No less than 74% of organisations surveyed feel ‘unstructured information (documents and content) is the Achilles’’ heel of their RPA implementation,”  says AIIM, a community that provides education, research, and best practices on information management. But a next-generation robotic process automation solution from Kofax, a supplier of software and solutions to automate and digitally transform human and information intensive processes, could be a potential fix.

John Mancini, AIIM Chief Evangelist explained: “RPA allows organisations to more effectively leverage the investments they have made in enterprise systems by allowing knowledge workers to automate their own processes and spread automation to the countless smaller processes that have been beyond the reach of BPM tools.”

He added: “By making unstructured information accessible to RPA engines, organisations can greatly amplify their ROI.”

And that is where Kofax’s next-generation robotic process automation platform enters the story. The company describes it as “a comprehensive, single-vendor, single-platform, Intelligent Automation solution,” that provides ‘out-of-the-box’ functionality.

The platform provides integrated AI, and ‘intuitive’ bot creation and management. Kofax says that its architecture and complementary ‘smart automation’ solutions empowers enterprises to quickly and cost-effectively plan, deploy and manage a digital workforce that scales. It does this by:

• Cognitive Document Automation (CDA)
  It is difficult to recognize records within a process such as accounting where invoices from different vendors generally vary in format. The platform automates the processing of unstructured documents or images and their content with embedded CDA which leverages AI technologies, optical character recognition, machine learning, and natural language processing. Software robots take the appropriate action automatically based on ingested information and process cognitive tasks to empower the human worker.
• Process Discovery
  In any process there are a number of steps but the order in which those steps should be executed may not be intuitive. The release introduces Process Discovery capabilities to help organizations easily track the human interaction with the client application via the user’s desktop. Now organizations can identify and understand manual tasks that are performed and can be automated with RPA as well as the order in which they should be completed.
• Lifecycle Management
  Organisations are deploying hundreds and even thousands of robots. Since bots interact with multiple applications, updates to software and web pages that incorporate bot-controlled processes can cause the bot to stop functioning until its code is reworked. This can cost businesses time and money. The platform alleviates this problem by providing enterprise-level robot revision control and deployment management making it easy to manage and deploy the entire robot workforce.

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RPA to next-generation robotic process automation

Reynolds C. Bish, Chief Executive Officer of Kofax, said that early adopters of RPA have experienced the benefits “in shifting human labour from ‘data gatherer’ to ‘data user’ roles.” But that these organisations can now take advantage of a complete end-to-end solution purpose built for enterprise deployment.”

Game changer, eliminates dull work and creates happier employees

According to Bart Groenewoud, IT Delivery & Solution Architect, Rabobank, the deployment of Kofax RPA’s next-generation robotic process automation “has been a game changer, supporting Rabobank’s goals for innovation and the transformation of our business.”

He said: “Implementation has been fast, flexible and efficient. We now have a digital workforce performing repetitive, manual tasks to free our human teams from repetitive (dull) work to concentrate on higher value work (their actual expertise) that in the end will also result into happier employees and customer value.

“Our Kofax bots were easy to build and deploy, with many up and running in as little as one month, if you free capacity and focus on the goals. Since implementation, we’ve combined Lean process optimisation with RPA to cut processing times (for example by 85%, or from over 40 minutes to just six minutes). This results in a thousands of hours saved this quarter alone.”

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 Kofax RPA Enables the Digital Workforce

Next-day carrier PITT OHIO, which routes hundreds of shipments for special managed accounts said that the Kofax platform has eliminated manual website updates. Darren Klaum, Director, Business Systems at PITT OHIO said the company “has reclaimed 90% to 95% of a customer service rep’s time, freeing them to tackle higher-value work that is both rewarding and enhances the customer experience.”

Kofax’s next-generation robotic process automation capabilities are leveraged across a wide range of use cases in banking, insurance, manufacturing, retail, logistics, government and other vertical markets.

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