Kofax Adds Forms Processing

Today, Apr 2004

Technology Reduces Sorting of Form Types

Information capture vendor Kofax (www.kofax.com) has joined the competitive forms processing space with the introduction of "Xtrata" forms-processing technology. According to Kofax, Xtrata, which will be an optional modular extension to the company's Ascent Capture suite, makes it easy to set up a system to handle new forms and ensures consistent automatic results for existing forms.

"Xtrata technology enables a much wider range of organizations to automate their paper-intensive business processes.

This foray into an already crowded field may require product feature differentiation or pricing concessions, and Kofax seems prepared to offer both. Macciola quotes a price of "about half that of the competitors, including the cost of the requisite Ascent." Macciola suggests that once established among Kofax's 11,000 customer installed base, a standalone product might be forthcoming.

The most notable feature demonstrated is the software's ability to correct for variances in aligning form template registrations. This addresses the nagging problem of having to re-define templates for established forms due to slight changes in printing or scanning.

Historically with a forms processing system, when a form is reprinted or a different scanner is used, a new template must be created to account for relatively small changes that occur in the scanned images.

Xtrata's registration technology addresses these problems by automatically adapting to changes in scanned forms, thereby improving character recognition, form classification and information extraction. This makes distributed scanning more effective by automatically adjusting for scans from different hardware or forms from different printers. In addition, Xtrata's automatic form classification eliminates the need to manually sort forms before scanning, further reducing the cost of operation.

"The location of printed fields varies substantially on different examples of the same printed form - particularly if a company does not spend a lot of money on specialized printing. The scanner can also introduce distortion from inconsistent paper pickup by rollers, subtle changes in roller speed as they pull the paper through the device, and from scanner electronics," says forms processing analyst Harvey Spencer, of Harvey Spencer Associates. "Registration marks can help, but the same factors which move or distort fields also affect the marks. Kofax's new Xtrata technology appears to remove the need for registration marks and makes finding data easier. The result is lower printing costs, more flexible forms design, automation of a wider range of form types, and reduced set-up times."