Blue Prism Reviews

This solution has increased the speed, accuracy, and happiness of staff involved in the activities for which RPA has been deployed. 

The most valuable features are the exception handling and versatility with interfacing to existing systems.

We would like to see intelligent process automation that integrates RPA and machine learning. 

We were using this solution for two main purposes. The first was to leverage the OCR capabilities, and the second was integration with Outlook to check email and retrieve attachments from email.

We were also looking at the workflow component, and how to orchestrate the bot and the process flow within Blue Prism.

This is all being done as a pilot project by one of our departments to assess the impact of implementing RPA.

An example of how this solution helped us is with our ticket creation process. When a client raises a ticket with us, we receive an attachment by email. We have to first read the content of the email and then the attachment. Next, we have to identify who the customer is, and based on that, we create a ticket and assign it to the appropriate team.

By using the automation in Blue Prism, we have reduced the manual activities of somebody reading those emails, figuring out whose account it is, deciding where it should go, and creating the ticket. All of these activities are automated.

The most valuable feature for us was the orchestration of the workflow. The way you design the flow and configure the activities for the bot is very useful if you are working with any of the BPM or local platforms. It made it very easy for the developers to work with assets.

I would like to see wider integration with other products. That way, while we work on other core systems like SAP or Salesforce, there are ready-made connectors that can get the data. It would make it easier for people to work with Blue Prism.

The next release would benefit from integration with artificial intelligence and machine learning technologies. For example, the OCR can populate fields in variables and proceed with a workflow. But adding intelligence to this, or integrating with a service such as AWS, would be useful.

We did not find any issues with respect to stability or performance. We performed testing around the number of emails that were coming in and tried to see how fast the bot was able to process them. We also tried scheduling the bot to run at a specific time and checked to see if it was able to do so.

We did not perform extensive load testing efforts.

An RPA scales as you add bots to your ecosystem.

We don't consider the number of users with respect to utilization. Rather, the solution is used by one of our departments. They have adopted RPA to handle one of its processes as a pilot project.

We have seen a lot of use cases, but it is still picking up. Not too many departments are coming up with RPA as a strategy, but I believe it will soon pick up.

The only contact we had with technical support was during our initial setup. It was a minor issue that was solved pretty quickly.

We did not use another RPA prior to this one. 

I do not want to call it complex, but it is not simple either. It is somewhere in between.

We set up our own sandbox environment to do the trial run and the POC. We did the initial setup, but we needed help from Blue Prism to some extent. I rate the complexity as medium-level because we needed help in setting up our infrastructure.

We had one developer involved, and there was a QA tester for the entire process. There was a back and forth mechanism between the developer and our tester. For deployment, there was an admin role who was taking care of our other system assets, such as the BPM and other platforms. The Blue Prism administration was taken over by the same person, so it does not require a specific admin.

We handled the deployment ourselves and did not hire anybody from outside of the company.

Other than your infrastructure, in terms of servers that you have to set up, I don't think that there are any costs in addition to the standard licensing fees.

We did not do any formal evaluation of other products. We chose this solution because we are working with Appian BPM, and Blue Prism is a partner. This is what influenced us to look at this solution, and they work well hand in hand.

We performed quite a few POCs to help understand the platform.

One of the most important things while working with RPA is choosing the right process, understanding the process, and ensuring that you pick the right process for RPA activities. That was the key to our success.

The process should not be too complex, and not be too simple. If it is too complex then it will take too much time to implement. At the same time, it should cater to your immediate needs so that you can demonstrate the tool's features to the leadership.

My advice is to do a pilot project before adopting any RPA platform. Try one or two key integrations, such as the Outlook and OCR integration that we have chosen.

Another important point is that there might be some fear in the team. Some people are concerned that bots are taking away jobs. It is important to ensure confidence in the team that the RPA will not replace humans. Rather, it will enhance their capabilities in terms of resources that are being used for mundane tasks. The message to take to the organization is that bots will handle the simple tasks, while humans can do more intelligent activities.

We have not fully explored the platform, but it is enough to capture our requirements.

I would rate this solution an eight out of ten.

We are mainly using Blue Prism for finance processes. Then slowly, we move into other processes, such as HR and IT.

The overall package from Blue Prism is valuable. I cannot pinpoint one certain part.

Blue Prism can improve on the ease of use of its graphic user interface(GUI).

In an upcoming release, it is important for Blue Prism to think about the future and not stay in the present. They should spend enough time on innovation.

I have been using Blue Prism for approximately three years.

The stability of Blue Prism is good.

Blue Prism is scalable.

The support that Blue Prism offers is very good.

I rate the support from Blue Prism a four out of five.

The setup of Blue Prism is very easy.

The number of people we needed for the implementation of Blue Prism depends on the size of the project. However, typically within the assignments which we do, which is more at the strategic level when drilling down to the initial part of the start of implementation, we use between five to ten smart technicians and business personnel.

Over a one-year period, customers should receive a return on investment using Blue Prism.

I rate Blue Prism 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.

We primarily use the solution for finance, specifically accounts payable.

The solution has improved our organization in that our AP administrators and AP clerks don't have to put the information into the ERP. The RPA does the transfer upon approval over to the ERP system. You don't have to code and create backend APIs or custom code to integrate the systems. It makes things much easier overall.

The object modeling is the solution's most valuable aspect. It's been quite helpful for our organization. The reusability of it has been great. Being able to create an object and use it for multiple processes has been very useful for us.

The initial setup is straightforward.

The reporting system, specifically the system admin reporting could be improved.

If there were more business analytics, that would be quite helpful.

In general, however, the solution isn't really lacking any features.

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

The solution is very stable. There are no bugs or glitches. It doesn't crash or freeze. It's extremely reliable in terms of performance. 

The scalability has been good so far. If a company needs to expand it, it can do so with ease. It's not a problem.

We have several hundred users on the solution currently. Blue Prism operates on the enterprise level and the activities of the digital workers happen on the servers. So virtually no one needs to interact with it directly. It's mostly on an administrative level that there are some people accessing the application and its reviews, exceptions, and things like that.

I have limited familiarity with other RPA products.

The initial setup is very straightforward. It's not overly complex. A company shouldn't have any issues with the process.

The installation itself takes maybe a couple of hours, however, the customization, depending on the complexity of the process, can be anywhere from six weeks to eight months. It really depends on the complexity.

Per five digital workers, you need one or two individuals for maintenance.

We are an integrator. We are able to help our clients set up the solution.

We are a reseller of the product.

We've been working with the most recent version of the solution in our organization.

I have been happy with this solution overall. I'd rate it at a ten out of ten.

We have multiple systems here that are integrated. We have our SAP system, and then we have the vendor portals that are running on some web applications. If somebody puts an order in the portal, there used to be some kind of verifications for which we had employed some people, but now, the same verification is done by Blue Prism.  

We have also been using it for automation for invoice verification. We use Blue Prism to do the verification of the scanned invoices sent by people. We are using the latest minus one version of this solution.

Blue Prism is very good at doing background processing. 

As a user, I cannot directly work with the bot. On a daily basis, I use and do some work in Microsoft Excel, which cannot be directly taken into Blue Prism. Our company majorly runs on Microsoft Excel. Everybody has Excel sheets as their working sheets. Therefore, we need a kind of automation to be able to do things with this program. This bot is almost like an invisible staff that works between the servers but not with the users. This bot works well with SAP and things like that, but it doesn't work with Excel sheets. It doesn't work with the bots that we have, and I cannot invoke an RPA right now as a user. It has to be done by an administrator who has better control than me. It needs better integration with Microsoft Excel.

Its price can be improved. It is expensive for us. It should be cheaper for a market like ours. We are based in India.

I have been using this solution off and on for a year.

It is a stable product. On the stability front, we haven't found any issues.

It is scalable, but scaling this product is a little bit expensive for us. We are based in India, and it is not fitting in the budget. To add more bots, we have to put in a lot more money. 

So far, we have automated almost 13 processes. In terms of the number of users, we have our partner and four to five technical people who are being led by a manager. I am from the client's side, and we have three people in our team. So, there are seven to eight people who are working on it.

It is pretty good.

We weren't using any such product previously. We were new to RPA, and this was the product that was chosen by our team. This decision was taken one or two years ago. At that time, I wasn't with this organization.

Blue Prism are our partners, and we did not face any challenges in installation. In a week's time, we were able to develop our first bot.

Blue Prism helped us in installing this.

It is expensive for us. It should be cheaper for a market like ours. We are based in India.

We will keep on using this solution in the near future because we have invested in this, but I wish to go for Automation Anywhere, and down the line, we might be exploring that. It is currently not a fully-grown application, whereas many features in the Automation Anywhere are full-grown automation features.

The Blue Prism sales team gave us a demonstration of the upcoming features a couple of weeks ago. They are coming up with a lot of features that are currently not there. I would recommend this solution only if the features they have planned in the upcoming version are there, and they are stable. Blue Prism currently cannot be compared with other products such as Automation Anywhere and UiPath. The full-grown kind of bot is something that is relevant for RPA use cases, but it is not there right now. It is there on the roadmap, but they have to take care of the stability. Right now, other products have definitely got an edge over this.

Without considering the roadmap and features that they have promised in the next version, I would rate Blue Prism a five out of ten.

We use the solution as an RPA tool to automate business processes.

The solution's most valuable feature is optical character recognition.

The solution's UI, control panel, and technical support could improve. Also, they should add more OCR engines to it.

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

I rate the solution's stability as an eight.

I rate the solution's scalability as an eight.

The solution's initial setup was straightforward. Although, the control panel installation requires some time as we need to connect it to SQL servers.

The solution generates a high return on investment.

I rate the solution as an eight.

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.