What needs improvement with Blue Prism?

We've found some challenges with Blue Prism, particularly when interacting with certain applications. The element inspection feature could be improved, especially for more complex applications.

Blue Prism as a product is very good, but it doesn't have additional features, like UiPath, which offers features in areas like attended and unattended automation. Blue Prism doesn't have an attended automation feature. The tour also doesn't offer features that can help in areas like document understanding and PDF reading. Though Blue Prism has now come up with features like decipher and computer vision, it is still not able to address most of the issues, making it an area of concern where improvements are required. From an improvement perspective, I believe that Blue Prism needs to have more skilled people in its support team who can address the issues of users immediately.

I would like to see a cloud version of Blue Prism available. Both cloud and on-premise options would be beneficial, as they would reduce maintenance costs. I'm using the Blue Prism desktop, which is still in the initial stages. I want enhancements in the Object Explorer and Application Model features to ensure stability in upcoming versions. I have suggested a few ideas, such as incorporating triggering mechanisms, but I haven't seen them implemented yet.

I don't think we can do the reporting and documentation in Blue Prism without using any third-party tool. I don't think the kind of reporting features that Power BI and Tableau provide are available in Blue Prism. Blue Prism is mainly for process automation and not reporting, but maybe they can add a reporting feature.

There is room for improvement in the pricing.

The tasks we use it for performed well, although there may be some minor issues with the 6.10 version. However, like every software, it is possible for it to have its own shortcomings that will eventually be addressed. In our business processes, we encountered an issue with a selector that stopped working, but we were able to create a workaround for it since it was only affecting one selector in one area. I don't think it's fair to place all the blame on Blue Prism because the application we were automating was heavily reliant on JavaScript, which caused difficulties in building the user interface. In my opinion, every platform would have faced similar challenges when automating such an application. However, we were able to resolve the issue and move forward with upgrading the system. I am not aware of any problems that other teams may have encountered, so I can't say for sure. I can't immediately think of any specific features either. I would need to take some time to consider it and discuss it with our team before making any definitive statements.

Blue Prism develops its own tools and process automation, but the documentation is unclear and incomplete.

Blue Prism doesn't have a web orchestration or control room where businesses can directly check the trends or carry out the process directly from the URL without downloading additional software like Nextiva on their machine. Some other features are also missing in Blue Prism. For example, the record and play feature makes development faster, but it is not there in Blue Prism. When you start the recording and do the activity, it automatically generates the steps. So that feature needs to be included.

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.

In the object section, there are certain things such as the navigation in the UI that could be improved. It would be helpful for developers. I'd like to see more technical support for the team and the provision of some community versions for people to learn the product. I believe it would also benefit Blue Prism to better understand the requirements of those using the product.

Blue Prism features two layers of documentation. If we could make it in one layer, then it would be easy to develop, and it would take less time for developers to complete the task. Blue Prism is a very comfortable and good tool to use. From my end, I don't think anything else needs to be added to the tool.

The solution can be improved by switching off data DB and including a report section with a morphing feature, like more reporting waste.

We had a lot of challenges managing authentication and reusing or using external authentication providers. For example, in API interaction, we need to get tokens from a centralized authentication platform that was always running for us. The solution can include attended robots similar to UiPath in the next release.

It lacks integration with proper AI, and it is a very complex tool to use in general.

Blue Prism can improve a lot. The interaction with Google Chrome can be massively improved. I know in the next version there are slight improvements. We don't know how much, but we are comparing them. At this moment, Google Chrome is a massive issue within the toolset, due to the way Google Chrome receives updates regularly but Blue Prism is unable to cope. The spy method of Google Chrome is not as user-friendly as Internet Explorer is. However, Internet Explorer is being discontinued from their support, therefore it's not the best browser to be using. This has caused us major issues in the last six months. Our customers go through platforms, such as CyberArk and Citrix. The way that Blue Prism interacts with these applications could improve. There are a few other issues, such as memory, but these are the key problems that have offered issues in the past six months or so.

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

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 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.

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.

Blue Prism could improve by having better integration with Computer Vision.

It's been our concern that we will be able to move more towards sustainability within our own company. We do rely a lot on third-party vendors, and we're hoping we can have more internal talent to actually manage all our projects. That's our number one goal and concern. We are looking into providing training to our business users that is similar to something like PowerBI, where you can basically configure and use less coding. That's what we want to leverage. The license cost is a bit high. Being a finance guy, that's number one for me. Number two is that whatever bots that you put inside, they only can run a specific activity at a specific time. For example, let's say I want to do a bank reconciliation at 10:00 AM, and, at the same time, I want to do some kind of asset capitalization, I can't do both. I need to choose which I can run at 10:00 AM. With one, I may need to re-time it. I'd basically like the bot to work on multiple activities at once. The deployment of the bots should be much faster and more intuitive.

There are a couple of challenges in Blue Prism's latest version. So the main difficulty is when the bots are in a run state. If the schedule calls that, then the schedule information is not being received by bots in the right way. It means the bot is already running, and there is a schedule in place that is not functioning as expected. Also, there is a scenario where the bots are not handling volume as expected, especially when there are challenges with other environments. So there are a couple of areas where we have found that bots are not working as expected, especially in version 6.4.

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.

There are a lot of things that could be improved. The very first thing is their control room, and they are still sticking to the desktop version, which restricts access. You can't really access it from anywhere. The entire industry is moving towards cloud-based solutions. Blue Prism should make it RPA-as-a-Service cloud version. I would definitely like to see how they could really make it more accessible, going beyond desktop applications. They have recently launched their web version, but that is still a read-only version of the control room. The web version of their control room could be accessible from anywhere so that I don't have to go and log into a specific machine. Additionally, we tried integrating some of the applications to Blue Prism, and there was no REST API. It is still following the older mechanism using SOAP API, which again restricted quite a number of the integrations that we wanted to do. Exposing their artifacts through web APIs, REST APIs, would be good, which is normal nowadays. It would be good to build more objects; they have very limited objects available, that is, implicit objects. If I need to connect to ServiceNow, I would need to build all those things. So they could really step up and create customized objects as an implicit feature that they could include.

It's not very easy to use. There is some learning curve that you need to manage as an individual. In the past we have had platform challenges with Blue Prism, like the scheduler functionality doesn't always work as expected and there are content downtimes as well. On the stability, I will probably rate it a little lower than medium. If they could have process recording and task recording also in place, that will help expedite the delivery for the automation.

Unfortunately, developing with Blue Prism takes more time than developing with UiPath or other platforms, because each action requires multiple actions. If you need to open an Excel file and collect the data from it, UiPath can do it with two or three clicks, like drag and drop the Excel application scope. With Blue Prism, you need to open the workbook, then open an instance, then get the sheet and then close that instance. It takes more time to develop things in Blue Prism. The dashboards are not excellent, they could be improved enabling more information.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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 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.

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.

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.

The recording of the transaction is missing in this solution. The pricing could always be better. We cannot record inactivity, we need an actual program or we need to design it. In the next release, I would like it to be able to record the transaction instead of designing it. It would be very helpful and easier to roll-out the product. The interface is okay as long as we can design it. The studio is fine.

There are a lot of things coming up, such as Discovery Bot and Process Discovery. A lot of other aspects are also maturing. We have definitely started using it for our clients, and it is maturing as a solution, but it is all about how you integrate the enterprise with all the automation projects, such as your chatbot, Conversational AI, and robotics. How they are integrated and talk to each other creates a very good business case with all three aspects. The next level should be about integrating it with other automation tools as well. It can have integration with other tools or automation projects, such as your chatbot, Conversational AI, and robotics.

There are many reasons why many companies don't go for Blue Prism. It is not open, and the community addition is not available. Blue Prism provides support through partnership. You need to do a partnership with them, which is a major disadvantage. You contact a Blue Prism team, and they will schedule a meeting with you. They will give you a demo and help you set up everything, whereas with UiPath and Automation Anywhere, you can try the community edition, and if it fits your needs, you simply buy a license for that. The initial setup of Blue Prism is complex. They simply provide a PDF or documentation for you to go through it, whereas, if you go with UiPath or Automation Anywhere, they have several videos and community support to guide you. The documentation of Blue Prism is static. They don't have any sort of videos or open forums. Other tools have got a lot of community support, but Blue Prism doesn't have that. Its training is also hard to attain, and they also don't provide any certification.

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.

The initial setup and deployment could be simplified. The stability could be improved. They could add more AI-related technology. With their free version, they should provide some sort of community link where you can learn for free. It would be better.

The intelligent automation, like document processing, is lacking and should be improved. I would like to see PDF processing capabilities, and invoice automation templates. Technical support is in need of improvement.

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.

It can be improved more in the field of Medicine. Lotus Notes automation should be easier to understand. Improvement is required with the DLLs for MAPIEx.

I have been speaking directly with Blue Prism's engagement manager about making the solution more web-based. It's not quite there yet. Currently, the latest version is still under the beta version, so, as a customer, we don't have access to it. They are making it much more web-based, but for now, everything you have to log into requires an enterprise server — It's still more client-based than web-based. They are aware of these issues, but it's not available yet. If they would have done this earlier, it would have helped them occupy the market space better. In the next release of Blue Prism, they are bringing in some great features, like deployment. I believe it's really going to focus on centralized monitoring. They are making it web-based. I think the scalability and the ease of installation are also going to get an upgrade in the new version. They are working on merging technology, like OCR capabilities — they are bringing everything under one banner. That's definitely going to help. This reboot of Blue Prism is definitely required. It's a little late, but at least they're doing it.

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.

The domain in regards to cognitive abilities and the use of processing activity needs improvement. They have added this capability, but that's not really big in the public. It is more also available for gold partners. So they should improve the user activity for the public or even the regular customer. It can add a good amount of scalability.

I would like to see machine learning functionality integrated with the automation.

It can be improved more in : 1. Surface automation techniques: using region mode. Identifying images more properly. 2.OCR: Can improve more in OCR, to read text more correctly, currently can say OCR in blue prism only works for less cases and is only effective 50%. so mostly OCR's of Blue prism is very less used and other API's or tools are integrated with Blue prism for OCR techniques. 3. Integration Support: To integrate any tool, API with blue prism. the team support is very less and also no proper details are available in Blue Prism. This can be improved much more. 4. AI: AI techniques will make Blue prism more powerful which is currently not done.

Blue Prism is lacking in document processing capabilities. The addition of better testing tools, or some kind of test suite, would be an improvement. If this solution had a framework for exception handling then it would be very helpful. As a developer, we have to put exceptions in as the first step. This product does not have AI Fabric or process mining tools.

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.

There are some weaknesses of the tool as well. For example, Blue Prism has been a little bit slow when it comes to the commitments on their roadmap. They had some delays last year, so I hope they make it up this year. They promise, but they are not meeting everything they promise in their roadmap. For example, they were launching a Decipher tool. It was delayed by more than a year. It has still not launched. Also, the Control Room for the robots is not very sophisticated. That can be improved. We are now going to some attended bots, as well. How do you make attended robots work? It is something that is counterintuitive. On the one hand, I'm saying I need an enterprise tool, and on the other hand, I want attended bots because some cases deserve it. While I need an enterprise tool, I now have some use cases where I want to have an attended bot as well and the tool is not very sophisticated on that end right now.

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.

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

The licensing models for this product need improvement. Compared to other tools on the market, it is one of the most expensive. We understand that they will be launching an OCR tool, and we are looking forward to this. We would like to see some desktop automation, although we have been told that the product is not going to be taken in that direction. Rather, they will continue to focus on product automation and we will have to incorporate other solutions.

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.

This solution is lacking attended automation, which is the worst thing about this solution.

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.

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.

Since Blue Prism gives me a lot of flexibility, I don't want the vendor to make any changes out of the box. I believe that there could be more community support, or there could be more support for developers like us from Blue Prism. Blue Prism provides a lot of documentation, but there is a lack of support. This is missing. A lot of times, you get stuck and have to solve the problem yourself. If there is a community that is working together and Blue Prism could support that, it would be very nice. I really don't need any additional features because most of the time we create our own features to work on top of Blue Prism. I would really be happy if Blue Prism can integrate some kind of OCR and machine learning capabilities that are now commonly available in the market.

One area that needs to be improved is the resource monitoring with respect to queuing processes. Specifically, if the user is trying to schedule more than one process then the product will reject it, saying that the process cannot be run due to license limitations. However, competing products do not have this problem. Rather, the processes will be queued and then completed once the resource is available. The robot will automatically pick up the process and run it. I think that this is an area where Blue Prism can do better. In the next release of this solution, I would like to see support for attended robots.

Blue Prism needs to provide better customer support because there are some bugs in the product that make implementation tricky. It is designed more for operational than transactional processes. If Blue Prism incorporated a lot of IQ bots and cognitive processing, then it might be of better value at a lower cost. The issue of the cost of the tool needs to be addressed. To become a Blue Prism partner, it's costly. I think that this is one of the negative aspects of using Blue Prism.

With Blue Prism user cannot automate processes on virtual machines or citrix, for that, user need to use surface automation. If this issue could be overcome, then it would be a super product for automating traditional business processes.

Blue Prism is lagging in terms of artificial intelligence. There is no artificial intelligence in version 4 or 5, which most people are still using as far as I'm aware. To be fair, they do have AI in version 6. Still, it's lagging terribly. Blue Prism is the inventor of the name of the term "RPA," and it's disappointing to see they are sitting around. Blue Prism, in my opinion, is very solid because it has so many years of evolution and backing. It's more solid than the other platforms but I feel that the intelligent automation needs to be jacked up to where the other platforms are, at least. Cognitive learning, for example, where it can actually follow your movements on the screen, is not there in Blue Prism. The bot will only do what you program it to do, whatever processes and objects that you refer to. It only follows that. There is no cognitive learning happening, whereas Automation Anywhere or UiPath can actually follow your movements, follow the steps that you're doing and then, bang, can go ahead and repeat those processes. And at the same time, it will learn to do it better as well. Also, when exceptions are being passed to Excel, there's a huge issue dealing with the date format. You actually have to program your date as a text, as opposed to as a date, and that is something I would like to see improved. I cannot say whether it has been fixed, as I don't have exposure to the new version.