When it comes to Artificial Intelligence and RPA, the industry is moving faster than ever, with new, smarter software coming to market with increasing frequency. At Kofax, our development teams have been working overtime to incorporate things like machine learning and natural language processing into our products to narrow the gap between what companies consider RPA today, and where AI can take us in the future. The release of Kofax RPA 10.4 brought three specific capabilities to the forefront that are just the start of where we’re headed with intelligent automation. Read on to get the details on each one, or you can also check out our What’s New in Kofax RPA webinar on the topic.
1. Integrated OCR and Document Transformation
We rolled Cognitive Document Automation (CDA) capabilities directly into Kofax RPA to empower software robots to read, understand, classify, extract and learn documents on the fly. This new feature combines functionality from machine learning, natural language processing (NLP) and Intelligent OCR to give robots the cognitive tools they need to make more decisions without human intervention than previously possible. While most RPA competitors either use third party tools to accomplish this task, or don’t work well with semi- and unstructured documents, ours is now fully integrate. This means users can now build smarter robots that can conquer unstructured information including documents, websites, emails, faxes, PDFs, scanned documents resulting in digital images, and more.
2. Integrated Robot Lifecycle Management
Kofax RPA comes with a True Version Control System (VCS) built in, to let users manage teams of software robots, scale RPA operations and reduce robot errors and downtime. Users now have the ability to deploy and track robots in motion, as well as back up activity and roll back robot versions and configurations via a single, integrated control panel. This makes it easier for users to scale projects across the enterprise, and to revert to earlier versions should a process ever breakdown or require troubleshooting. This new capability uses the industry standard Git repository and also syncs with multiple repositories following standard procedures for robot dev, test and production.
3. Automated Process Discovery
Kofax RPA supports software robot development teams with the ability to record, map and analyze targeted user tasks before starting the robot design process. By allowing users to record tasks and business applications, teams can more easily identify good projects for automation. This tool includes a number of data visualization dashboards to pinpoint existing processes and showcase user activities so anyone can see real-time where automation will have the largest impact.
What Else is New? A Bold New Look and Feel
With 10.4, the team at Kofax modernized the user interface and user experience with an updated UI for the design studio, the primary location where robot-builders spend most of their time. Users can now conduct more rapid software robot building and use a more intuitive automation graph when conducting desktop automation tasks.
Updates are always happening here as we tighten up our integration with other Kofax automation software tools.
In closing, there is much more going on today behind the scenes with Kofax RPA, and as of this post we’re already well on the path to version 10.5 and even 10.6 with even more machine learning and NLP-based capabilities. If you’re new to RPA and ready to give Kofax RPA a try, download our free trial.