

We did not evaluate other solutions. We chose this one based on recommendations from the consultants that we had.

For anybody who is implementing this solution, it is important that you do not implement a process that is inherently flawed. Especially for more complex processes, you have to figure out how to solve those and re-engineer them. You want to enhance the processes.

Secondly, ensure that your design team is allowed to complete the design and move onto the next process. You do not want to have them repeatedly called back to enhance the process, because that slows down your rollout strategy.

You need to get buy-in from the business around what you're going to automate, and how you're going to do it. That is how you're going to leverage it going forward. If you don't have that then you can automate and put bots out there, but if the business doesn't support them or doesn't adopt them as co-workers then you're going to be battling against scaling. Anybody who sets out on this journey should be looking to use them on a large scale, and not just as a point solution.

I have not used other solutions so it is difficult to compare. However, in terms of support and the ability for us to start using the solution, it was quite easy. 

I would rate this solution an eight out of ten.

Our primary use for this solution is in the financial department.

It offers assessments by way of a robotics or automation readiness assessment tool, which was quite helpful. Otherwise, it is much like other automation tools.  

This solution is lacking attended automation, which is the worst thing about this solution.

We did not push the boundaries of our implementation beyond what you would normally expect for this type of solution.

We have not dealt with technical support for this solution.

Specifically for Robotic Process Automation, we did not use a solution prior to this one. We have used Test Automation tools from Mercury Interactive, which seems to be where RPA started.

The initial setup for this solution was complex because our client did not refine the processes. There was no time taken to make simple, reliable, and high-volume processes.

My advice for anybody implementing this solution, or any other RPA project, is to start with the right processes. They should be simple, and suitable for high volume or repetition. Do not make the processes too complex.

I would rate this solution a seven out of ten.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

We did not perform extensive load testing efforts.

An RPA scales as you add bots to your ecosystem.

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

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

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

We did not use another RPA prior to this one. 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

I would rate this solution an eight out of ten.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The stability of this solution is very good.

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

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

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

We did not use a solution prior to this one.

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

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

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

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

We perform the implementation for our clients.

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

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

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

I would rate this solution an eight out of ten.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Blue Prism scalability is good. 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

No, I have not used a different solution.

No.

No.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

ROI and efficiency savings. 

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

Access to the SQL database allows for extra capabilities.

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