Blue Prism Reviews

The first automated processes were mainly backoffice procedures. Accordingly, unattended robots have been used to do the job. To me however, a big portion of the potential value added from RPA comes from attended automation, especially in a people-intensive professional services company like the one I`m working at. Typical examples for solutions desired by the staff are digital assistants taking care of the tedious and error-prone data transfer processes reaching from HR and Marketing to Finance.

Of course, Blue Prism is capable of improving one´s processes, especially in terms of efficiency. I´m not saying that it didn´t improve things at all at my company. However, my personal opinion is that improvement is behind what´s possible nowadays. As desribed before, attended automation and digital assistants keep becoming more important - if not crucial for a company´s RPA journey. And that´s exactly where Blue Prism in my opinion fails. Developing processes, you can feel that the solution is not made for attended automation. 

Valuable feature are for sure the modelers. They are quite easy to understand and use. I think they are what people mean when they say Blue Prism is a bit easier than UiPath. Whereas I definitely like the ease of use, this comes at a cost. In direct comparison to UiPath, the Studios feel like Kindergarden to me. Trying to make robot development accessible to people with limited technical understanding, they are taking away the endless possibilities resulting from the fact that a software robot is still a mature computer program. Not being able to insert code - or even complex expressions - is not a feature to me. Summing up, I like the ease of use of BP but to me, the sacrifice is too high.

When I am comparing Blue Prism to UiPath, it lacks many features. For example, I am missing all variable types that I am used to having in UiPath.

I don't like that it is so limited, anything that you do feels limited in your capabilities.

Usually, you have dropdown menus with 10 choices but if you need that 11th or 12th one it is so difficult to work around it. 

For me, I feel that it is lacking in features.

It consists of simple actions that work quite well together, and the integration is good but the scope of things that you can do is too narrow.

The interface could be brought to a more modern state of the art interface. It still has this gray Windows 95 style, which is outdated.

The way that humans interact with robots is a feature that is very poor in Blue Prism. 

The focus is on the unattended automation, for example, robots running in the background at some bank. If you have more digital assistance, assisting humans in their daily work is something that is very difficult and I would like to see this improved.

I have been using Blue Prism for two months.

The stability is quite good.

This solution is scalable, but I don't have a lot of experience with this area. I am basing this only on what I have heard.

We have approximately 500 end-users.

Due to the limitations, we don't have plans to increase our usage. We are considering a change.

I don't have a lot of experience with technical support. At this time, I cannot say anything good or bad.

Previously, I was using UiPath and because of a change in job, I started using Blue Prism.

This solution was already in place when I joined the company. 

The setup and deployment were already complete.

We have a team of five to maintain this solution.

We did the implementation internally.

We have a three-year contract that is paid on a yearly basis.

To my knowledge, there are no additional costs other than the standard licensing fee.

I don't think that I could recommend this solution. I prefer working with UiPath.

We implemented Blue Prism some time back. I'm not using it right now. 

I get most involved during the evaluation and the deployment phase.

With Blue Prism, we automated back-end processes. Blue Prism is more like service-side automation. It is not good for attended automation.

Blue Prism can lower the average handling time immediately by 20-40%.

You also need to look at what is the long term goal. A long term goal could be that you want to keep, not integrate, with anything else. 

Blue Prism has a long learning curve because the coding is complicated. You need to be a very highly skilled developer. Blue Prism has a high coding skill and certification requirement that hinders your ability to automate quickly. 

Blue Prism moves out new versions very fast and their back-up compatibility is not good as compared to their competition. Essentially, this means you spend a lot of money just upgrading the bots.

Blue Prism is quite stable. It has the interactive client that is really good. The licensing model is very simple as well.

The user interface is okay. I don't think there is much of a problem.They need to also have a better capability in attended automation. Blue Prism has not invested enough in AI development.

They need to have a Bot store. If they can introduce AI bots that will automatically diagnose why something failed and keep sending data back to admins, it would be an improvement.

We have been using the Blue Prism RPA ( /categories/robotic-process-automation-rpa ) solution for almost one year.

Blue Prism is quite stable.

When you need to run more processes, you buy more licenses, but you will spin up more VM. Scaling not is a problem for Blue Prism.

We started with Blue Prism.

The initial setup of Blue Prism is standard and not difficult. The instructions are very clear and easy. It doesn't take long to implement. The setup is not difficult.

Changing the board and getting it deployed didn't take too long. The deployment into production and moving to the environment took somewhere between eight to ten weeks. It could have been a little less.

reduction of Operations effort

These prices are deal-specific, it will probably not be right to review negotiations with the vendor. Currently, there are no new licensing agreement changes for us.

We evaluated Automation Anywhere.

If you need only server-side back-end process automation, use Blue Prism. If you need assisted automation or services automation, use Automation Anywhere or UiPath. On a scale from 1 to 10, I would rate Blue Prism with an 8.

The tool's user interface is very intuitive. 

The solution is pretty high priced. The tool's support also needs to be better. 

I would rate the tool's stability a nine out of ten. 

I would rate the product's scalability a nine out of ten. 

I would rate the product's setup an eight out of ten. 

I would rate the product's ROI an eight out of ten. 

I would rate the solution's pricing a seven out of ten. 

The end users are happy about the solution.

The solution was deployed on-prem. We have about 100 users.

We were partners with Blue Prism.

There has been a huge amount of cost savings and freeing up. Employees got more vacation time allotted. That was a direct result of the time saved by RPA.

As a developer, I liked the layout and UI, specifically when it came to testing. Dragging and dropping stages and actions made development quick and easy to learn. The UI, allows you to watch as the bot moves through each step of the process at the same time it launches, interacts and closes applications, which really aids development and troubleshooting, unlike with AA and UiPath.  

I don't have an suggestions for improvement, at this time.

I used Blue Prism for five years. The last time I used it was a year ago.

The solution was stable.

Scalability was easy.

Technical support wasn't great. On a scale of 1 to 5, I would give it a 3.

Initial setup was straightforward. On a scale of 1 to 5, I would rate the difficulty of setup a 4.

Deployment took a couple of months from development to publishing it into production. We didn't have an implementation strategy. 

We had 25 developers for deployment and maintenance. We had about a dozen in production for support.

Deployment was done in-house.

I would rate this solution 7 out of 10.

In one of the use cases, we import Excel tables. We extract the Excel data from the output of a proprietary application. This application produces Excel tables as an output, and we then create PDFs for certificates for the people who are flying. They have to do training, flying hours, and things like this. In this project, we closed the gap between the proprietary application, provided by a different team, and the HR application.

It is deployed on-premises. Due to security issues, we are not allowed to use cloud services. We only have centralized application servers that are operated by the central operations team. It is not on users' desktops, which is possible, but it is not our focus.

RPA processes are helpful when we need interaction with different applications and close the technical gaps between them. In one of the use cases that we evaluated, there was a single Excel template from a vendor. The Excel file has 7,000 objects, and it included information about the part numbers, prices, and some of the details about each object of a complex maschine. This file had to be input to SAP, so a human had to enter these 7,000 objects one by one, which is a pretty mechanical and uninteresting task. The RPA bot was easily able to import this file. Without RPA, this import had to be done by a person who had to do the same task 7,000 times just to import one contract. This is where RPA processes and RPA tools are very helpful. RPA tools have the possibility to close media gaps. RPA tools are like macros on steroids. They now have got the maturity level for big data centers.

We see some security issues in Blue Prism. The German vendor Servicetrace is better at this point. This is also reflected in the Gartner report where Servicetrace is mentioned as the tool of choice in high-security environments. So, security, particularly in terms of administration, needs to be improved. We must have the possibility to prevent the administration from taking a look at the ongoing process. When we have restricted data flow, the operations team should not be able to take a look at the data that is processed.

I have been using this solution for about three years.

It has been pretty stable. Most errors are human errors in the input files. When we have issues, they are usually because of the content of the input file. There are no technical issues with the product.

It is not currently an issue on our side because the company has pretty strong and fast machines. Because these machines do only RPA and nothing else, they can handle the work of a lot of employees and do a great job with that.

I'm not sure if our contractor has many tasks to handle with the vendor itself. During the software evaluation, we had discussions with the vendor about product details, but the support is taken care of by the contractors, and I'm not sure how often it is required.

The installation itself was pretty straightforward. The installation of the software is pretty easy, but it can get tricky when you go into bot development and have to close the gaps between different applications. The most complex use case took us about two and a half years.

We have a project team of five to six people for implementation. Operations are handled by three people. The project team is extended by external persons or contractors. The basic operations are done internally.

We definitely save money by using RPA.

Due to our financial structure, we need fixed costs. So, a license based on the usage would not be feasible. If we have a license model that is based on tasks per year or something else, it could create a very dynamic range of costs. Due to our public financial input, we have to know what it will cost. So, we have licenses per server. This helps us in planning, and we know exactly when we need additional servers. We can then request additional money for them.

It is a pretty good solution. I would rate it an eight out of 10.

The solution has cross-application features where it can be set up with SAP, email, or SharePoint.

The solution could be more user-friendly. I would like the see the inclusion of a recording feature as in Microsoft, SAP, and other legacy systems. Users can play the recording and use it for future use cases. The recording can help with the automation and configuration. I would rate the tool’s interface a seven out of ten. It needs to improve.

We have been using the solution for around two to three years.

The product is quite stable.

The solution is scalable. We have around 100 users for it in our company and we intend to scale up the numbers.

We have never contacted the tech support team since we have our own internal technical team.

The solution is enterprise software so we will try to maximize our usage during the available slots. We will get ROI with the high price since there will be some value added with automation. I think that after doing a cost-benefit analysis, we are on the positive side.

I would rate the overall solution 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.

One of the most powerful features in Blue Prism is exception handling. It's one of the features that really differentiates it from other platforms.

It is really easy to use; it's user-friendly. 

Also, you only have one database and can consolidate everything, database per environment. I think that helps to have more control, to trace all the data and all the loss, and scale in an easier way.

It is stable and easy to scale.

It is easy to set up as well.

Blue Prism needs to work in a web-based account. I think that Blue Prism will need to have the main features be web-based so that you can control the box in a web-based environment and not in a client's environment.

You need to enter the machine and study the client in that machine to see what happened in the box. In other platforms, you can do that in a web-based environment, which is easier to access.

The OTR can be more powerful.

They also need to have an easy way to have more sessions for Telco machines. 

I started using it five years ago as a developer. It is deployed in cloud and hybrid environments.

The stability is really good.

It's really easy to scale.

If you have problems in production, they have technical support 24/7. They respond quickly and help you resolve the issue that you have.

It is easy to set up. In a position setup, at most it can take eight hours. In a box environment, it can be set up in 10 minutes.

I highly recommend Blue Prism and rate it at nine on a scale from one to ten.