Blue Prism Reviews

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.

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 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.

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 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.

We have about 20 use cases in production. Probably half of them are related to finance, monthly closures in our company, invoices, and bank reconciliations. On the IT side, use cases are about audit requirements with user attestations, user reviews, and schedules.

We're currently using the on-premises version, but we're internally moving to Azure cloud rather than moving to Blue Prism cloud.

The ease of development is the most valuable. Standard VBOs are pretty useful there with Excel and different things. Our custom developments for SAP and things like that are pretty easy to set up and quick to get going.

The control room is its worst feature. It can be laggy, and it is not as user-friendly.

We're with staying Blue Prism, but we're moving it from on-premises to Microsoft cloud for cost savings. We looked into Blue Prism cloud. It has a lot of features, but it comes with a lot of costs. Right now, we have six spots, and we're only at 13% utilization. The cost didn't really weigh out for us for moving to Blue Prism cloud, but on-premises, it is working for what we need.

Once it is set up and gets the steamroll, it seems pretty good to stay. It is self-sufficient in many ways with the processes. Change control and password are a bit of a struggle sometimes, but that's general with automation and trying to be fast-moving. Overall, it is pretty stable and self-sustaining.

It is scalable. We are using some central objects.

We probably haven't gone through their standard support channels, but we reach out to our contact there when needed, and he gets us in touch with somebody right away. So, within a week, we're talking to an expert and getting some assistance.

We just started with Blue Prism. We didn't deploy anything else previously.

I'm more on the production side. I didn't really do any of the setup functions.

I don't recall what it was. Initially, we had our licensing through the consultant, and when we stopped using them, we renegotiated licensing. Blue Prism gave us temporary licenses during the negotiation. When all things were said and done, it came out to a decent price even without the vendor. So, our management has been happy with that.

Try to think of standard automation questions related to security, change control, and things like that before you get started because once you get developing, it is hard to go back and implement those things.

I would rate Blue Prism an eight out of ten.

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

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

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

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

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

I have used Blue Prism within the past 12 months.

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

The technical support is very good.

I have used UiPath previously.

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

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

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

I rate Blue Prism an eight out of ten.

The product is pretty good so far.

The initial setup is not complex.

It's not too difficult to configure everything.

It's fast to get up and running if you use a cloud deployment.

We haven't really used it extensively. I can say that even though it feels like a good product, there are some things that are completely missing the mark for me in Blue Prism.

The solution isn't complete. There are items that you have to pay extra for, such as the Interact. Those things should be part and parcel of the Blue Prism solution. I can't see it as a standalone separate service, therefore, why do I have to buy this separately? It should be part of the base offering.

From a monitoring perspective, the way the screens are set up, or the reporting within Blue Prism, is not really user-friendly. You need a technical person to basically put that up. It's not necessarily easily viewable.

As far as the assessment is concerned, the assessment tools need to be refined as it is really difficult for one to just use it out of the box. The cloud offering basically says that you can start right away, and you don't have to wait for all of these configurations and things. However, we have purchased the on-premise solution and not the cloud solution. For me, I just need a better experience on that deployment, even though it should have been the more mature solution.

From a Blue Prism perspective, user-friendliness is really an issue. The components that I now have to buy extra to do automation, things that, if I look at a tool like UiPath, that is already part of their toolset. You don't have to buy any user integration with other solutions. I can't understand why Blue Prism doesn't do the same.

They are not really very innovative. There's nothing that wows me if I would compare them to the newer tools that are coming out that's got the cognitive automation tools that are built into the product.

Within Blue Prism it's very difficult to manage a team of coders, for instance, or a team of developers developing on the same application. That is not in Blue Prism. You can't do that. It's one developer at a time working with one thing. The source code management within the toolset really needs to improve. They don't seem so managed and packaged well, and integration to maybe other repositories where one can store that information would be better. That is where it's lacking at the moment. The configuration, as I said, of the reporting, of the dashboard, out-of-the-box, should actually be easy to configure and not so challenging.

I've been using this solution for about six months.

I've worked with UiPath in the past.

The solution's initial setup has a sort of medium level of difficulty. I won't say it was complex per se. I would definitely not say it was complex to do it or to configure it. 

The price is low and it's reasonable, however, I expected more to be included in the product. Now, if I have to go and buy all these other extras, that price is going to go up. For instance, if I use OCR capability and I'm not using their product, the Decipher product, I have to go and buy an ABBYY license separately. That means I have to manage more licenses. It's not included in the package where I have a good OCR solution that works with it, I must now go and buy and manage separate licenses. It is just a nightmare.

If you look at the supply chain, you now need to get a separate license from another company if you want to buy licenses to OCR with Blue Prism. And that is where the cost increases and then the investment becomes a little bit more difficult to justify. 

I'm a customer and an end-user.

I'm in a position within our company where people are saying to me, "We've got Power Automate from Microsoft, why should I use Blue Prism?" And with the Microsoft suite, Power Automate, and all of the cognitive automation is already included as part of Azure. And here I sit with Blue Prism, and now I need new gateways to integrate with that. It's going to be a little bit more work to make it work with Microsoft Azure than the product that is already there in Microsoft Azure. I must now basically justify to the business why do I need Blue Prism.

It makes it very difficult in terms of their strategy if all the extra products that we want, we have to buy additionally. Whereas, if I compare it to the Microsoft Azure Suite of things, you get all of these features without having to buy them separately as you would need to with Blue Prism. It's a very difficult sell to the business.

I would advise others to go straight to the cloud and not mess around with the on-premise solution. The reason is the on-premise solution will take you six months before you can start to show anything. Going to the cloud is probably a better option to get the results out faster.

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