Cut Through the RPA Hype: Look for These Critical Capabilities

As market pressures and customer expectations motivate organizations to work smarter and more efficiently, many are turning to robotic process automation (RPA) to increase efficiency, overcome the gaps of siloed systems and drive their digital transformation. There is certainly no shortage of RPA vendors to choose from. But, looking for an RPA solution today isn’t the same as it used to be.

So, how can you differentiate between the different solutions on the market? How do you find the right RPA solution for you? Gartner just released their Critical Capabilities for Robotic Process Automation report to help you evaluate vendors across key RPA capabilities and use cases.

The RPA Market is Evolving

It’s important to note that just like enterprise needs change, RPA is evolving as a solution, too. It’s no longer enough to automate the simple tasks. To get ahead, organizations require technologies like artificial intelligence (AI), machine learning (ML), process orchestration, capture, optical character recognition (OCR) and advanced analytics. This is why we’ve seen a shift from RPA as a standalone offering toward an integrated intelligent automation platform.

How Did Kofax Score?

According to Gartner, “Kofax provides one of the strongest products in the market today.”¹

Addressing the needs for a truly scalable enterprise solution, Kofax RPA is complemented by embedded AI, Cognitive Document Automation, Natural Language Processing, and Machine Learning technologies – all critical capabilities for achieving automation at scale.

It’s no surprise that these capabilities received best-in-industry scores in Gartner’s report. Kofax scored 5 out of 5 for OCR, and 4.5 out of 5 for AI, Machine Learning and Natural Language Processing. Kofax led all other RPA vendors in these categories. In total, Kofax scored in the upper two quartiles of nine out of the 10 capabilities.

Kofax also scored in the top three of the three use cases Gartner explored:

1. Integration via UI: The “unattended” ability to move data between two applications in a relatively ad-hoc fashion.
2. Large-Scale Data Migration: Integrating several cooperating sets of components to move data between one application and another (the features necessary here are also those needed to build an “API façade”).
3. Augment Knowledge Workers: Empowering knowledge workers and enhancing operational efficiency.

Cut Through the Hype

What should you be looking for as you evaluate RPA solutions and vendors? Advanced AI, ML and Natural Language Processing embedded into RPA can help you broaden your automation potential and enable smarter robots that can take on knowledge-based processes. This goes beyond basic process and repetitive task automation, using AI for accurate decision making, orchestration, or communication.

OCR is also a key component of RPA and intelligent automation. With advanced OCR you can capture and infuse data or content of any type (email, text documents, social media, images, videos, etc.) into your business processes. This empowers your knowledge workers to work more efficiently and effectively.

Finally, make sure these capabilities are deeply integrated, as many vendors rely on third parties for this functionality. Kofax is the only intelligent automation provider that has all of these capabilities available on a single platform. With an AI-leading Intelligent Automation platform, Kofax helps organizations transform more data intensive business processes, accelerate business impact and achieve more strategic outcomes than any other provider.

¹Gartner Critical Capabilities for Robotic Process Automation by Derek Miers , Marc Kerremans, Saikat Ray, Cathy Tornbohm, July 8, 2019