Lexmark Builds Off ‘First Mile,’ Hones Kofax Solutions to Help Customers Achieve Digital Transformation
Driving its digital transformation initiative, Lexmark recently announced improvements to several of its software products — Kofax Kapow, Insight, Mobile Capture, SignDoc and Claim Agility — to complement the Kofax TotalAgility platform. Digital transformation — the application of digital technologies to automate business processes as a means to increase efficiency — builds on top of the customer engagement automation solutions offered under Kofax “First Mile” initiative.
“Digital transformation is a result of our experience with our customers,” said Russ Gould, senior director of Product Marketing, Lexmark Enterprise Software. In terms of the “First Mile” way of thinking, Gould said that “we’re still doing what we’ve always done in our sweet spot, operating between the systems of record and the system of engagement, where we bring these two together.” The way Gould and the team at Lexmark see it, when their customers adopt solutions like mobile capture they’re already taking steps towards digital transformation. The company hopes that this new round of software will help their customers get all the way there.
Kofax TotalAgility platform is an automated business process and case management platform aimed at optimizing a business’s operations. The solution offers a flexible information onboarding, enabling businesses to capture information on paper via TWAIN- and ISIS-enabled scanners and MFPs, plus digital information by way of smartphones and tablets, email, fax, watched folder and web services. The platform also helps to streamline business processes and case management. TotalAgility connects people, procedures, policies, and systems and offers end-to-end process visibility, discovery, and monitoring functionality that can be leveraged to optimize processes. The solution also offers eSignature support for secure and convenient signature capture, mobile capture support that can be built into customer-facing applications or websites, and robotic process automation to free employees from tedious data-gathering tasks.
Kofax Kapow is a robotic process automation and integration platform for acquiring, enhancing, and routing information from supported applications or local and web-based data sources. Basically, the platform is another step toward full automation, swapping humans for “software robots” where possible. “The real core is automating manual, repetitive tasks, or what we sometimes call ‘swivel chair automation,’” explained Gould. Kapow can intelligently aggregate and route-relevant information across varying systems and the web just like a human would.
“We weren’t particularly focused on interacting with thick-clients — old client-server applications” said Gould. “What we’ve done in this most recent release is enable businesses to build software robots to automate their legacy applications — whether they’re mainframe-based or something like SAP or Oracle.”
Kofax Mobile Capture
“Mobile technology is now the preferred channel of engagement, particularly among the younger generations of customers,” said Gould. “From our perspective, we invested in mobile technology a number of years ago, but recently, we’ve added things for our customers to improve the experience with their customers.” Mobile Capture enables businesses to embed capture and OCR technology into their own customer-facing mobile applications or web forms.
“We’ve generated OCR packages that are small enough to fit on mobile devices, allowing our customer to build their applications to be smart enough to react to the environment they’re in,” said Gould. Should low bandwidth become a problem, OCR processes can be handled on the user’s device.
Kofax Mobile Capture also addresses the problems that come with our increasingly globalized marketplace. “Whether it’s IDs in the U.S. from all 50 states or IDs from across the globe, we make sure the recognition levels are where they need to be,” said Gould. “We’re constantly acquiring new IDs and putting them into the system so our customers can simply plug Mobile Capture into their own application.”
Kofax Insight
Business intelligence and analytics software lend themselves well to companies working toward achieving digital transformation. Kofax Insight offers full visibility into business processes and systems to help companies optimize their operations. The system provides near-real-time visualizations of processes and business information which can be used to identify and rectify problem areas. The solution is fairly customizable, enabling companies to build customized dashboards that could pull data from a variety of sources.
According to Gould, the dashboard-based platform aims to bring business intelligence (BI) to the forefront and to understand business processes. “With a standard BI platform, you can get information about a process, like how many invoices are being processed and how many are still in the queue — but these tools can’t understand the relationship between the steps and the process, which limits the user’s ability to truly understand what is really happening from a process perspective,” said Gould. “The capability, which we call Process Intelligence, to understand this relationship was baked into the latest iteration of Kofax Insight to help our customers see what’s really going on.”
“We’ve taken old classic metrics you would use in a classic BI tool, and intersected that with detailed process metrics. This enables users to look at processes in different ways. Instead of just looking at the process step-by-step, users can change their viewpoint to understand different metrics, such as what impact a good paying customer has versus those that take a long time to pay.”
The company also announced the release of two applications that aim to streamline specific business processes. SignDoc 2 is an application aimed at securing and streamlining processes that require signatures from internal and external users. Also announced was Claims Agility, a TotalAgility derivative aimed at automating medical claims. Lexmark claims that the solution will reduce processing time and errors, and offer explanation of benefits and coordination of benefit documents, exception handling workflows, and a self-service billing portal, among others.
Our Take
Automation continues to alter the office landscape. These types of solutions will continue to help businesses reduce overhead thanks to faster, more accurate processes and the increased ability to locate and optimize inefficient processes and activities. Adding in items like self-service portals accessible across varying media types on a customer’s device of preference should also serve to keep customers happy. That’s a win, folks.
is president and senior analyst for BPO Media, which publishes The Imaging Channel and Workflow magazines. As a market analyst and industry consultant, Ames has worked for prominent consulting firms including KPMG and has more than 15 years experience in the imaging industry covering technology and business sectors. Ames has lived and worked in the United States, Southeast Asia and Europe and enjoys being a part of a global industry and community.
