Great low code platform, however room for improvement
What do you like best?
Blue Prism is a great piece of software for low code, easy process automation, its capabilities can be extended far beyond basic UI process automation and integration with Web APIs are easily acheivable.
From a dev environment to a prod environment only takes a few clicks and Blue Prism makes putting your processes live very easy. The key with any RPA platform is that its not a no code solution, there are times that you will have to write your own code, on the platform and Blue Prism is no different. To get the most out of Blue Prism, you will need to dedicate resources to build solutions within Blue Prism otherwise you may not see the cost savings to the product.
What do you dislike?
While Blue Prism is great, it does fall short in some basic integration areas, such as regular expressions in application models and general regex matching as a whole. To really get the most out of the product as previously mentioned you will find yourself writing simple code objects that perhaps the platform could do out of the box (such as checking if a column exists when working with collections)
I think that it would be great if Blue Prism had better integration between a dev and prod environment, at the moment to import new releases you have manually export / import but it would be nice if there was a package release system that automatically imports a new release into a prod environment (thinking of continuous integration).
It would also be great if Blue Prism could integration better testing options such as defined unit tests, before a release is made available, this way a developer can easily catch errors in their code that they might not otherwise be aware of.
What problems are you solving with the product? What benefits have you realized?
At Norfolk County Council, we're using Blue Prism to not only automate our IT requests from end users via Assyst, we are also using the platform to complete payroll related tasks and help with the COVID response by using RPA to automatically register local businesses with the Department of Health and Social Care for the UK's Workplace Surveillence Testing programme. We've only been developing for a few months, however we have managed to save NCC as a whole a huge number of hours just in a few "quick win" type projects.
