Blue Prism Reviews

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've primarily used the solution for financial purposes. We have payroll management and a lot of manual processes. With this, we can run automated reports. There are about 15 to 18 interfaces where we get the information. We can consolidate emails, PDFs, and Excel. There's automation to pick everything up and understand all the sources and different kinds of data. We can input raw data, consolidate it and then handle calculations. We can download data and save it in folders.

The solution offers very good accuracy.

The automation on offer is great.

Whenever we used to have issues, the developers used to follow up with the technical team. They're good.

The initial setup is simple and straightforward. 

The solution can scale.

We have found the product to be stable. 

Everything on offer is great. We could hardly find any procedural issues at all. All the processes are really quite good. 

They should come up with these open-ended certifications, like UiPath, where people can just go ahead and get the certification. That way, people can evaluate and pick up certifications easily to make it easy to learn.

Everyone uses Workday and Salesforce and all that stuff. If they had specific plugins to interact with these enterprise tools, that would be very helpful. 

We've used the solution over the last 12 months. 

The solution is stable and reliable. it's problem-free. there aren't bugs or glitches. It doesn't crash or freeze. 

It is scalable, it depends on the requirements. At this moment, it is scalable. In terms of enterprise scalability, I'm not sure. However, it does scale from one particular area to many areas, including accounting, treasury, payroll, et cetera.

Technical support is good. they are helpful and responsive.

From my understanding, the team never had issues in terms of reaching out to the Blue Prism support team and getting solutions. They were all fine.

The initial setup was not complex at all. It was very, very easy. Initially, there were very few hiccups. Once we got up and running, it's amazing, it's perfect. There's not a problem at all.

We have our own center of excellence. I hired employees and contractors to help as needed. We were the business architects and we got the requirements and came up with the process design.

We have definitely seen an ROI.

I'd rate the solution at 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 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.

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.

In our case, all use cases are relevant to the telecom industry. In the telecom industry, we are the service providers for various telecoms such as Vodafone, AT&T, et cetera. We are the service providers. We are doing some processes and we are doing support in the networks as well. In terms of the internet, when it comes to supporting the network, there are some processes that need to be completed manually. Therefore, we will take those processes from all the verticals. For example, we did this project for Telus, and we identified the processes to where we can implement automation. We sought out processes that were good areas for automation adoption.

We identify those areas for clients and map them out.

The solution's most valuable aspect is the fact that it is systematic. It's a very systematic tool. We can do all these things like array and cache. It's very useful.

We were able to create a few new processes which we automated. 

The mapping is very good. On mapping, we can order the tools required for automation.

The analysis itself is very good. We're able to say which areas can be improved and which are the easiest areas to automate. Typically, it's good at revealing which decision-making areas could be automated effectively.

The tool is very technically sound.

The product is very secure. 

The solution is not user-friendly. It has a very high learning curve. People should be able to learn it easily so that they will get interested in using it. 

While the solution is more secure, it's very hard to find people trained on that. I need different people, not only those who are trained on RPA tools. I cannot get people in Blue Prism. Without the resources, people just move to Automation Anywhere or UiPath which are more user-friendly. In comparison, UiPath is much easier to use and you can find people who are well-versed in it.

The product needs to put out more videos, similar to Automation Anywhere, which does that a lot. You can find a lot of videos online in relation to Automation Anywhere and UiPath, however, this is not the case with Blue Prism. There's just less information available. 

Blue Prism needs to provide better training. They need to start something similar to Automation Anywhere University or UiPath Academy. If they had some courses at different levels (basic, advanced, and master), there would be more educated personnel available.

The solution needs to provide a trial license - whether it is on cloud or on-premises. They need to provide a standard environment to work with. We need to have practice in installing the data center and connecting it to the database. 

We need to understand how we can migrate from one lesser version to the higher version and what is the load balance and how we can manage that. We need to understand better how our core system is managing that. Proper training would help with understanding.

I've been using the solution for about two years at this point.

The solution is quite stable. We haven't had any issues with it. It isn't buggy or glitchy. It doesn't crash or freeze. 

I'm strongly involved with Automation Anywhere. I've been working with Automation Anywhere since 2019.

While Blue Prism and Automation Anywhere are very similar to each other in terms of capabilities, Automation Anywhere is much easier to use. 

Even in Blue Prism or UiPath or Automation Anywhere, the attributes are very similar to each other. However, Blue Prism is got a larger barrier to entry due to its high learning curve and lack of strong training.

We prefer the fact that, for example, on Automation Anywhere, we can use trial versions and we can use that time to train employees on how to use it. With Blue Prison, there doesn't seem to be a trial option.

We are not very familiar with the Blue Prism installation or if it's easy or not. Those areas are a bit of a gray area for me as I'm not doing many installations. 

The setup and installation we didn't do ourselves. We did these projects in the client end roadmap. The client has the Blue Prism tool. They set up everything themselves. Our job is to go there and to be able to provide the roadmap.

Likely, the installation takes about two or three hours, I would estimate.

The product has its own database, such as an SQL server. We often install supporting tools, however. There are some coming out now, such as Python, Java, and VBScript editors. Certain items, such as Java Runtime Focus should be installed. There are different installations depending on the client. If it is not on the cloud, the installations definitely take some time. It might take two hours or more.

Our clients handle the initial setup themselves.

Unlike other options, you need to buy a license. You cannot do a trial. At least, that was always the case a few years ago. With UiPath or Automation Anywhere, there are trial versions. It's a drawback for clients if it is still true that no trial option is on the table.

I'm no longer using Blue Prism. I deal more with UiPath now. However, I am certified in Blue Prism. I tend to take care of the delivery part. We talk with the clients and understanding the clients' requirements, understand the project, then divide the project into activities and map them out. I will help to architect it. If there is any trouble in capturing those areas then I will analyze this in Blue Prism or Automation Anywhere. 

So far, in those Blue Prism projects, it's very straightforward with rule-based - straightforward in the process automation. We will concentrate on low-hanging areas first and we will identify only those areas that we can automate easily. I'm sorry. In terms of automating end-to-end process, we will concentrate only on to 60% to 70% for our automation.



Premarajan:
So come back to the courses, in that way, we are not much familiar with the Blue Prism installation, how this installation takes time, it's easy or not. Those areas are a little gray area for me because I'm not doing much in the installation. But if you ask us if in the installation of Automation Anywhere, definitely, I can say I'll answer that. I can see that screen by screen. When we install it, the watch screen will come first like that. I can say that because I personally did installation Automation Anywhere installation.

Premarajan:
I set up a lab system in Tata so that our employees can train. I did a lot of things. Like that, I installed a UiPath as well in my system. I installed even [inaudible 00:26:08] also they provided, Microsoft has. They also provided a trial license to me when I asked. They also provided.

Premarajan:
But Blue Prism, those days, didn't provide me the trial version and they didn't help me, how to install it. No idea. That is a shortfall I can say about Blue Prism. [crosstalk 00:26:29]-

Emma:
So you were-
Premarajan:
It's very limited when we needed the license or those who purchased the Blue Prism people can work on Blue Prism tool. Others had no chance to learn. That I can say one way it's good. In the other way, people were not aware of the tool. That is, I can say it's good except for one drawback.

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

We use it to automate various backend processes in our company, such as PO processes and finance processes. We are using the latest version. It is deployed on the cloud as well as on-premises.

It is good for transactions that are very straightforward. It works very nicely with the structured data. 

It is user-friendly. It is easy to implement and easy to understand.

We didn't find it much useful for unstructured data. It is not easy to do the automation with Blue Prism if you have unstructured data. It should have better automation processes or connectors for unstructured data such as PDFs or pictures.

It has a connector for different applications, such as SAP, but we use a few other applications for which it doesn't have a connector.

It should have a more comprehensive dashboard that we can use to see the processes that are running and control the parameters.

I have been using Blue Prism for almost two years.

There are some issues with its stability. On a scale of five, I would give it a four.

There is a partner who is doing the automation for us, and they contact the technical support. We don't have any visibility on that.

I wasn't there when we did the initial setup at the company, but from what I know, it was not that painful. We were able to set it up quickly.

I would recommend this solution to others. I would rate Blue Prism an eight out of ten. 

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.