Blue Prism Reviews

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.

Anything which is redundant and has the same steps can be easily automated with Blue prism hence reducing manual operation and manpower.

We have a project in which a user requests through an email, Blue prism pickups that email and according to the request finds out which access has to be provided and follows the same procedure to give access. Once access is provided a business notification is reverted back. In case of an exception the business is notified in such scenarios after maximum retries. 

We started with a very small team and small projects. As the project started getting success with Blue Prism we have a large number of teams now just for automating all the business procedures. Larger time was saved after automating the processes.

The business was very much satisfied with the results. Many projects involving Java, Mainframe SAP, Web browsers, and Windows were made. We did also use PDF automation using OCR and Surface automation which helped tremendously as our company is payroll-based and involves lots of file processing in which the toughest is interacting with PDFs. 

• Automating: Blue prism helps in reducing manual operation and manpower.
• Reporting: As cases are handled by Blue Prism we can extract all the logs and provide reports and analyze reports as per the need. We can use the reporting and dashboard feature of Blue Prism. And if the business needs a separated report we can create a separate report for such cases also by creating a process.
• Higher Productivity: Blue Prism can run in unattended mode for 27*7. No manual person needed other than Support.
• Cost-effective: As manpower is reduced.
• Higher Security: Blue Prism has inbuilt security features.
  

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. 

I have been using Blue Prism for three years until now.

I was trained in .Net, and from then working in Blue Prism.

We used UiPath which was not so much effective than Blue Prism.

For simple processes use UiPath and Automation Anywhere.

For medium to high complexity processes use Blue Prism.

For much complex process involving decision making and much more of AI use Work fusin.

We did evaluate other options:

• Automation Anywhere 
• Work fusion

We are primarily using Blue Prism for automating repetitive Excel tasks and preparing reports. This involves downloading reports and data from websites, followed by data massaging. Most of the automation is within Excel. 

The studio is very easy to use. It is not just for coders, as you can have a diagrammatic representation of the process.

The debugging is great because you can step into the code during the process, and you can also re-step, which means returning to a previous one. You can also change the code while the process is running and see the effect without having to stop the execution.

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.

I have been using Blue Prism for the past three years.

Blue Prism is working fine and the stability is fantastic.

It is difficult to expand the use of Blue Prism in an environment. For example, if I have 10 members in my team and I decide that it isn't enough, and in response, I want to onboard 100 more people, it's difficult to do. This is related to the costs of licenses and infrastructure.

The difficult question becomes if I want to get 100 more people involved in automation, how do I scale the team?

When it comes to scalability, nowadays, it's about citizen development models. Everyone wants to use RPA, which means that any number of people might be doing it. As a center of excellence, if I tell them that they need additional infrastructure, licenses, and training to accommodate it, then onboarding 100 people is a large commitment.

Improvements could be made by supplying a URL to the website for training, creating group licenses, and using a plug-in instead of a dedicated machine or virtual machine. If we could install an agent on a machine without any license for development purposes then it would be helpful.

Currently, we have approximately 100 users.

I have been in contact with technical support many times, and I would say that they are good. It is robust I would say, although not very quick. There seems to be a lack in terms of regional representation, which means that it takes longer because the support is online.

We also use UiPath and Automation Anywhere.

Our adoption of Blue Prism is an expansion in our automation efforts, and we did not switch from using these other products.

Most of the RPA solutions are very similar, although the debugging is better in Blue Prism than other products. Instead of being able to change the code while it is running and then have it continue, with other products you have to restart the process and monitor it after each change is made. Debugging in Blue Prism saves a lot of time.

The initial setup is simple and it took us approximately half an hour to complete.

Our in-house team handled the implementation and deployment.

Maintenance is required and it is handled by our "Run and Maintain" team. Their primary job is to make sure that the bot runs at the right time.

Our licensing fees are approximately $5,000 USD per year. The price is based upon the licensing model, where clients are assigned categories such as platinum, gold, and silver customers.

Everything is included with the cost of the license. 

This is a good RPA product and definitely one that I recommend. When I want to automate stuff with the web site, perform web scraping, or interacting with Excel and SAP, it is quite stable. The bot does not just fail. Once you capture the underlying application control, it's there and will not just break.

I've seen other RPA tools wherein you do the automation, do the recording, and once you replay it, it doesn't work because of some random lag in the timing of the application. Similarly, if something changes then it may not work. In Blue Prism, you have complete control over that.

Overall, I would say that this tool is very good. It is one of the best in the market.

I would rate this solution an eight out of ten.

Across different business areas, the use cases differ.  The back-office, for example, are more along the lines of reconciliation of data, the back-end operations. We have use cases in our dispatching department as well, where use cases can be like data is gathered for traders to make intelligent decisions, or nominations power plants to the website. 

Some use cases in our procurement area and our financial services.

Our goal is to free our employees to do more value-added tasks, while the robots do the manual activities. That way, employees can move on to more sophisticated tasks. The robot does its work but the employees are still in control. For example, the dispatcher is still on the desk and looking at what a robot has nominated, for example.

We have use cases where RPA is integrating it with machine learning, with chat bots. . Our idea was to start with the basic robot and then make them more sophisticated by adding natural-language processing or machine learning. We have a couple of use cases there, as well. But the repetitive-task use cases are more common.

Our application server and our database are on Azure cloud. But you have to use a virtual machine to access it and that virtual desktop environment was on-prem. Currently, a project is going on to move them to virtual machines as well. So the Blue Prism hosting is currently on our private cloud, Azure, and the virtual machines are on-prem and will be moved to Azure in two months.

There are multiple advantages. 

Time saving is definitely one of them. We do not build robots if they are not going to be effective; Process Improvement is key. You don't want to automate a non effective process.

it can be quality, it can be 24/7 operations, it can be compliance. 

For example, in terms of time, a back-office operations guy would spend, let's say, a number of hours doing reconciliation activities from one system to another, which is something that can be done by a robot quite quickly.

When you look at the front-office, for example, the advantages are more quality-based — less human error. Our dispatching desk , a human error in entering values/nomination can cause imbalance/penalty costs. So five minutes of dispatcher time is different than five minutes in back-office operations. That's why we never say it's only time-savings. The benefit could be avoiding the cost of error. And the opportunity, to do more value adding tasks in the time saved.

As for 24/7 operations, for example a billing robot which can generate the bills before employees are in office.  Then there are some compliance or audit-related situations, where you need to prove auditability of some of the processes. It used to be a human saying, "Yes, I have done the check," but now, if you have a robot checking it, you have everything in the system so an auditor can look into it. I would not say time is the main motivation; the motivations are multiple.

Another advantage, is future of work and modernising the workplace.

And then some are really not technology-related, is that business and IT are coming closer together. Business understands IT and IT understands the business.  We have a federated COE. I am the head of the COE and it is more like a matrix organization where people from different organizations report to me functionally, and I just run an end-to-end customer journey. The way we implement has also changed. It's not that you build a robot and it's with IT, and IT maintains it. No. The business is still accountable for the result of the robot. these are not quantifiable advantages but you see them at the organizational level.

The ease of use is quite good. We have some internal developers so some of our training is more an introduction to robotics. The second module of training is more delivery-related, using the robotic operating model. The last one is Blue Prism-related training and that phase is already available via the Blue Prism portal. We have access to the portal with Blueprism. if somebody is interested in developing, they can learn that via the portal. I make the environment available to them. But the ease of use is really good because a lot of business people, who have some idea about logic and who can think in logic, can configure things, because there is no coding.

The other features are quite comparable to what is in the market right now. There's nothing special about them. But ease of use is important because the business can also handle it.

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 have been using Blue Prism for a little more than three years.

It's stable. We haven't faced any problems with it.

We haven't faced any issues. We are in the scaling phase and we are scaling well. We don't have a problem there. It's scalable.

We have > 60 robots that are live and the demand is high. There are multiple business areas that are live, and there are many more in the pipeline. 

Blue Prism's technical support is really good. If you raise a ticket you get an answer within 24 hours, and we have not paid anything extra for support. The maximum I have had to wait was two days. Getting an answer in one or two days is really good. And we generally get an answer from the product team, which is very good. And if they can't solve it via the support ticket in writing, they call you and discuss it.

You also have account partners so if something needs to be addressed quickly, you can make a call. Blue Prism has also visited us two or three times and that is really good. We have a good relationship.

We did not have a previous solution.

One of the major features, and it's why we selected Blue Prism, is that it's an enterprise-level automation. We wanted something that would be enterprise software, so we could monitor it centrally and maintain it centrally, while giving people the freedom to work independently as well. We didn't want a situation where I build a robot and now I'm looking at it on my screen. The idea was to free up peoples' time so that they could do something value-add while the robot is running on its own machine. This enterprise-level type of software was the need and Blue Prism fulfills that.

I have been involved right from the beginning and the initial setup was okay. It was not something that IT could not handle. We didn't run into a lot of trouble.

Setting up our infrastructure was not a problem from the Blue Prism side, but it was more with our infrastructure. Our company is a little bit complex. But it did not take more than four to six weeks for the infrastructure setup, and that was three-and-a-half years ago, so it might be even faster now. 

For maintenance of the solution I have an application manager. I have somebody who does service-enabling so that the robots can move to production. For delivery, I have a project manager, and there are BAs and developers and, for each business area, I have an implementation lead and, of course, a process expert/owner. In my COE I also have these roles and I also have a deployment lead who takes care of the policies and the procedures around the robotics for the entire organization. I also have a solution architect and another role called dependency manager, because there are a lot of different engines we have to manage since we're working with a lot of applications.

We used a consultant in the beginning and we also now use an integrator.

The use cases I outlined are the areas where we are seeing ROI: Quality, compliance, error-avoidance, opportunity cost, and time-saving.

The pricing is scalable for a enterprise-level solution. It's quite scalable and it's quite comparable with the market. If you really scale well over the number of licenses you have, you can achieve economies of scale and it comes out to be very cheap.

There are no costs in addition to the standard licensing fees. There is an option to increase your support levels by paying another 10 percent or 20 percent on your licenses, depending on how much support you want. We are still happy with the support.

There were three leaders at the time we did our evaluation three years ago and were quite equal in terms of their functionalities. One of the factors that led us to choose Blue Prism was the enterprise-level functionality. 

My advice is "go for it." It's good. We are satisfied that we have achieved with the tool, and we are continuing with it. 

Having said that, I would advise that you are free to explore the market and do a study, but in the end all the tools are very similar. It's more about how you will handle it in your organization. That is what is more important. There is not just the tooling around it. There is also the people management aspect, and process management. So there's a lot that goes along with it; more than just the tool. One of the things that I like about Blue Prism is that their operating model is quite good.

The biggest lesson I've learned is not about Blue Prism, it's about RPA as a whole. As I said, it's not just the tool or the technology, it's about how you bring in change management in the company. How do you take people along with you? How do you explain the journey? How do you set up the operating model? Because for scaling, your operating model is really important. You can't just put two robots in place and then think that you will scale because there are a lot of considerations around it. How will your organization adapt to it? For example, when a human joins your company he or she needs an ID. What about robots? Do they need an ID? How do those processes fit in when they operate? How will they communicate with humans? There's a lot of change management around it for the whole organization. 

It's a digital transformation, or you could just call it a transformation. You need to think about a lot of moving parts around it. The tool and the technology are quite easy actually, because all the companies are quite experienced in it. But change management and the transformation part are quite difficult. 

Another thing to think about is how do you choose the right processes to automate? You could think about just automating randomly, or you could think about whether a process is even needed for the organization. Why is somebody doing it? Maybe that process is not even needed; it's obsolete. You might get rid of some processes. We did that as well, and sometimes RPA is not the right solution. So think about automation as a whole. These are some of the things that I was given advice on.

I'm not a technology specialist, I'm a process transformation expert. It's not about technology in the end, it's about what you have done as a transformation to the company. The ways of working have changed. The way you look at a process has changed. A back-office analyst is now building robots himself, for himself. The way he's looking at the process has totally changed. 

We do a lot of RPA training as well. We have a in-house-built curriculum where we have multiple training modules. When people do the training, they change the way they look at processes. They are already thinking about robots or digitalization. You can call it the future of work. When you began this journey, you never thought you would have these kinds of advantages. But now you have them.

I would have given Blue Prism a nine out of 10 if they had delivered on their roadmap, especially Decipher.

I use Blue Prism mainly for backend operations where I don't need a lot of manual intervention coming in. Blue Prism is mainly for backend operations like auditing, reporting, compliance, and regulatory requirements.

I use Blue Prism for my customers. I really don't use Blue Prism in my own company or for my own automation. I do automation for my clients. 

If you look at the banking sector, there is a lot of regulatory compliance to be adhered to, and that's where Blue Prism has helped me a lot. Because of automatic compliance checking and auditing, Blue Prism actually gives my clients a lot of benefits, i.e. as an auditor which can check up to 100 transactions a day.

I can now basically sit back and look at over 100 transactions being checked per day. Blue Prism really brings down the number of people required, and it increases the speed. 

Blue Prism assists us in risk management through our compliance to regulations where the cost has been brought down to a very large extent.

The feature of Blue Prism that I find most valuable is the ability to build my own custom objects or use custom logic for doing the particular task. If there is a task that Blue Prism cannot do out of the box, Blue Prism provides me the facility of designing one and integrating it into the application. 

This process is called Visual Basic Objects. I can do all I like because I can add to the functionality of the Blue Prism tool as and when I require it.

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.

The solution is actually based on the previous technologies which are very stable from Microsoft. This is the SQL server and the WPF. I don't see problems with the stability of the solution. It's really pretty good.

The scalability's actually in the hands of the person who is developing the bots. Blue Prism out of the box is good enough to provide a platform. After that, the developer's creativity is to really scale it up. I don't see any problems with the scalability in Blue Prism. It's one of the finest compared to the other products.

In my customer organization, we use 15 developers. Everybody works on Blue Prism. In our customer organization, when we've written the bots, there are not a lot of people working on it because the work has been automated. 

The bots run on hundreds of machines right now, but there are very few people required to monitor that execution.

There are two roles. One is the person who is executing the bots and monitoring the results. That is a very small number, but the beneficiaries of this automation are multiple. 

We have a client where they have over 200 auditors. It's an insurance company. All of these auditors actually get the results from the automation which we have written in Blue Prism. 

The number of beneficiaries is much larger than the number of people we require to execute the bots.

When we deploy, we actually send in three people at the customer side to deploy the bots. We normally take about a week to have these three people on site, who will set up everything and we can also train on how these bots run, i.e. how these bots are to be maintained, automated, and monitored. 

It takes about a week. These three guys are there for a week for this particular exercise. Then we basically leave one person there for a month or so. By this time the customer's personnel are trained enough to take over from our guy. Then our guy comes back.

We have been in this for quite a long time. I myself have put in 33 years in the IT industry. Most of the time it happens that we are able to solve the problem on our own. We normally don't need to go to Blue Prism, but there have been situations that we wish that the technical support could have been better. 

Because we ran into technical problems, then the solution had to be found on our own. We basically had to create a workaround for getting the job done.

We have the background experience in the base technology which Blue Prism uses. Blue Prism doesn't do a lot of OCR, Optical Character Recognition, out of the box so we built our own. 

We tried to get in touch with the technical support, and then finally we figured out that it's not available out of the box. We built OCR functionality for Blue Prism ourselves and we extended the tool.

We work with almost every solution: Automation Anywhere, WorkFusion, WinAutomation, etc. We work with everything. Sometimes it happens that the tool which is needed for the client is Blue Prism.

Sometimes the client wants us to use Blue Prism. Sometimes we propose that we use Blue Prism for the client. We don't distinguish between which tool is good, bad or ugly. We basically go by which tool is specifically required for the job.

The setup was straightforward. There are scripts that do the installation and setup. The only thing that I want Blue Prism to look at is the deployment scenario. 

When we deploy this Blue Prism based bot, if we can get some sort of scripting help from Blue Prism in deployment, that would be nice.

The development takes about a month for a particular project, but we need a couple of days to set up the whole thing at the customer's side. I think that can be reduced a bit. 

We have our own scripts written, but our strategy is to write scripts and then install them at the customer's side. Still, there is more that could be done.

We do the Blue Prism installation ourselves. We don't use anyone from the outside.

We really don't bear the costs. The cost is borne by the customer. It runs into about $100,000 per year per customer for Blue Prism. 

We need to add the hardware costs to set up the servers for the SQL server, and then we need to budget for about a week to set up the entire infrastructure. 

We need to add the cost of the people who will be working during this week. There are other costs, but it is the same for any tool. 

We normally budget around $30,000 for the first year for the hardware, setup, and people cost.

We evaluate other options every time. It's not that we do it only once. We have experience with seven tools. We basically look at all seven tools in terms of the features provided, the flexibility, the resources that we have, and also the cost of the tool. It also depends on the budget the customer has. 

Then we select which tool we are using based on an assessment matrix. We figure out which tool actually fits into all the criteria of the project.

We've evaluated WinAutomation, Automation Anywhere, Kofax Kapow, and WorkFusion. Those are the main tools.

Most of my customers, which are large financial services/institutions, supply chain, and logistics companies, are now looking to scale up by a factor of 10. 

We have a customer who is a bank in South East Asia. We have developed about 32 bots and now they are looking at around 200+ more to be deployed.

It depends on how much it costs them to automate, how much budget they have, how much time they have, and what the benefit is that will come in. Most of the time the benefits are huge as long as they are able to create the budget for it.

There's only one piece of advice, and it's not dependent on Blue Prism. The advice is actually to get two different sorts of people who are good at the job:

• One is your designer of the automation system.
• The second one is the developer of your automation. 

If everybody is looking at automation, the first investment should be into getting the right people onto the team.

Blue Prism comes in at a 9/10. It comes in at nine because it's a mix of everything that a developer would want from a platform and from a solution. 

Blue Prism gives you flexibility. It gives you scalability. It can basically go and do large data processing in the back end without disturbing anybody very efficiently. 

That's why I give it nine because like all other tools, the moment you bring in the front end with all of the manual intervention, you run into delays. You run into problems. You run into risks of creating mistakes and errors, then getting lost within the automation. Blue Prism can handle large volumes and that's why I give it a nine.

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 tool's user interface is very intuitive. 

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

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

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

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

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

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

The end users are happy about the solution.

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.