Blue Prism Reviews

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.

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 use cases are account receivables and account payable. In insurance, our use cases are for vetting beneficiaries, upgrading client portfolios, and updating customer's policies.

The entire tool is valuable because it is an enterprise tool. It is on par with other tools like Automation Anywhere or UiPath with the OCR/ICR facilities, analytics, and the entire package for enterprise-level security. It has the highest level of security as compared to any other tool. 

There are a lot of things coming up, such as Discovery Bot and Process Discovery. A lot of other aspects are also maturing. We have definitely started using it for our clients, and it is maturing as a solution, but it is all about how you integrate the enterprise with all the automation projects, such as your chatbot, Conversational AI, and robotics. How they are integrated and talk to each other creates a very good business case with all three aspects. The next level should be about integrating it with other automation tools as well. It can have integration with other tools or automation projects, such as your chatbot, Conversational AI, and robotics.

I am in robotics for the last seven to eight years, and I have been using Blue Prism for about three to four years.

Stability-wise, it is a good tool. 

It is definitely scalable. The whole market of RPA is definitely scalable, but it again depends on your feasibility and complexity when you study a particular environment and process. It also depends on whether you want to scale in the whole organization or different departments or you want to scale up into different areas. All RPA solutions are on par in terms of scalability. There is no difference between them.

I don't have any direct experience with them. My solution architect used to handle that. I haven't seen many technical issues because if you are going to deploy the solution and if you've studied enough about the organization and the architecture, then something major is not going to come up. Anything minor, such as securities, passwords, or anything else, can be easily managed.

It is completely run by the solution architects, which is the support team from the RPA side. All technical issues definitely involve the IT team, which is your internal architecture support team and the application support team. You need the support team from the architecture and the IT perspective to manage the technical follow-ups.

I have also used UiPath and Automation Anywhere. All these three solutions stand out because they are at the enterprise level. As compared to UiPath and Automation Anywhere, to use Blue Prism, you need developers who have hardcore development experience. It requires quite a bit on the development side. In Blue Prism, you can also code separately and write a script, which adds more value to it.

Blue Prism came too late into the market with its analytics and process discovery features, whereas Automation Anywhere and UiPath were the first ones in the market. Blue Prism is catching up, and it is in the Gartner quadrant, Forrester, etc. It is not lagging far behind.

In Europe, Blue Prism has captured a lot of markets. In the US and Asia, you will see Automation Anywhere and UiPath in the front race. Microsoft, WorkFusion, and Pega are also catching up now.

It is not that complex. It is about how you study an organization and how an organization's architecture runs through. If it is a big organization or an enterprise, then you have to have solution architects from the customer side and also from our side. Solution architects will go and study the customer's architecture. Based on that, we can select which tools are going to be used and how complex it is going to be. It is very much dependent on how the architecture of an organization is because you are going to place the automation tool into that particular organization. Therefore, the initial feasibility and study play a major role in defining the complexity of your design and the entire format or automation.

Initially, the deployment used to take quite long. Now, it is not client-based; it is web-based, and the installation process has been reduced. You just download, and there is no starting a client and all that kind of stuff. It is much easier now than it was before.

In terms of the staff required for the deployment and maintenance of Blue Prism, it depends on what kind of process you're managing. It is not about the tools; it is about the processes. You need to know:

• How complex they are?
• What is the risk factor for these processes?
• How do they impact the entire automation in terms of cost? That is a very important aspect of support because it is in production, and it is going to have a straight impact on the client's revenue.
  

Generally, one person can easily support around five processes if they fall into the simple category. If the processes fall into the complex category, then you need at least two people managing five processes. By complex, I mean when you have applications that are lengthy and the number of steps of the process are more than 500 or so, and you have to monitor the bots very closely. When the bot or the process breaks, the support team needs to take over and act accordingly. 

The roles and responsibilities and the kind of people needed for maintaining the solution vary based on whether you have agile project management or a lot of projects going on. Typically, you will need a solution architect. You would require an analyst only in the first two or three months or whatever is the period for taking care of the process you want to deploy. After that, you don't require the analysts because it only needs to be overseen from the business side, which will begin with SMEs and the production support team.

Any changes or optimization after 90 days, six months, or a year, due to multiple factors such as legislation changes or anything else, have to be done in the process that is robotized. At this stage, the SMEs and the support team play a very vital role. There should definitely be a very good support function because a lot of follow-ups happen in the process and the production in robotics. To manage them, there should be a very good ticketing system in place. The Agile methodology works perfectly fine, and it adds great value to run your process effectively and having an efficient process, but you definitely need the solution architect, application owner, project management team, and the COE team to manage the entire workflow, work items, or backlog items coming into the support function.

It is a bit higher in cost as compared to Automation Anywhere and UiPath. The rate also differs from client to client. Margins are also important when it comes to costing and licensing. There are some additional costs involved besides the standard licensing costs. You have the development team cost, which includes the project manager, development team, analyst, and testers. You also need a team manager. You also have the tools cost, architecture cost, platform cost, and the licensing cost of each bot.

You should suggest a tool only after you study the architecture of an enterprise. Every tool has its own features, upside, and downside. It is not about necessarily going for Blue Prism, Automation Anywhere, or UiPath. For implementing a solution, you definitely need to look in the market to find out what suits you. You can then go for it.  

Blue Prism, Automation Anywhere, or UiPath are on par. There is not much difference in those tools at an enterprise level. The early development cost and the cost of the platform differ in these three tools. There are some clients who say that "We want only Blue Prism. We don't want to look at anything else." In such a scenario, you can definitely go for Blue Prism because it is on par with other competitors. 

The biggest lesson that we have learned from using Blue Prism is that it is important to choose the right processes and the right complexity of the processes. You can't choose highly complex processes where you have around 800,000 steps or very volatile processes where the team is involved in the application layer or at the process level very frequently. These kinds of things could be avoided.

I would rate Blue Prism an eight out of ten because it is a very old tool. It has been around in the market for quite a while, and they have their own learnings. It is a complete package at an enterprise level, where you can have analytics and attended and unattended automation. You can run your scripts, and at an enterprise level, even security aspects are very strong as compared to what is generally required by a client. There is room for improvement. All the new features that are coming up are not being used by many clients, and a lot of learning has to happen.

We are using Blue Prism mainly for the finance and IT automation processes.

The most valuable feature of Blue Prism is the control and development of the processes from one location.

The solution can improve by having a free license for evaluation purposes.

I have been using Blue Prism for approximately one year.

Blue Prism is a stable solution.

The scalability of the solution is good.

The solution can be suitable for all sized businesses, but it depends on the use case.

The support from Blue Prism is very good.

I have used UiPath and Robocorp. Blue Prism is more stable and provides good support, and a monitoring and development perspective.

Robocorp provides Python as a programming license and the cost is very low. All the features are available, but coding knowledge is required.

The initial setup of Blue Prism is of a moderate difficulty level.

I do the implementation of the solution with my clients.

The price of Blue Prism is high compared to others solutions. It would be helpful if they could provide a trial version for new users to try. Other vendors provide a community or trial version. There are not any hidden costs.

There are three different packages Blue Prism provides.

We are completely satisfied with the solution.

From a monitoring perspective, we have various stages and phases in RPA that enable us to perform monitoring, scheduling, and management simultaneously, which is a significant advantage. As a result, I can recommend to my colleagues that they utilize this capability and obtain certification.

I rate Blue Prism an eight out of ten.

As for primary use cases, we have done purchase order processing for close to five countries, and we also do non-compliance in terms of the field assets deployed by a company to hospitals. That is, we use it as an asset tracking solution.

From technical perspective, Blue Prism is pretty good.

Overall, it's a stable and scalable solution. Installation is straightforward as well. 

Blue Prism could be compatible with Oracle's suite of ERPs. We have seen some issues related to this.

They could do much better with their intelligent document processing solution. They're pretty behind and don't have attended bots.

I would also prefer a better UI in the administration screens The user interface is pretty bad from an administration perspective.

I would like to see a lot of features like process mining.

I would also like to see a lot of different innovative solutions like human-bot interaction, handover managerial systems, and collaboration systems for process capturing, storing, and evaluating and getting discussions done within businesses.

We have been providing Blue Prism to customers for more than three years now.

From a platform perspective, we see compatibility issues with Oracle's JD Edwards software sometimes, but overall, to my knowledge, the solution is stable.

It's a scalable solution, and scalability is not a problem.

With regard to the initial setup, it's a pretty straightforward from Blue Prism's perspective. It's not as complicated as the installation of a WorkFusion solution, for example.

The actual installation, that is, setting up of the environment, can be done in less than a week from scratch.

We have four or five customers using this solution, and I have close to 50 or so people working across these customers. We have a combination of staff, such as architects, developers, managers, infrastructure engineers, etc.

Our customers pay for an annual license.

The product is good even though there are a lot of shortcomings. Also, the access to the company itself is very difficult. Obtaining a partnership is difficult, and getting support is difficult as well. So, I'd rate them at seven on a scale from one to ten.

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

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

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

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

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

It depends on how you code this.

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

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

Its price is sometimes higher.

I would rate Blue Prism an eight out of ten.