Blue Prism Reviews

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 like the reliability and robustness of Blue Prism. The object design way of implementing things actually brings a lot of reusability for us because you can design your objects once and leverage them in multiple automations. So, we use this extensively.

There are a lot of things that could be improved. The very first thing is their control room, and they are still sticking to the desktop version, which restricts access. You can't really access it from anywhere. The entire industry is moving towards cloud-based solutions. Blue Prism should make it RPA-as-a-Service cloud version. I would definitely like to see how they could really make it more accessible, going beyond desktop applications.

They have recently launched their web version, but that is still a read-only version of the control room. The web version of their control room could be accessible from anywhere so that I don't have to go and log into a specific machine.

Additionally, we tried integrating some of the applications to Blue Prism, and there was no REST API. It is still following the older mechanism using SOAP API, which again restricted quite a number of the integrations that we wanted to do. Exposing their artifacts through web APIs, REST APIs, would be good, which is normal nowadays.

It would be good to build more objects; they have very limited objects available, that is, implicit objects. If I need to connect to ServiceNow, I would need to build all those things. So they could really step up and create customized objects as an implicit feature that they could include.

I've been working with it for two years. We've been using versions 6.4, 6.9, and 6.10 and are currently evaluating 7 as well.

I think Blue Prism has the capability to scale its automations. In terms of handling a load, as well as extending the digital workforce for a single process, it supports multi-bot architecture.

However, as far as robustness in terms of when we scale robots, that is, when we want to extend the robots for a process where multiple bots are working, I think Blue Prism has a certain edge because of the maturity this tool has gained over the years.

I work very closely with the support team and their professional services teams, and I think that Blue Prism provides very good support.

I worked with Automation Anywhere before Blue Prism.

The initial setup is fairly okay in comparison. With Blue Prism, I could configure all of the types of configuration that Blue Prism supports. Whether it is single sign-on, app server-based, database, or single login, it was all quite simple.

Blue Prism has a higher cost with respect to RPA enablement, particularly if you are trying to start with RPA. If you are a middle-scale company, then the cost of robots and their overall infrastructure can become really huge. You would feel like this is really a costly affair to start with RPA.

So, Blue Prism has a higher cost if you are talking about middle-scale companies. However, if you're thinking of having more than 50 bots or 100 bots, perhaps this will have a lower impact on your cost. In general, Blue Prism is costly.

If an organization is more focused on internal automations which belong to their own infrastructure and they want to comply with their security requirements, then I would recommend Blue Prism.

If, however, an organization wants to really move forward towards the cloud and towards intelligent automation and integrations, then I would definitely recommend UiPath.

If you want to build your team, look for a person who has development background because of Blue Prism's implementation. It follows object-oriented concepts, where you create your object, which is like a reusable class or reusable artifact.

Even with regard to processes, you have to really think of developing them or writing your automation in such a way that it complies with what has been designed in the objects. I think a developer mindset is very much required for developing automation through Blue Prism.

Overall, I would rate Blue Prism at six on a scale from one to ten.

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

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

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

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

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

There are multiple advantages. 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

We did not have a previous solution.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

We are a company that automates console services. We work with console tax, revenue, and benefits.

We manage approximately twenty consoles in the UK, and we have achieved considerable savings with Blue Prism. We were able to automate a large task using Blue Prism to verify extensions and console tax, and we have seen great benefits from using Blue Prism for these tasks.

Although the solution may look complicated it actually has a lot of features and user space to work out of.

Optical character recognition has room for improvement.

I would like to have more options to automate from mobile devices without having to pay for additional licenses.

I have been using the solution for five years.

I give the stability a nine out of ten.

I give the scalability an eight out of ten.

We have around 18 people using the solution in our organizations. We have around 30 licenses to easily scale if needed.

The initial setup is not straightforward but also not complex. We had to set up the database. We required two IT people for deployment. 

The implementation was completed in-house.

We have seen a return on investment with Blue Prism.

I give the price of the solution a seven out of ten.

I give the solution an eight out of ten.

The more time spent using the solution the more proficient we become.

We have various use cases for the solution and deploy it on AWS Cloud.

When we need specific reports, the default reports posted in the interactive clients are not helpful but can be useful. However, this means we can utilize only the minimum level, but we want to use more input data from the Blue Prism tool, which means we need to fetch more of the data from the table side, and for this, we need to integrate many tables for this integrating of data. So it becomes difficult to get a BP database onwards.

We are additionally migrating the Blue Prism database to different clouds. Blue Prism currently supports SQL Servers, and structured data, it is stored as an income performer. When we migrate to a process from a different environment, we either need to go with the complete restoration of the GP or we need to lose the data. This is because if you have ten processes, five processes may complete the testing. Other processes may still depend on the current environment when we move to live production. So since it can take weeks or months, we may lose the data while waiting, and we cannot integrate both from different clouds. 

Hence, the solution can be improved by enhancing the process's data storage and by including a common check. Sometimes, if the developer fails to identify a timetable directly, it will impact other processes. Currently, all processes are stored on the various tables in the Blue Prism, and the pre-check can ensure the developer is notified.

The solution can be improved by switching off data DB and including a report section with a morphing feature, like more reporting waste.

We have been using the solution for a year and a half, and we are recently migrated to version 6.10.2.

The solution is stable. I rate the stability a nine out of ten. 

I rate scalability an eight out of ten, but when we interact with different environments, it is difficult to communicate, and DB synchronization is problematic. We currently have approximately 50 people utilizing the solution in our organization.

Technical support is often delayed as it takes four to five days to resolve issues since some people work across different time zones under constraints. Additionally, they are not traceable when we need to forward the case to a high level, and it takes another week to escalate to a higher level, which is unacceptable.

Deployment depends on the process' complexity level. It depends on if you want a straightforward process or gradual deployment over two weeks. For example, one week for the UIT testing and another week for SIT testing, four days for UIT testing and working at the QI level, and the following week for production, and in one month, we can take up hyper care. This is the best practice.

We did light scale mode for the deployment process, so when one process came into the picture, we ensured that the production environment would be ready for that process. So far from size, without any delays in the project deadlines and once the process is developed and code reviews are completed, we take internal approval to move the code to the following environments. So we can use duplicate and use different tools for pushing this code in the CIPD environment level or move this cycle management, like import and export processes.

We implemented it in-house.

The license is expensive, however, I cannot share the exact cost.

I rate the solution a seven out of ten.

Our primary use cases are mostly for device processing, such as extracting data from PDFs and reporting it into ERP applications.

We have a customer who used to perform certain tasks manually. They no longer have to do that as the bot performs the tasks. They only need to review whether the bot is working as expected or not. It has significantly improved their process time, and Blue Prism has proven to be time-saving and resource-saving.

The most valuable feature is that it is more secure and reliable. It is also why big companies such as banks mainly use Blue Prism.

Blue Prism doesn't have a web orchestration or control room where businesses can directly check the trends or carry out the process directly from the URL without downloading additional software like Nextiva on their machine.

Some other features are also missing in Blue Prism. For example, the record and play feature makes development faster, but it is not there in Blue Prism. When you start the recording and do the activity, it automatically generates the steps. So that feature needs to be included.

I have about four years of experience with Blue Prism. We're working with the previous update.

Blue Prism is a stable product. But it's not very flexible when it comes to integrations. Blue Prism's forum is smaller, unlike some other RPA tools, where there is a large forum with a wide range of integrations readily available in the marketplace. If you want to integrate any solution from the Digital Exchange, you may not find as many options as compared to other tools. So, while Blue Prism is stable and secure, it may not be as flexible as other RPA tools.

When compared to other RPA tools, Blue Prism is highly scalable and reliable. I have deployed Blue Prism processes that required deployment for up to fifteen users per process. Due to other factors, deployment permission is needed if the workload exceeds the system's capacity. Typically, it runs smoothly without issues, but in cases where the workload surpasses our support team's capabilities, we can deploy up to fifteen percent of the portal's resources, and the system continues to function effectively even at that scale.

In the beginning, when we were working with Blue Prism version 5, there were some issues after installing the latest update. So we decided not to install the latest version and only update after some time. Eventually, it became stable without any issues. When we needed to contact support for updates, we had to reach out to group parameters.

Most of the time, they say it is a known issue and will fix it with the next update. When we faced challenges, like setting up a load-balancing server, the support was good, and we could set it up without any issues. They provide good support for known issues but may not be able to fix some problems.

The initial setup process is easy compared to other applications. Our customers use the on-prem version because they are old customers; at that time, the cloud version was unavailable.

To deploy the solution, it is advisable to deploy it in an environment that closely resembles the development environment. It includes having similar desktop resolution, applications, and access. In case of any changes in common objects, thorough end-to-end testing of use cases is necessary to ensure that the existing solutions are not affected. It can be a time-consuming process due to the increased amount of testing required.

For the deployment team, it would be best if we have a separate chain management process to ensure security and prevent developers from accessing the production environment. Having dedicated resources for chain management would be beneficial not only for Blue Prism but also for other sectors. We can recommend tools to ensure coding standards are being maintained and submit them to the chain management team.

For maintenance, we should have a separate support model in place. Like in any other support model, it would include a support team with levels 0, 1, 2, and 3. The support team would be responsible for automated processes that provide information on the version, system improvements, and high memory usage alerts. This way, the support team can act accordingly and increase the model size if needed.

Having these measures in place would make maintenance easier. Otherwise, if the process runs at its peak level, it may not run as smoothly as needed. Without automated alerts, maintenance becomes more difficult, and the process may not function properly. Implementing these setups could be useful and can be delivered through email.

The pricing or licensing costs of Blue Prism are around $15,000 per year, primarily based on the number of processors run in parallel.

My advice would be first to assess your requirements. If you prioritize reliable security, Blue Prism could be a good choice for you, but it may come with a higher development cost than other vendors. Additionally, if you choose Blue Prism, you should ensure that integration is streamlined by developing your own code.

When it comes to business, the process assessment should be critical in finding the right solution. Not all processes are suitable for automation, and there is a risk that ROI may not meet expectations if the process is not suitable. It's important to consider the required equipment and ensure the solution is designed to handle potential issues, such as offline support. The solution should also be designed with the expectation of needing support once deployed. During development, it's important to follow best practices to ensure the solution is efficient and has a high ROI. It's also important to ensure that the solution is reliable and does not break. Manual intervention may be necessary if there are any issues, so it's important to have a plan in place for business continuity.

Overall, I would rate Blue Prism a seven out of ten because it has stability issues.

We have a partnership with Blue Prism and I'm a software engineer. 

This is a good solution. I like working with multi-bot architecture, it's very flexible. 

In the object section, there are certain things such as the navigation in the UI that could be improved. It would be helpful for developers. I'd like to see more technical support for the team and the provision of some community versions for people to learn the product. I believe it would also benefit Blue Prism to better understand the requirements of those using the product.

I've been using this solution for almost four years. 

The solution is generally stable although we have had some inconsistencies. 

The solution is definitely scalable. 

The value of this product could be greatly improved if we could get satisfactory answers from the technical support. The last time I opted for a learning license from one of my colleagues, I never received a response from the company.

The initial setup wasn't too complex and didn't take a long time. 

Our primary use case for the solution varied, and some of the use cases were in financial and billing, while others were in managed services and automating infrastructure. It is deployed on-premises.

The biggest benefit the solution provided was in the financial sector. Specifically, in billing and processing orders for customers. So it focused on processing manual data that was coming from various systems or interfaces and putting it into the billing platform.

We find the stability and the ease of reusing code design valuable.

We had a lot of challenges managing authentication and reusing or using external authentication providers. For example, in API interaction, we need to get tokens from a centralized authentication platform that was always running for us. The solution can include attended robots similar to UiPath in the next release.

We have been using the solution for approximately five years and are currently using version 8.6.

The stability is good, but it is not perfect. I rate it an eight out of ten.

I rate the scalability an eight out of ten and it could be improved.

We had a good experience with customer service and support. I rate them a nine out of ten.

Positive

I was not part of the initial setup.

We implemented the solution in-house, with an internal IT support operational team consisting of approximately ten people covering shifts so that they will be able to monitor and maintain the robots 24/7.

Based on the project, the solutions have a return on investment or breaking point at roughly 18 months. I rate the overall ROI a six out of ten. It is just a little bit above the breaking point but it is worth it. It does not have much benefit in the long term because our businesses are changing, and the time to use the robot was short.

The solution is costly. I rate the pricing a nine out of ten, with ten being the highest price. It was approximately 700 euros monthly. Additionally, there was 25% included on subscriptions for maintenance but the percentage varied from year to year.

I rate the solution a seven out of ten. The solution is good, but its authentication features can be improved, and the price can be more affordable. I advise new users to have a clear business value and a good process defined before implementing the solution.