Blue Prism Reviews

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

The solution has been quite stable so far.

The new features that have come out have been great.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

We only have about 50 users on the solution currently.

We do plan to continue usage.

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

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

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

The initial setup is pretty straightforward.

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

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

We're using the latest version of the solution.

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

I'd rate the solution eight out of ten.

We use it mostly to mimic what our operation agents are repetitively doing so that they don't have to do the same thing over and over again. We are using it to eliminate the repetitive tasks that require no thinking or intelligent decision making. We are using the latest version of Blue Prism.

It is able to eliminate repetitive tasks and bring efficiency. At any point in time, the bank needs to hire 10 to 15 operation agents. In operation teams, the turnaround rate is always very high, so we are constantly understaffed. Capacity has always been an issue. With Blue Prism, we are able to automate a lot of tasks. 

We can also scale up and down. We can scale up our operations when we see larger volumes and scale down when we have lower volumes. We can have new bots, licenses, virtual machines within days, but we cannot have an agent trained up within days. It takes weeks to hire people and train them.

Its ability to talk to different systems that we have is a valuable feature. We use Pega, which is like a credit card processing system. We also use a Debit Process Manager, which is like the Visa debit application. In the bank, we have credit card and debit card sections, and we need to kind of investigate some of the transactions when customers are complaining about the charges. Blue Prism can log in to a different system to perform the exact actions that the agents are doing. This feature has been very helpful.

Its ability to engage with external systems and websites is also very valuable. Each of our RPA projects could go across different systems. We have an in-house banking system. We also use the Visa network, and we have to go to different sites to do a lot of data scraping to ensure the data in our system matches the data in the Visa systems, and we just deal with some of the charges.

It isn't very easy or intuitive for our developers to program the bot to make intelligent decisions. A bot, for the lack of a better word, is stupid, and it can only do what we program it to do. It cannot make intelligent decisions. For example, if we are reviewing Uber charges, they could be posting their transactions under different corporation names, even though they are under the same parent company or group. A human can easily understand that it is the name of the same company, and it just has an asterisk or space, but a bot cannot do that. When a bot cannot complete the transaction, it sends out an exception rate, business exception, or system exception for a human to do a manual review. The exception rate has been high because the bots cannot make decisions that we think are very simple, which is understandable because that's how they were programmed. There is potential in utilizing the higher intelligence side of the tool, but it is not easy to code higher intelligent actions.

It is a very lengthy process to get the provisioning to ensure that it is kind of doing what it needs to do. Provisioning involves multiple things, and it is quite complicated and not the best experience, but it is not just because of Blue Prism. Blue Prism is easy, but it takes a long time to onboard into our in-house system. 

I have been using Blue Prism for one year. I started doing the RPA project a year ago. I am providing consultancy to a specific business unit to ensure that the tool is deployed in the right way and meets the business need.

I'm involved with in-house systems as well as external systems. For provisioning, I get new bots. It involves multiple things, and it is quite complicated. It is not the best experience, but it is not just because of Blue Prism. Blue Prism is easy, but it takes a long time to onboard into our in-house system. The provisioning of our in-house system or external systems is a challenge that we have internally.

In terms of users, on the technology side, there are three main roles. We have developers, delivery managers, and business analysts. Business analysts gather different requirements of the business unit to ensure that developers know how to program our bots. The delivery manager is like a project manager who ensures that the projects run smoothly and prioritizes different tasks when any change requests come in or there is any change in the schedule. 

On the business side, there is the subject matter expert and a manager for the operation team. There is also an operation agent who does the demo of how humans are performing their day-to-day job so that the technology team can understand what a bot needs to do. There is also the redesign component of it to ensure the bot is not just mimicking what the human is doing. It is also doing something more and better. 

I don't think that there was a tool that we used before Blue Prism. There were various things that people were doing in silos on their computers. Blue Prism is probably the only automation tool that was rolled out at an enterprise level. We are also rolling out Power Automate.

We have different teams that do the provisioning. It is not my area to do the setup. In terms of the setup of the application, it is not hard to set up. The bank will have everything resourced and pushed into our computer. All I do is just click a button and install it, but there are a lot of things that happen in the background, which I don't know.

We have to do our business case before we wrote out RPA projects. Based on our tracking, the business benefits for the last three years have been on track. Most of our projects get returns within one year based on the human capacity that we are saving, and we have seen and are on track for the business benefit.

The billing is on a yearly basis. They send us the bill every year. My business unit is billed by the technology team, so I don't know exactly how much they pay. In my business unit, we have our first-year license costs, and then we have our ongoing costs. Our bots cost projected per license is $8,600. Our projected support cost for every year is about $38,000. Our operation agent costs anywhere between $50,000 to $55,000, so the saving is there, but it is still kind of expensive for us, but I'm looking at it from the technology kind of billing us for it. This is the cost that we have for our technology team, which is different from the licensing of Blue Prism.

I would rate Blue Prism a six out of ten, which I consider as a good rating. Seven is very good, eight is excellent, nine is outstanding, and ten is perfect as per my standards.

We've started to use some of the new features such as translation, cognitive, and we are finding them useful. We are also finding API integrations very useful.

We would like to have something, not particularly within the tool, that gives flexibility to the end-users to schedule the bots themselves. There should be some kind of control room flexibility so that they can go in. We don't have to always keep that centralized with us. 

We would also like to have inbuilt scheduling and resource pooling to distribute the bots on servers from within the platform. I should be able to distribute or orchestrate them internally so that if one bot takes a little longer than planned, it automatically shifts to another server. 

We would also like its price to be lower.

I have been using this solution for about one and a half years.

It is stable.

It is absolutely scalable. We have close to 200 automations written in Blue Prism. We have five to six people who work on this solution.

They're good. We didn't find any issues.

This was our first platform for automation. We have used other tools such as K2, but Blue Prism is the only full-fledged RPA platform that we've used.

The initial setup was easy.

Its price should be lower.

I have heard that UiPath is catching up in a big way and offers a lot of flexibility. You can also evaluate UiPath.

I would rate Blue Prism an eight out of ten.

I'm an IT consultant and I implement Blue Prism for my clients.

The only good thing about Blue Prism is the execution speed.

The interface is okay; it is like drawing a workflow map, which some people prefer.

For developers, they should have some kind of recording feature. Their competitors have this capability, so it is a big thing.

If you execute too fast then your code dies.

The stability can be improved by building something on top of it, code-wise. When you are running the software, it needs to attach to whatever window you are on, and then you need to build it separately. This is where you get stability.

This solution is scalable because they have an object library, which others do not have. In terms of reusability, it's great.

My clients are enterprise-level organizations.

In terms of support, they have almost everything for Blue Prism. They have tutorials and other such materials.

I haven't raised any tickets with them, so I do not know about their real support model.

I use UiPath for the most part.

I have some experience with Pega RPA but it's garbage, so I don't use it.

The initial setup is straightforward. You just need SQL and then you can install it.

Ultimately, this should be set up on the cloud using Azure or another provider. however, there are lots of companies that haven't brought their automation off-site, so they are on-premises deployments.

This is a very expensive product and this is the reason that they're losing their market share.

I know that Blue Prism is trying to improve because they have acquired some other vendors.

To summarize, I think that this product is good for business but it's terrible for developers.

I would rate this solution a seven out of ten.

The primary use case of Blue Prism is for financial services. It can't be accessed via a simple web application like you can do with its competitors. For financial services where the main requirement is to retain data in-house, Blue Prism is the way to go. I'm an RPA engineer and we are customers of Blue Prism. 

Blue Prism has helped the company in areas such as invoicing, requests on an augment coming from customers and things like that.

I love the development phase of Blue Prism because there are simple things you can put in place that help you understand workflow and how implementation acts. I love how Blue Prism can use the same variables and objects used on other processes, the really key value is the object sharing. I like that you can forward so you can speed up the process while it's executing which you can do on other RPA tools, but you can also simulate the feed tool from two to four and reach the output quite nicely.

For me, a web application that can improve the connection between robot and human, and share information simply without any file sharing, without any access from the machine, that has the tower controlling it, is the easiest way to share information.

The user interface could be improved and I would like to see a web interface to easily access robot information. The key value of Blue Prism is also its main weakness because Blue Prism is quite connected to its data, so anything you do on Blue Prism is logged on the database. It's quite difficult to read these logs, so I would like to have a more valuable way of understanding how robots work on the environment. Blue Prism doesn't manage variables well. It's annoying because you have to declare visually every variable but there's not a list of the variables. You have to open the graphical elements and check the variables.

I've been using this solution for one year. 

It's a stable solution. It has a quite simple architecture and is very connected to the machine on which Blue Prism works. The RPA tools are connected with the machine, with the applications, with the credentials, and that improves stability.

The solution is very scalable because you can deploy a robot on the machine and with the same licenses you can deploy another robot on another machine. 

Technical support is quite good although I think not as good as with some other solutions. UiPath, for example, has great support, great speed, and they're right on the issues. Blue Prism has that too but they're not as good as the others. 

The initial setup is quite straightforward and similar to other solutions. 

This is an expensive solution. I think Blue Prism has a licensing mode quite different from the other RPA tools.

Blue Prism is a very secure solution because you can implement a structure as a high availability infrastructure. If you have, for example, three machines and one license, you can put this license on any of the machines. If the first machine is down, then you can put that license on another machine.

I would rate this solution a seven out of 10. 

I work for the healthcare industry, and I use it for claims orders. We have claims orders, and we have integrated service manager tickets to bring tickets from different locations or websites and update them to the SharePoint tracker. From there, we send any notifications to the concerned person.

I am currently working with an on-premise solution that is connected to the cloud UI.

We are trying to speed up the process for our client because, being in the healthcare industry, they do have a lot of defects and issues. They are working on the latest products, which have different defects and issues. Being able to speed up this process, provide information to different business people, and make things easy is the value add. These tickets are also related to claims audits, so it would also speed up the claim process.

Blue Prism supports the multi-bot architecture, which is really good. It is also really good at OCR. Blue Prism is integrated with Abbey OCR, and it provides at least 90% right information on period documents. This is something that is really good in Blue Prism.

Blue Prism can deal with a huge amount of data. We can track each and every record, and then we can see the data. If you don't have much coding experience, it makes it easy to build automations and deploy them. It is also easy to learn and easy to work with. It has a lot of features, which makes it reliable for any sort of automation.

The activities that we do are a bit difficult to do in Blue Prism as compared to UiPath. UiPath provides create activities and create packages related to AI analytical skills. This is something that Blue Prism doesn't have.

I have been using this solution for more than one and a half years.

We don't interact with their technical support. I work in an environment where we implement use cases and give them to the clients. We build use cases, do UAT for these use cases, and then deploy them for our clients. The clients already have their production support team for support. If there is any issue in the production, we do support the clients.

All these use cases are something on which we work with a fixed scope. These are not things that can be built on long-term projects. We just focus on trying to get the use cases from them, and we then build, implement, and deploy them.

I also use UiPath. When comparing Blue Prism and UiPath, there are some pros and cons in both tools. UiPath does some of the things really well but lags behind in some aspects and vice versa. Blue Prism is really good at something like multi-bot architecture and tracking of the tickets for the records. UiPath provides create activities and create packages related to AI analytical skills, which is where Blue Prism lags behind.

It was a bit complex because when I started with RPA in 2018, Blue Prism was not a free source tool for us, which is where I found difficulty in learning things and becoming familiar with all the products in Blue Prism. UiPath was a free source tool, and they provided most of the training and made it easy for us. They also provided a free community version for us, which was helpful in learning it.

I don't have an idea about Blue Prism, but I have an idea about UiPath. UiPath is scaling its business in different products. It has got products for intelligent document processing (IDP) to test or log integrations for chatbots. If you want to work on something like a true test automation, you have to buy a test book. In such cases, they have a predefined way of working with, implementing, or running things. This is where I see that UiPath might be a bit costly or expensive when compared to Blue Prism because UiPath charges for each and every product.

I would rate Blue Prism an eight out of ten. It is a good tool. 

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.