Blue Prism Reviews

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 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 an independent consulting group.

It is used in a lot of healthcare-related processes, and healthcare manufacturing.

There should be permanence across all of the automation technologies, such as UiPath, Blue Prism, and Automation Anywhere. It would allow the client to have automated processing of manual data work.

Currently, we are automating all of the manual processes. Once you have the bot built, you deploy it and it is obvious that it is going to help the client with reducing the man-hours, leaving them to focus on better quality work.

This is applicable for all RPA, not just Blue Prism.

The development interface is quite easy to work with.

The deployment is easy.

They have OCR technology, but it's not that great.

They need to come up with better OCR technology.

In the next release, the OCR features need to be improved. This is an area that I would love Blue Prism to work on.

I have been using Blue Prism for almost two years.

It is stable and it doesn't break down easily. 

If it is deployed in the right server and based on the requirements, and the comments they have documented on the site, it's pretty stable.

We have not scaled that high for any of our clients yet. We have four or five bots that have been running with no issues.

I have not reached out to technical support, but my teammate has.

It is easy to deploy.

If you are not doing any kind of smoke testing, it can be deployed in less than three days. You can just deploy to the production server minus the testing.

This is an area that I don't have any visibility to. I am not accountable for any kind of licensing and pricing. Our sales team takes care of this.

It is very important that you have a good design in place because it gets tricky when you are building the bots, otherwise, there will be a lot of propping and changing. 

There are many flows needed to build in Blue Prism.

It is always advisable to have a good stable design in place before you build the bot in Blue Prism.

I would rate Blue Prism a seven out of ten.

Our primary use case is automating data entry-intensive tasks interacting with in-house applications.

This solution has allowed us to free up time for more "value add" tasks, increased quality through a reduction in data entry errors, and has benefitted us with shorter turnaround times for some processes.

The most valuable feature is the ability to do surface automation, allowing interaction with legacy systems where terminal emulation is still in use.

I would like to see the vendor improve the efficiency of Blue Prism interaction with applications. There are instances where the human user can complete the process faster than the "bot". It does not support (at least not well) scenarios where attended automation (back and forth hand-off between human and bot) is required.  

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 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.

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.

Our primary use for this solution is to automate and run our mundane operational processes.

This solution has helped us become more efficient, as we have been able to automate certain processes, up to 85% of the work in some claims processing areas. We've been able to use it to very successfully transform data from one system to another. We have also used it for underwriting new client take-ons.

The most valuable feature is the design studio and its ease of use. The security and control room features are also very good.

I would like to see it better integrated with, or layered over, Java-based systems.

A feature that I would like to see in the next release is the ability to easily call on the robots to fulfill part of the process, and be run by the users in the business, where the robot can simply be activated rather than running mass processes from a control room. Essentially, I think that keeping the human in the loop is important. Blue Prism does have some vendors that partner to accomplish this, but it would be nice to have it built-in, rather than have a separate vendor with a separate license contract.

We don't have problems with stability. It is one's own IT infrastructure that lets you down, whether it is networking or otherwise. The system itself hasn't been a problem.

We're only in the process of scaling so it is difficult to say. One of the things that the developers have said is that it's quite slow, and quite cumbersome when layered over Java-based solutions. Whether it is scalable in that space, or not, is to be determined.

We have fifteen robots running.

We have had to contact technical support from time to time, and they are responsive. We've always received feedback from them. Typically, the only time that we've needed them is when our own IT support has had problems in the Blue Prism space. Sometimes, after we've contacted them, they pointed us in the right direction and actually found that the problem was on our end. These are some of the types of problems that they have helped us to solve.

We did not use another solution prior to this one.

The initial setup was relatively straightforward. The system itself is not overly complex. Rather, it's more of how you get your own internal IT infrastructure geared to be able to handle the new technology.

Deployment can take between four and six weeks per process.

Our implementation strategy has been to first focus on those processes that are going to deliver the greatest return on investment to ourselves and our clients. Typically, it's a small team that is supported by a vendor. Over time, they take over the development of the robots and they manage the control room.

The number of staff required for deployment and maintenance depends on the number of robots that you have running. Our entire team is six people, including business analysts, an engineer, a control room operator, and two developers. One of the developers is a senior developer who is able to validate and sign off on what is developed.

We used a consultant for the deployment.

We did not evaluate other solutions. We chose this one based on recommendations from the consultants that we had.

For anybody who is implementing this solution, it is important that you do not implement a process that is inherently flawed. Especially for more complex processes, you have to figure out how to solve those and re-engineer them. You want to enhance the processes.

Secondly, ensure that your design team is allowed to complete the design and move onto the next process. You do not want to have them repeatedly called back to enhance the process, because that slows down your rollout strategy.

You need to get buy-in from the business around what you're going to automate, and how you're going to do it. That is how you're going to leverage it going forward. If you don't have that then you can automate and put bots out there, but if the business doesn't support them or doesn't adopt them as co-workers then you're going to be battling against scaling. Anybody who sets out on this journey should be looking to use them on a large scale, and not just as a point solution.

I have not used other solutions so it is difficult to compare. However, in terms of support and the ability for us to start using the solution, it was quite easy. 

I would rate this solution an eight out of ten.