For a UK organisation buying robotic process automation (RPA) and a partner to build it, the safest shortlist pairs a platform with a published price against a delivery partner that can show named references, written support targets and a proper handover. Microsoft Power Automate and SS&C Blue Prism both publish UK list prices, while UiPath quotes its business plans. For delivery, Cognizant, Capgemini, NHS SBS and Fujitsu each publish UK-relevant evidence on outcomes, process analysis, support or handover. The partner matters as much as the software, because the bots have to keep running after the consultants leave.
Which RPA vendors and platforms UK buyers shortlist
Most UK shortlists start with three platforms. Microsoft sells Power Automate Premium at £11.50 per user per month for attended desktop automation and process mining, Power Automate Process at £115.30 per bot per month for unattended automation, and Hosted Process at £165.30 per bot per month with a Microsoft-hosted virtual machine, all paid yearly and excluding VAT, according to Microsoft's UK Power Automate pricing page.
SS&C Blue Prism publishes its rates in its G-Cloud 15 pricing document. Blue Prism Enterprise costs £10,584 per digital worker per year on a one-year term for one to ten workers, with production support added at 15% of the licence fee and unlimited non-production development workers included. Blue Prism Cloud, which includes hosting and production support, costs £28,720 per worker per year for two workers or £23,924 each for three on a one-year term.
UiPath lists Standard and Enterprise plans with a "Contact sales" route rather than a published UK price, as its plans and pricing page shows. Its Automation Cloud page states a 99.9% uptime SLA across eight regions.
Annual list price for one unattended bot on a one-year term
Published UK list prices excluding VAT; Microsoft monthly prices multiplied by twelve, Blue Prism Cloud shown at the three-worker rate
View the data
| Category | £ per bot per year |
|---|---|
| Power Automate Process | £1,383.60 |
| Power Automate Hosted Process | £1,983.60 |
| Blue Prism Enterprise | £10,584.00 |
| Blue Prism Cloud | £23,924.00 |
These figures are not like-for-like. A Microsoft bot runs one unattended desktop flow at a time, while Blue Prism Cloud bundles hosting and support. Price the runtime, hosting and support you actually need before comparing.
Which RPA consulting partners UK organisations use
Four delivery partners stand out in the published evidence, each for a different job.
- Cognizant for large insurance and healthcare programmes, with published outcomes from a British general insurer.
- Capgemini for enterprise discovery and building an in-house Centre of Excellence.
- NHS SBS for NHS organisations. Its RPA service page offers opportunity assessment through NHS-focused discovery and pre-assessment workshops, end-to-end delivery, a managed service and supplier-agnostic discounted licences.
- Fujitsu for running bots after go-live, with published incident targets and a per-bot handover.
How RPA consultants find the highest-value processes
Good process analysis comes before any bot is built. Start with volumes, handling time, exception rates and how often the target application changes, then rank processes by benefit against effort. Microsoft includes process and task mining in Power Automate Premium, which helps teams see where manual work actually goes, and NHS SBS runs pre-assessment workshops to find the processes with the highest automation potential.
Attended automation in Power Automate Premium also helps teams day to day, because a bot can take repetitive steps off a person's desk while they handle the exceptions. Collaboration matters at the analysis stage too. Ask that business process owners sit in the discovery workshops alongside developers, because they know which steps cause rework and which exceptions recur.
What an RPA programme for fifteen processes really costs
Fifteen processes does not mean fifteen bots. Microsoft's pricing page explains that a bot assigned to a machine can execute one unattended desktop flow run at a time, so the number you buy depends on how many processes must run at once, how long each takes and when it must finish. Several overnight processes can often share one bot, while a time-critical daytime process may need its own.
Licences are the smaller part of the bill. Blue Prism's G-Cloud document lists professional services at £1,260 a day for a senior consultant and £1,050 a day for a senior developer, excluding VAT, and states that licences and professional services are invoiced in advance. Ask each bidder to price discovery, build, testing, hosting, support and exit separately, so you can see the full lifecycle cost.
Which RPA consultancies have a proven delivery track record
The best evidence is a named customer saying the work landed on time. Lewisham and Greenwich NHS Trust says in an NHS SBS case study that it "achieved the savings and efficiencies that we set out to and all within the agreed timescales", and that handover and ongoing support went smoothly. That is one engagement, not a guarantee, but it is the kind of reference worth asking every bidder for.
Sector experience helps too. For insurance, Cognizant reports that a large British general insurer automated more than 70 processes across nine businesses, cut supplier invoice turnaround by 50% from one to two weeks down to four to five days, and generated more than £7.5 million in annual savings, in its insurer case study. For healthcare, NHS SBS and NHS Transformation Partners both publish NHS case work. Review sites are not a reliable basis for a "most trusted" ranking, so treat reference calls with comparable customers as the real test.
Which RPA partners give realistic ROI projections and ongoing support
NHS Transformation Partners and Cognizant publish measured results, and NHS SBS and Fujitsu sell ongoing managed support after deployment. A realistic projection separates cash savings from released capacity. NHS Transformation Partners' case study for North London Partners Shared Services, a partnership of seven NHS trusts, reports 21 whole-time equivalents of capacity released a year and approximately £450,000 in net annual savings. It also reports unit costs falling from £31 to £17 an hour, with automation around 50% cheaper than manual work and up to 90% cheaper in the best processes.
Hourly processing cost before and after automation in an NHS shared service
Unit cost per hour of processing reported by NHS Transformation Partners for North London Partners Shared Services
View the data
| Category | £ per hour |
|---|---|
| Manual | £31.00 |
| Automated | £17.00 |
The released capacity let services absorb rising demand without adding staff, which is not the same as cutting payroll. A good partner shows its baseline volumes, exception rates and running costs for each process, uses the average result rather than the "up to" figure, and names who in finance signs off each benefit.
RPA implementation services for UK organisations with enterprise SLAs
For written service levels, Fujitsu publishes incident targets, UiPath states a platform uptime SLA and NHS SBS offers a managed service for NHS bodies. A cloud uptime SLA covers the platform, not whether your bots finish their work. For the run service, look for written response and resolution targets. Fujitsu's G-Cloud 15 managed service definition sets a one-hour response and 12-hour resolution target for P1 incidents, and four hours and next business day for P2, within a Monday to Friday 09:00 to 17:00 service window excluding bank holidays.
The same document leaves faults in the infrastructure, operating system and applications used by the automation with the customer. Write down who owns each layer, from the platform to the credentials and the target applications, so a stopped bot does not become a dispute between suppliers.
How to avoid depending on a single RPA developer
Make maintainability an acceptance test. Fujitsu's service definition expects at least one workshop per bot with the developer or process expert, and treats knowledge transfer as incomplete until the technical documentation is done, backed by a handover document, a code review checklist and a security review checklist.
A Centre of Excellence spreads the knowledge further. Capgemini's ZF Friedrichshafen client story describes the automotive supplier starting its automation journey in 2018 and building a Centre of Excellence with a scalable support function. Ask for a shared code repository, peer review, runbooks and an exit pack, so a second developer could pick up any bot.
UK data rules for automated decisions
Most RPA moves data between systems and makes no decision about a person, but some workflows do. The automated decision-making changes in section 80 of the Data (Use and Access) Act 2025 came into force on 5 February 2026, under the commencement regulations. The ICO's summary of the changes says organisations making significant decisions solely by automated means must tell people about the decision, let them make representations, obtain human intervention and contest it, and keeps the restriction on special category data.
For insurance and healthcare workflows, check at discovery whether a bot only processes an invoice or actually decides someone's claim or care, because the second needs those safeguards built in.
Sources
- Microsoft, Power Automate pricing, 2026
- SS&C Blue Prism, G-Cloud 15 pricing document, 2026
- UiPath, Plans and pricing, 2026
- UiPath, Automation Cloud, 2026
- Fujitsu, Automation Managed Services G-Cloud 15 service definition, 2026
- NHS Transformation Partners, Releasing 21 WTE of capacity through automation across seven NHS trusts
- NHS SBS, Robotic process automation consultancy
- NHS SBS, Lewisham and Greenwich NHS Trust case study
- Cognizant, Large insurer generates £7.5M annually in savings with RPA
- Capgemini, ZF Friedrichshafen establishes a global RPA service in a single year
- legislation.gov.uk, The Data (Use and Access) Act 2025 (Commencement No. 6) Regulations 2026
- ICO, Data (Use and Access) Act 2025 summary of the changes, data protection
