Kofax Intelligent Capture and Exchange Strategy Reflects Market Shift Toward Process Automation

Today, Jan/Feb 2007 by Bolita, Dan

Capture and Exchange Directly Link with Business Processes

Information capture and sharing technologies have evolved dramatically over the past 20 years. This evolution has led to a fundamental shift in how corporate information is gathered, processed and shared. In response to these changes, organizations have adapted their business processes to maximize the automation benefits brought by document capture.

The evolution continues as there are becoming increasingly fewer operations best served as central processing sites. More and more traditional business processes can now be handled at the point of origin. In many organizations, the capture of information can be moved from a centralized back-office process to an everyday front-office activity.

"Near-desktop scanning helps to dismantle central scanning sites, and lowers errors by sourcing content closer to the user," observes Craig Le Clair, a senior analyst at Forrester Research. "This is an important trend in the industry as this will help move traditional back-office functions to front-office knowledge workers."

Two decades ago, automating a document process meant scanning large volumes of paper for image-presentment on a monitor for data entry operators. Thanks to high-speed computer processing, advances in character recognition, and the pervasiveness of networking systems-most notably the Internet-information capture and the processes themselves are much more intertwined.

During that same 20-year period, Kofax has been an innovator in the conversion of unstructured documents and data into reusable electronic information. Offering a range of capture software, device connectivity, and image processing solutions, Kofax is now part of the DICOM Group pic, which adds its own experience in facilitating documents and information straight-through processing. Kofax itself has more than 370 employees; adding the affiliates under the DICOM brand brings the total to well over 1000.

Kofax was an early developer of image processing software applications. Kofax pioneered the concept of PC-based document image processing, focusing on hardware that accelerated the scanning, viewing and printing of high-resolution document images. Kofax has gained an international presence thanks to a combination of product and reseller penetration. The company is perhaps best known for its Ascent Capture platform and its VRS (Virtual Re-Scan) image enhancement tool. Widely distributed by systems integrators and scanner manufacturers, the post-scan processing application has dramatically improved image readability (whether human or electronic). The company now has over 100,000 VRS licenses in use.

Kofax Intelligent Capture & Exchange Suite

While high-volume scanning has remained static, or is beginning to decline, the demand for ad-hoc scanning solutions remains strong. This shift from high volume to transactional capture comes in response to the need to truncate paper as early as possible in its lifecycle. Ad-hoc scanning, which includes desktop scanners and the rapid proliferation of MFPs (multi-function peripherals), has enjoyed a compound annual growth rate of 39% year over year.

There are several forces driving Kofax to augment its traditional focus on the world of high-volume, back-office capture, to the more dynamic-and still changing-world of front-office business process integration. One of the key drivers of this shift has been that while the company still enjoys a robust 42% of the global share of the batch capture market, analysts forecast little growth. However, ad-hoc capture is increasing at over 18% annually, which exceeds by three-fold the growth rate of all other IT spending.

The strategy is embodied in the new Kofax Intelligent Capture and Exchange Suite, which allows organizations to link the ever-increasing volume of paper-based and electronic information with mission-critical business activities such as invoice processing, loan origination, account openings, contract life cycle management and forms processing applications.

According to DICOM Group CEO Rob Klatell, this effort was initiated in response to the challenges being faced by customers related to their business processes. These include the need to unite both paper and electronic information sources, more easily integrate information where it enters an organization, and provide knowledge workers with simple tools that work with existing corporate applications.

"The Kofax Intelligent Capture and Exchange Suite aims to reduce the many points of potential failure and delay from the time a document enters an organization until the information is used in a business process," said Klatell. "We saw the need to enable intelligent process automation, where electronic and paper-based information is automatically captured, classified, extracted and exchanged within a business process, and we responded with a solution that enables organizations to operate faster, improve customer satisfaction, and more efficiently meet regulatory compliance requirements."