Blue Prism Reviews

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

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

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

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

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

There are multiple advantages. 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

We did not have a previous solution.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

We 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.

Predominantly, this platform is used for Robotic Process Automation. It's a low-code tool that doesn't require much technical knowledge and is easy to introduce to your business users in order to make them citizen developers. 

Most of the manual operations and administrative work are low-hanging candidates for automation using this tool. 

It can be used for your infrastructure or application monitoring use case.  

The tool has an extended feature of integration with different databases which can be further extended for analytics/visualization tools. These include Tableau, PowerBI, QlikView, and Splunk.  

The product has impressively increased the productivity and digital transformation effort within the company. The product's USP which makes it different from its competitor is the robust enterprise implementation and the maturity of this product. Its core design works towards building an Object Library. The product has enormous potential which customers can take advantage of thanks to the overall product maturity. The product is available in both the cloud and on-premise.

The core strength of the product is the database schema, reflected in its UI behavior and strength. 

From a leadership point of view, integrating the DB into any of your analytics/visualization tools can give you every insight into your program's health in terms of license utilization, ROI, support landscape, current scope, and future backlog capacity. 

We have integrated the product with our centralized infra-monitoring tool, which gives us real-time insights into BOT health and also the health of the underlying resources.

Emerging technologies adoption is a challenge for every organization, especially the products which address productivity/automation. 

The unstructured data, decision-making through machine learning, building data mining repos, and building smart contracts using blockchain will bed needed in the future. 

Any product that can make itself sustainable with its clients has to make sure they are making the right effort to integrate or upgrade its toolsets to cope with future needs.

I have been using this product for the last six years.

The product stability allows me to work on value-adding work rather than doing maintenance.

The product is fully scalable based on your capacity and automation needs.

We are at the top support tier and have had a good experience so far.

Positive

I have worked on most RPA tools. The company had already selected this product.

It is not complex to set up if your IT team has basic 3-tier application set up knowledge in the case of enterprise-level set-ups. Anyone can do single-machine set-ups by just following the instructions.

We handled the implementation in-house.

The ROI is a combination of soft and hard benefits. This is our 5th year using the product and we are easily getting close to 65% ROI.

I am aware of the pricing. When compared to most of its competition, it's almost near the same in terms of cost.

I have worked on most of the RPA tools. 

The rush to implement RPA is normalizing now. I hope that more companies will invest more time in process evaluation, design, and re-engineering, rather than starting to develop BOTs just to be in the rat race.

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

The solution has been quite stable so far.

The new features that have come out have been great.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

We only have about 50 users on the solution currently.

We do plan to continue usage.

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

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

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

The initial setup is pretty straightforward.

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

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

We're using the latest version of the solution.

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

I'd rate the solution eight out of ten.

We 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 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.

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.

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.