Blue Prism Reviews

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.

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 are using Blue Prism primarily for reconciliation use cases. Any task related to reconciliation is suitable for Blue Prism.

In some cases, Blue Prism has helped save time, improving workflow efficiency.

The main automation feature of Blue Prism is the most valuable. However, I feel that Blue Prism does not effectively market their other products, which could enhance the use of the primary automation tool.

There is a need for a co-management product to manage multiple developers using Blue Prism. Features like version control and supporting multiple developers at the same time should be improved. 

Furthermore, Blue Prism should invest in marketing their other products. I also find it concerning that they require purchasing support calls.

I have been working with Blue Prism for about four years.

We haven't truly tested its scalability due to low transaction volume, so it remains unknown at this stage.

Blue Prism, as a company, provides excellent support. However, I dislike the necessity to purchase support calls separately.

Neutral

Prior to Blue Prism, we considered solutions like Automation Anywhere. It seems the market is moving beyond RPA, making it hard to justify further investment in RPA when newer tools offer more capabilities.

We haven't truly seen a return on investment since we lack sufficient transaction volume.

Blue Prism's pricing is on the higher side, especially since newer technologies have surfaced, yet their prices haven't decreased.

We evaluated other RPA tools like Automation Anywhere.

Blue Prism is versatile and best suited for specific use cases. If it fits the use case, I would recommend it. I rate Blue Prism a seven out of ten overall.

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 currently using the automation provided by Blue Prism RPA in the claims process.

For one, it's easy to set up, and once it gets running it can handle multiple processes in an efficient manner. It's a very robust system.

Another nice thing is that, due to Blue Prism being a market leader in its industry, we often get people who are already highly familiar with it compared to other products. This was one of the main reasons why we went for it in the first place. 

Our primary challenge at present is that we are finding it difficult to get additional business insights into existing processes so that we can identify where we need to improve. Beyond that, we would also like to have a continuous monitoring facility.

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

I would rate the stability a nine out of ten. We haven't had any major issues with the product.

The scalability is good and I haven't seen any limitations as yet. Right now there are about 20-30 people using it in my organization.

I would rate the scalability a nine out of ten.

Blue Prism's support is good at what they do, and they have lots of people available to help.

I would rate the technical support an eight out of ten.

There was certainly a learning curve during our initial experience of it, but it was fairly easy to set up.

I would rate the setup a six out of ten.

It's an expensive product. For what they are providing in terms of capabilities and features for the price, I would rate the pricing an eight out of ten.

I have also looked at Celonis and ABBYY Timeline, mainly to see if they offer the continuous monitoring feature that we are looking for.

Overall, I am satisfied with Blue Prism, knowing exactly what the product can and can't do. At this point, for us, it's just a matter of figuring out how we can implement it as a more complete, comprehensive solution in our business.

I would rate Blue Prism an eight out of ten.

I'm one of the senior consultants in the company I work for, we are a service provider and we provide IT services to our customers. One of these services we provide is automation, using tools, such as Blue Prism.

We are upgrading to version 7.01 of Blue Prism in a few months.

We are using Blue Prism recently for statistics processes, which is the automation of SAP transactions for our logistics departments. Additionally, it is being used for SAP transactions within our IT finance service department. We do many things with it, such as partial reset and ticket re-keying. We have incident tickets logs from the IT department, which can be from emails, and we do re-keying exercises.

Blue Prism can improve a lot. The interaction with Google Chrome can be massively improved. I know in the next version there are slight improvements. We don't know how much, but we are comparing them. At this moment, Google Chrome is a massive issue within the toolset, due to the way Google Chrome receives updates regularly but Blue Prism is unable to cope. The spy method of Google Chrome is not as user-friendly as Internet Explorer is. However, Internet Explorer is being discontinued from their support, therefore it's not the best browser to be using. This has caused us major issues in the last six months. 

Our customers go through platforms, such as CyberArk and Citrix. The way that Blue Prism interacts with these applications could improve. There are a few other issues, such as memory, but these are the key problems that have offered issues in the past six months or so.

I have used Blue Prism within the past 12 months.

We have had a mixed experience of the stability of the solution. The problem that we have faced might be our infrastructure. The application itself can't be completely blamed. I think some of the issues are down to our VM infrastructure, the application service that we use, and the host that the servers are hosted on. In terms of the application, we have not seen many issues.

The technical support is very good.

I have used UiPath previously.

You don't need to be a technical developer to develop in Blue Prism, you follow the natural way you have developed. Whilst with UiPath, you need some development background to be able to develop in it.

We have been using Blue Prism for approximately eight years and when we first set it up it was a bit complex, but we always had support from the license of Blue Prism and other providers that we have within our organization. The whole process was fairly easy because of the support we had.

My advice to others would be to make sure they fully understand the use cases. If they are implementing it for customers, you're going to come across connectivity issues and make sure that you fully understand that it's not going to work right away. You're going to have to have a few releases into production, be mindful of Google Chrome and the issues that you may come across.

I rate Blue Prism 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.

Blue Prism is a mature, stable product with lots of built-in features. 

Blue Prism develops its own tools and process automation, but the documentation is unclear and incomplete. 

I rate Blue Prism nine out of 10 for stability. 

I rate Blue Prism nine out of 10 for scalability. 

Blue Prism provides templates for most use cases, but we've had to contact their developers for a few OCR use cases. They helped clarify some confusion about the documentation.

The initial setup was straightforward like any other Windows application. You set up a basic SQL Server and install it. We installed it on our own on-prem server. 

I rate Blue Prism five out of 10 for affordability. Blue Prism costs much more than other RPA tools. It's expensive, and the maintenance costs are always high.

I rate Blue Prism eight out of 10. It's a good option if your automation team has that kind of budget. It is scalable and easy to implement. You can create lots of boards, but each will have separate licenses and require more resources or on-premise servers.