The Industry Standard
Overall Satisfaction with Blue Prism
Blue Prism is primarily used for automation internally in Fujitsu. Fujitsu uses Blue Prism to automate many Project Management, HR and Finance process saving on average one hour per week in HR and finance. We use Blue Prism to verify invoices and use OCR to scrape printed documents into an Excel format. These tasks would usually be done by hand and would be time-consuming as well as tedious. Blue Prism's capabilities allow for human intervention when necessary, say if an invoice is too large to be signed off by a robot, which is incredibly advantageous. Blue Prism is also our key product and the cornerstone of our Fujitsu RPA center of excellence.
Pros
- The huge amount of processes available out of the box allows for all simple processes to be quickly automated, and more complex solutions are catered to.
- The process flow is very easy for a non-technical person to understand, for example, if a project manager wanted to see progress on automation, that manager could simply look at the flow and understand the process. It uses standard flow diagram icons that are easily distinguishable. This is in contrast to UiPath which can be more complex from merely glancing at it.
- Blue Prism already is an industry leader, clients are very eager to buy and implement despite its fairly high price.
Cons
- Blue Prism has no trial software, which meant I could not learn it in my spare time without a Fujitsu approved and paid license. This delayed my learning and lead me to pursue UiPath instead, which has a community free edition which is very powerful.
- The software looks like Windows 98 compared to slicker, newer software such as UiPath. This is not really an issue but visual appeal is very important, especially in pre-sales situations.
- If you haven't been strict with yourself with planning and laying out your process flow, it can get very messy very quickly. More forethought is needed to create a workflow vs. with competitors.
- Massive time saving, 1 hour per person per week in HR and finance internally.
- All new joiners have had to have new Blue Prism licenses, which are expensive.
- After the license was bought, our developers quickly had certification, which meant they could be billable on the project. That shows Blue Prism's easy learning curve.
UiPath is a more visually appealing, middle of the range, free alternative to Blue Prism. It's, in my opinion, easier to pick up, obviously due to a person being able to download it for free and try it out, and also because of it's excellent online academy. However, Blue Prism is practically the industry standard, and its integrations with massively powerful tools put it in a league of its own.
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