Blue Prism Reviews

Our use cases are account receivables and account payable. In insurance, our use cases are for vetting beneficiaries, upgrading client portfolios, and updating customer's policies.

The entire tool is valuable because it is an enterprise tool. It is on par with other tools like Automation Anywhere or UiPath with the OCR/ICR facilities, analytics, and the entire package for enterprise-level security. It has the highest level of security as compared to any other tool. 

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.

I am in robotics for the last seven to eight years, and I have been using Blue Prism for about three to four years.

Stability-wise, it is a good tool. 

It is definitely scalable. The whole market of RPA is definitely scalable, but it again depends on your feasibility and complexity when you study a particular environment and process. It also depends on whether you want to scale in the whole organization or different departments or you want to scale up into different areas. All RPA solutions are on par in terms of scalability. There is no difference between them.

I don't have any direct experience with them. My solution architect used to handle that. I haven't seen many technical issues because if you are going to deploy the solution and if you've studied enough about the organization and the architecture, then something major is not going to come up. Anything minor, such as securities, passwords, or anything else, can be easily managed.

It is completely run by the solution architects, which is the support team from the RPA side. All technical issues definitely involve the IT team, which is your internal architecture support team and the application support team. You need the support team from the architecture and the IT perspective to manage the technical follow-ups.

I have also used UiPath and Automation Anywhere. All these three solutions stand out because they are at the enterprise level. As compared to UiPath and Automation Anywhere, to use Blue Prism, you need developers who have hardcore development experience. It requires quite a bit on the development side. In Blue Prism, you can also code separately and write a script, which adds more value to it.

Blue Prism came too late into the market with its analytics and process discovery features, whereas Automation Anywhere and UiPath were the first ones in the market. Blue Prism is catching up, and it is in the Gartner quadrant, Forrester, etc. It is not lagging far behind.

In Europe, Blue Prism has captured a lot of markets. In the US and Asia, you will see Automation Anywhere and UiPath in the front race. Microsoft, WorkFusion, and Pega are also catching up now.

It is not that complex. It is about how you study an organization and how an organization's architecture runs through. If it is a big organization or an enterprise, then you have to have solution architects from the customer side and also from our side. Solution architects will go and study the customer's architecture. Based on that, we can select which tools are going to be used and how complex it is going to be. It is very much dependent on how the architecture of an organization is because you are going to place the automation tool into that particular organization. Therefore, the initial feasibility and study play a major role in defining the complexity of your design and the entire format or automation.

Initially, the deployment used to take quite long. Now, it is not client-based; it is web-based, and the installation process has been reduced. You just download, and there is no starting a client and all that kind of stuff. It is much easier now than it was before.

In terms of the staff required for the deployment and maintenance of Blue Prism, it depends on what kind of process you're managing. It is not about the tools; it is about the processes. You need to know:

• How complex they are?
• What is the risk factor for these processes?
• How do they impact the entire automation in terms of cost? That is a very important aspect of support because it is in production, and it is going to have a straight impact on the client's revenue.
  

Generally, one person can easily support around five processes if they fall into the simple category. If the processes fall into the complex category, then you need at least two people managing five processes. By complex, I mean when you have applications that are lengthy and the number of steps of the process are more than 500 or so, and you have to monitor the bots very closely. When the bot or the process breaks, the support team needs to take over and act accordingly. 

The roles and responsibilities and the kind of people needed for maintaining the solution vary based on whether you have agile project management or a lot of projects going on. Typically, you will need a solution architect. You would require an analyst only in the first two or three months or whatever is the period for taking care of the process you want to deploy. After that, you don't require the analysts because it only needs to be overseen from the business side, which will begin with SMEs and the production support team.

Any changes or optimization after 90 days, six months, or a year, due to multiple factors such as legislation changes or anything else, have to be done in the process that is robotized. At this stage, the SMEs and the support team play a very vital role. There should definitely be a very good support function because a lot of follow-ups happen in the process and the production in robotics. To manage them, there should be a very good ticketing system in place. The Agile methodology works perfectly fine, and it adds great value to run your process effectively and having an efficient process, but you definitely need the solution architect, application owner, project management team, and the COE team to manage the entire workflow, work items, or backlog items coming into the support function.

It is a bit higher in cost as compared to Automation Anywhere and UiPath. The rate also differs from client to client. Margins are also important when it comes to costing and licensing. There are some additional costs involved besides the standard licensing costs. You have the development team cost, which includes the project manager, development team, analyst, and testers. You also need a team manager. You also have the tools cost, architecture cost, platform cost, and the licensing cost of each bot.

You should suggest a tool only after you study the architecture of an enterprise. Every tool has its own features, upside, and downside. It is not about necessarily going for Blue Prism, Automation Anywhere, or UiPath. For implementing a solution, you definitely need to look in the market to find out what suits you. You can then go for it.  

Blue Prism, Automation Anywhere, or UiPath are on par. There is not much difference in those tools at an enterprise level. The early development cost and the cost of the platform differ in these three tools. There are some clients who say that "We want only Blue Prism. We don't want to look at anything else." In such a scenario, you can definitely go for Blue Prism because it is on par with other competitors. 

The biggest lesson that we have learned from using Blue Prism is that it is important to choose the right processes and the right complexity of the processes. You can't choose highly complex processes where you have around 800,000 steps or very volatile processes where the team is involved in the application layer or at the process level very frequently. These kinds of things could be avoided.

I would rate Blue Prism an eight out of ten because it is a very old tool. It has been around in the market for quite a while, and they have their own learnings. It is a complete package at an enterprise level, where you can have analytics and attended and unattended automation. You can run your scripts, and at an enterprise level, even security aspects are very strong as compared to what is generally required by a client. There is room for improvement. All the new features that are coming up are not being used by many clients, and a lot of learning has to happen.

Blue Prism takes good security measures and is user friendly.

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 have been using Blue Prism since 2014.

It is stable.

We have 300 resources that are using Blue Prism at different levels.

It can be maintained by three people and it can be done by our IT team as well. It is not hard to maintain

If you are a customer or a gold partner, you'll be aligned with a customer success manager who can escalate the case quickly and you'll receive a resolution in no time.

After I started using Blue Prism, I also started working with Automation Anywhere and Ui Path.

Blue Prism has its own market share. The large three or four organizations use Blue Prism's security and scalability features, which can be applied at an enterprise level. Some things need to be improved. These are things that are lacking in other tools as well, so it is a fair competition.

The initial setup was straightforward. 

If everything is set up well like the restrictions that are on the PCs are up to mark, it will take 20 to 25 minutes for the complete installation.

My advice is that not all activities can be automated by using Blue Prism. There are certain levels of criteria that need to be calculated before choosing a particular RPA tool. There are things that need to be considered before choosing economically.

In the next release, I would like to see improvement in cognitive abilities, AI, and document processing.

I would rate Blue Prism an eight out of ten. 

We have a lot of use cases for automation, including testing our website.

The most valuable feature is that you can create automations without coding.

The web-based designer is very user-friendly and easy to use.

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

We have been using Blue Prism for about three years.

At this point, it is hard to say how scalable it is. We have more than 200 employees using it.

This product is very easy to maintain, so we haven't had to contact technical support.

Prior to using Blue Prism, we gained experience using UiPath. We have now started using Automation Anywhere, as well. Each of these RPA products has different features and we choose the one that best meets the needs of the project.

For example, UiPath is very good at text file automation, whereas Automation Anywhere is better at web-based or cloud-based automation.

The initial setup is not complex. I would say that it is really easy.

We had assistance implementing Blue Prism from SAP.

Blue Prism is less expensive than some of the other RPA solutions. The licensing fees depend on the number of users that you have.

I would rate this solution an eight 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.

The product is pretty good so far.

The initial setup is not complex.

It's not too difficult to configure everything.

It's fast to get up and running if you use a cloud deployment.

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.

I've been using this solution for about six months.

I've worked with UiPath in the past.

The solution's initial setup has a sort of medium level of difficulty. I won't say it was complex per se. I would definitely not say it was complex to do it or to configure it. 

The price is low and it's reasonable, however, I expected more to be included in the product. Now, if I have to go and buy all these other extras, that price is going to go up. For instance, if I use OCR capability and I'm not using their product, the Decipher product, I have to go and buy an ABBYY license separately. That means I have to manage more licenses. It's not included in the package where I have a good OCR solution that works with it, I must now go and buy and manage separate licenses. It is just a nightmare.

If you look at the supply chain, you now need to get a separate license from another company if you want to buy licenses to OCR with Blue Prism. And that is where the cost increases and then the investment becomes a little bit more difficult to justify. 

I'm a customer and an end-user.

I'm in a position within our company where people are saying to me, "We've got Power Automate from Microsoft, why should I use Blue Prism?" And with the Microsoft suite, Power Automate, and all of the cognitive automation is already included as part of Azure. And here I sit with Blue Prism, and now I need new gateways to integrate with that. It's going to be a little bit more work to make it work with Microsoft Azure than the product that is already there in Microsoft Azure. I must now basically justify to the business why do I need Blue Prism.

It makes it very difficult in terms of their strategy if all the extra products that we want, we have to buy additionally. Whereas, if I compare it to the Microsoft Azure Suite of things, you get all of these features without having to buy them separately as you would need to with Blue Prism. It's a very difficult sell to the business.

I would advise others to go straight to the cloud and not mess around with the on-premise solution. The reason is the on-premise solution will take you six months before you can start to show anything. Going to the cloud is probably a better option to get the results out faster.

I'd rate the solution at a seven out of ten.

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.

We were using Blue Prism mainly for simple RPA processing.

I work with advisors, and we have a lot of clients that have a lot of processes. We use the solution for the cost and management processes. When we need to organize some information we join the information into a report.

I use the basic features that are very useful.

There are some new tools on the market that work better than Blue Prism. When Blue Prism receives information I have found other RPA solutions refresh the application better. At this moment it's not the best application.

Blue Prism could improve the integration with the development of applications. For example, a type of automation where we can build applications and integrate them with the RPA. This is something that we would use a lot and is not available in Blue Prism.

I have been using Blue Prism for approximately two years.

The support is great for Blue Prism when you are implementing the solution. However, since it is a new solution there is not a lot of information on the forums.

The installation difficulty level depends on what processes are going to be being used.

My advice to others wanting to implement this solution is to make sure they evaluate their requirements and it is important to have good integration with their systems. I would recommend using templates for their data because if they do not it can create problems.

I rate Blue Prism an eight out of ten.

We use Blue Prism to target the financial service industry. Our core use cases are specifically in insurance and banking.

Within our company, there are two developers that use this solution. 

Whether we increase our usage of this solution is going to be a market-based or market-driven decision. 

Although it's very simple to work with, it's a bit limited in terms of capability compared to similar solutions. 

I have been using Blue Prism since the beginning of 2021.

Blue Prism is stable enough. 

Blue Prism could be more scalable. 

Most of our use cases are back office-based. They usually don't interfere with our day-to-day operations. We tend to run most of our robots in the evening after working hours. The support is mainly remote. So it's not really a big deal.

We started with UiPath and Automation Anywhere.

Before we started using this solution, we were programming directly from things like Python, which was really cumbersome and complicated. The mid-levels specifically around continuity, and plus one capability internally. That's why we decided to use existing development tools like UiPath, Automation Anywhere, and Blue Prism. From an implementation perspective, they're a lot simpler to use. We no longer have to do a full-on manual implementation and develop from scratch.

The big vendors should consider some sort of unbundled pricing model that allows them to price accordingly to a customer's needs. Because developing robots manually took too long, this solution gave us a lot of flexibility when it came to pricing. A lot of global vendors have a very big problem understanding the price structure or price requirements of frontier markets, like Africa.

Compared to UiPath and Automation Anywhere, on a scale from one to ten, I would give Blue Prism a rating of six. 

I would recommend Blue Prism to others. From a tool perspective, UiPath is by far and away the best tool to use. Unfortunately, it's rigid around its pricing. Blue Prism is more affordable, but it won't provide you with the same features and functionality.