Thursday 24th October, 2013

The latest announcement from Kofax of the launch of their TotalAgility AP Automation solution represents the culmination of four years of planning and some high profile acquisitions, notably Singularity, Altosoft, and more recently, Kapow.  As a company which invests heavily in R&D, the new platform offers a flexibility in application which, the company hopes, will broaden the market for Kofax and its appeal to customers. And, if Anthony Macciola's (CTO Kofax) claims of doubling the financial expectations of its new mobile solution are anything to go by, it's working.

Anthony went on to explain that the new SaaS solution has been designed with the SME market in mind, and shouldn't be thought of as a replacement for MarkView, but rather another string to Kofax's bow. He pointed out that although the cloud had represented a challenge for them in the past, that's no longer the case - and as the new solution has been designed from the bottom up, without the need to adapt to existing functionality, it's ready for the way that businesses work today.

In fact, the solution combines the capabilities for which Kofax is already renowned - ie capture and process management, but also includes relatively new mobile and analytics capabilities to offer something more - improved and faster cost savings, improved vendor management and better cash management. Although it can be used on any ERP system, it’s been designed around a tight integration with Microsoft Dynamics AX, and as Anthony says, has 80% accuracy, straight out of the box.

AP Automation is the first smart process application solution built on the TotalAgility 7.0 platform, and as as Bala Kothandaraman of Hyandai says: “using the Kofax AP Automation solution has enabled us to improve productivity by processing a higher volume of invoices dramatically faster, with greater accuracy and at lower costs.”

The capture market has expanded in recent years, and the industry has responded, and continues to respond to the need for organisations to be flexible -  agile if you like - in their approach to business,  including smarter analytics and real-time capabilities. The new Kofax launch is a great response to that, helped by some sound and systematic aquisitions to shore up, and add value on the capability side - and the development of a well designed dashboard on the user side. So far, recent developments have been more about playing to their strengths in capture capability, and while the immediate future is likely to be one of embedding the new solution into the market place, it'll be interesting to watch out for any movement into additional functionality in the coming months and years.