SS&C | Blue Prism Chorus - Ask Us Anything recap

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Community Team
Community Team



Earlier this month we ran our Chorus Ask Us Anything online seminar, in which Chorus experts @EricBradnam @JeffreyGrisenth @KavithaChennupa @JanelleSullivan and Hidayatullah Mohammed gave an exciting introduction to the Chorus Products now available to SS&C Blue Prism customers.
We saw a high number of questions asked ahead of time and live and have compiled the key questions and answers here. Jeffrey and Eric have also answered to the questions in relation to language support that we did not have time to cover in the AUA, and these are included at the end of the blog.

Q: By "Process Intelligence" do you mean BPM (Business Process Management) or Process Mining or something like Task Mining reaching application data logs to discover process models?

Jeffrey: We're referring to process intelligence or BPPI (Blue Prism Process Intelligence), the product. Blue Prism's approach to process intelligence includes both process mining and task mining. So, the answer is, both.

Q: There are over-lapping functionalities between BP (Blue Prism) Decipher and Interact with Chorus, what is the roadmap for those two applications? Will they continue to be supported or will the functions move into Chorus?

Jeffrey: While there is overlap, most capabilities that Chorus brings to the Blue Prism product portfolio are complementary and differentiated from what Blue Prism had prior to joining SS&C. Together we are now the only provider in the intelligent automation space that combines world class RPA with robust BPM and no-code application development. So, while there is a little overlap the thing to focus on is how much Chorus products complement the Blue Prism product portfolio. We know that you rely heavily on some of these tools, and we are sensitive that, when we do make changes, we will both plan for ample time and as seamless as migration to anything new.

Q: There are several BPM tools on the market. What is the advantage of Chorus against others?

Jeffrey: I think about this in in three ways. The first is that it is pre-integrated with Blue Prism, and we are adding robust communication and control of digital workers. We already have a connector live in the DX today. And what we are releasing in November is going to set a new standard in terms of what you can do in terms of the communication and control between business process management and, and RPA.

Secondly, I would say Citizen Development. A lot of the business process management platforms out there are really owned exclusively by it. If you want to make changes, that is going through it. Most people that are developing end-to-end processes on Chorus are in the business, they are operations users.

The third thing is our proven track record, especially focusing on regulated industries. Chorus has been in the market for decades, 24 out of the top 25 financial services firms and 19 top 25 global insurers are using Chorus, and not just using it: we are doing mission critical work at massive scale for these industry leaders. They rely on it, not just to automate work and to orchestrate work, but also minimize operational risks. They're using Chorus because it can help them have better quality, and fewer errors.

Q: Can I as a Blue Prism partner get access to BPM Chorus and Document Automation for our evaluation purposes?

Eric: We are running similar sessions to this for partners. Your Blue Prism partner will be getting these emails. We are building an enablement program, which will include a combination of online learning, hands on keyboard access and some classroom-based sessions to do some enablement. We will be adding all of this to the established Blue Prism partner program early next year. We absolutely want this to be part of your toolkit as you move.

Q: What does Chorus’s back-end support look like? Can you tell us about the integration between BPPI (Blue Prism Process Intelligence) and Chorus deliver from a practical perspective? 

Hidayatullah: We have an omnichannel addition across the BPM process. What that means is you can trigger a process through many different channels, like an email as a scan, artifact, an SMS or whatever.

Eric: It does not matter where it comes from, it can all flow through the same process. You are not building multiple channels for this piece of work to get done. You just add the point where it starts, you are saying here is where it comes in, and here's the key data elements that are going to help us automate it.

Q: In Document Automation is it possible to use custom template?

Hidayatullah: We can configure variations of a given form type or a template on the system before ingesting any document for digitization. We also have preloaded industry standard forms for some of our key areas such as Insurance and financial services.

Eric: I talked to one [customer] recently who has 800 templates in their system. You do not have to go in and pre-index and figure out what this form is you just send a batch of paper to the cloud-based document processing and the platform itself says, oh, I know what this template is because the model is pre-trained. It is pre-trained on billions of data points, handwritten and low-quality machine scan, data points. It is your template, our team, or your team will map out the fields that are important to you.

Q: Regarding Document Automation, you mentioned cloud base, does that mean it does not support on premise install?

Jeffery: Chorus BPM, UX builder, and Document Automation are all cloud products. They can be deployed in both our SS&C private cloud, which a number of our financial services and insurance customers opt to use. Or we also do deployments in AWS.

Q: Will Decipher and Chorus merge in near future as IDP tool?

Kavitha: Our vision is to have a unified, intelligent document processing product into the market going forward. And currently we are investing in bettering what is already have a world class document automation product with Chorus Document Automation. But at this point in time, we are not planning any merger.

Q: What timeline are we looking at on Chorus launch roadmap?

Eric: Absolutely now, these are live systems. Chorus has been in production for something like 30 years. So, it's up, it's live.

Q: Is the UX Builder only a form designer OR it has capabilities to build a full-fledged app and deploy?

Jeffrey: UX Builder lets you extend beyond people in your organization. You're able to create interfaces that can be exposed to customers. So, you can have public webpages or websites or portals that customers can access. They can be fully branded and formatted so that they look modern and professional. They can be tied into automation, logic and integration through RPA or BPM to create a dynamic and personalized interface.  

With UX builder, we are providing your business users with the ability to create user interfaces and data storage that can then connect to your RPA processes and your BPM services to initiate automations to gather information throughout them, as well as to be able to stand up internal applications and websites that might not be connected to automations at all.

Q: I currently have a lot of Microsoft Power Automate Desktop (PAD) flows already created. Does Blue Prism have the capability to simply run PAD flows, so I don't need to re-create all my existing RPA?

Eric: In terms of getting a piece of work started, you have many options, whether it's an API, whether it's the UX builder, whether it's an email, there's so many different ways that you could initiate a scan service, or many of our customers are using SS&C as an outsourcing agency where it's actually SS&C agents that are going to start a piece of work running through, through Chorus. It doesn't matter where it comes from, it can all flow through the same process. So, you're not building multiple channels for this piece of work to get done. You just at the point where it starts, you're saying here's where it comes in, and here's the key data elements that are going to help us automate it.

Q: Does the Document Automation have a confidence level within itself and pushes a document for human review if it doesn't feel confident that it achieved high accuracy?

Janelle:  Our engine is getting 98% accuracy on handwritten because that's an ML technology that we use to do that. But it works for machine print, fillable, PDFs. So, as you're looking for use cases, the use case for that is any kind of structured form. Anytime page two looks like page two, that's a candidate for extracting data using that technology.

Kavitha: And for those very few items, which are below the confidence level, we have a review interface, as part of Chorus Document Automation that we can use for correcting the data and sending it outbound. If you do not want to use Chorus Document Automation, you want to keep your audience or your end users within the ecosystem that you're using, either BPM or RPA. We have great tools through which you can build the user interfaces and then kind of display those confidence scores along with low confident data items for correction.

Q: What version of Blue Prism is Document Automation available please?

Kavitha: Either 7.0 or 7.1.

Q: How can we see a live demo of Chorus document processing? What is the license cost? And how the volume is calculated, by pages, by words or some other way.

Eric: Per page processing fee. But in general, the answer is talk to your account representative, me, or any one of our solutions engineers would be happy to join your Blue Prism account team and present to you a live demo. In many cases we can show it back to you that day, digitized. It’s so exciting for us to be able to just present that back to you as soon as we see your sample. Use your channels, reach out and, and we'd love to give you a demo.

Q: Do you have recommendations for which processes are good candidates to start with for Chorus BPM? Are there some common use cases? Where can I find some Cases/client stories?

Eric: We have lots of great use cases. Lots of them in SS&C's traditional finance and healthcare markets. But I recently did a webinar where we're working with a, a mining company to digitize their safety observations. There’s plenty on our website. There's more to come. We'll post some on the Community. Do reach out to your account manager, or your success manager, there's lots of people who can get some information for you to understand some of the other business problems.

Q: Will there also be Chorus integration with Service Assist? 

Kavitha: We have prioritized seamless integration for the core components of Blue Prism: RPA BPM process, intelligence, decision analytics, and IDP. Going forward we will also be looking into Service Assist, and we would also like to meet you.

Q: This product also has an additional license cost to Blue Prism license? How long till Blue Prism Customers can have access?  

Janelle: Yes, these are, these are applications that are available for purchase. Please do get in touch with someone from our team. We can work with you to do demos. These are absolutely off the shelf available for purchase. And the second part of your question is they are licensed products and services and there's additional fees involved.

Q: What is a language support for document data extraction? Are European languages supported?

Eric: For the pre-trained model to executed with the high level of out-of-the-box accuracy, the document must contain Latin characters, either handwritten or machine printed. For other languages, Document Automation can leverage models provided by third parties to perform the data extraction. Please reach out to your representative for me detail. 

Jeffrey: We are looking to expand to other languages in 2023 and will prioritized based on the opportunities.

Thank you all to our Chorus experts Eric, Jeffrey, Kavitha, Janelle, and Hidayatullah  for giving up your time.

If you have any further questions about the award-winning Chorus products - check out the Chorus Community. You can also view the recording or this webinar in the Chorus community library.

Many thanks!


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