It is Time to Get Excited About Kofax RPA

We live in a world that is information driven. Whether it is millions of bits of data generated by sensors (IoT), volumes of data produced by ERP, MRP and CRM systems or multitudes of unstructured data or content such as emails, documents, presentations or PDFs, we are inundated daily with information. And the volume is growing as it becomes easier to produce, create and transmit this information. However, there is a problem.

For businesses to execute with speed and efficiency in their industries, they need to process all this information at the speed of which it is received. And because the growth of information has surpassed the enterprise’s ability to rearchitect its systems, many of the processes associated with the management of information require manual human manipulation—human interactions that are being stressed.

Consider a process where supplier information is collected in the field on one device, in one format. But the business requires this information to be populated in several other systems for the process to fully execute. To make this, happen several manual operations must take place. Manual, rules-based, routine tasks that steal time away from an enterprise’s most valuable asset—its employees!

Now, a lot of this type of manual repetitive work can be automated with Robotic Process Automation (RPA), a program that sits on top of your existing systems and bypasses the IT development cycle of integration and migration. This is advantageous for enterprise IT departments because they don’t have to write scripts or develop integrations to legacy and disparate systems in an attempt to automate a process. RPA also eliminates the need to develop homegrown applications that may require specialized knowledge to maintain and redevelop to adapt to new applications or information types.

This promise of efficiency and the ability to leverage the existing IT infrastructure has motivated many organizations to adopt RPA, in essence a digital workforce. A recent study by ISG estimates that by 2020, 75% of enterprises will have adopted robotic process automation in multiple functional business areas.

Over the past decade, RPA has delivered on its promise of unlocking productivity benefits tied up in manual processes and has electrified an approach to digital progress without the need for massive systems reengineering. This adoption is also driving greater demand out of the bots that are deployed as part of an RPA implementation. Companies want more sophistication. They want the bots to do more than just routine manual processes. They have a goal to augment their valuable employees with digital workers to eliminate the routine and leverage human innovation and ingenuity.

This is definitely what Kofax is hearing from its customers, and we are delivering. We have augmented Kofax RPA with our own technologies, delivering to the market Kofax Intelligent Automation (IA), a platform featuring RPA with machine learning, cognitive document automation and other artificial intelligence technologies.

See how Kofax RPA and Cognitive Document Automation work seamlessly to automate a common document process like invoice processing:

The combination of RPA and Intelligent Automation is the backbone of what Kofax can deliver to the market. It is important to note that, unlike other RPA vendors, Kofax has these technologies in house. This is a huge benefit to customers because they can make the progression from RPA to Intelligent Automation with technologies that are developed, supported and delivered from one provider. Working with a single provider to execute Intelligent Automation strategies will greatly reduce overall total cost of ownership and decrease implementation times.

With the RPA improvements that we are delivering now and in the next three months, our customers will be able to start adopting Intelligent Automation technologies. You can see some of these advancements in our online demo. In addition, Kofax is offering a free trial of RPA with a one year evaluation period. The ability for Kofax to introduce these connected, yet granular solutions is providing the market with an Intelligent Automation framework that not only delivers the ability to manage and scale a digital workforce, but ushers in a new era of business and IT alignment that will leverage human ingenuity.