Kofax has announced new robotic process automation (RPA) capabilities that leverage artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning (ML). The company says it provides “out-of-the-box” functionality and a comprehensive, single-vendor, single-platform, Intelligent Automation solution.

“Early adopters of RPA have experienced the many benefits in shifting human labour from ‘data gatherer’ to ‘data user’ roles. Increased productivity helps them remain on track for profitable growth, improved customer service and significant competitive advantage,” said Reynolds C. Bish, Chief Executive Officer of Kofax.

“These exceptional organisations are eager to scale their digital workforce throughout the enterprise and can now take advantage of a complete end-to-end solution purpose built for enterprise deployment—today and tomorrow.”

Kofax is using the umbrella term Cognitive Document Automation (CDA) to describe its combination of AI technologies, optical character recognition (OCR), machine learning, and natural language processing (NLP) used to automate the processing of unstructured documents or images and their content.

It has also introduced Process Discovery in this release of its RPA platform, to allow organisations to 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 

Organizations 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 organizations time and money.

Kofax RPA aims to alleviate this problem by providing enterprise-level robot revision control and deployment management making it easy to manage and deploy the entire robot workforce.

In tandem with this launch, Kofax RPA is now available to the market via a free 12-month trial. In addition, Kofax offers professional services implementation packages.

According to AIIM, 74 percent of organizations surveyed feel “unstructured information (documents and content) is the Achilles’ heel of their RPA implementation.”

“RPA allows organizations 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,” notes AIIM Chief Evangelist John Mancini. “By making unstructured information accessible to RPA engines, organizations can greatly amplify their ROI.”

Bart Groenewoud, IT Delivery & Solution Architect, Rabobank, said, “Our Kofax RPA deployment has been a game changer, supporting Rabobank’s goals for innovation and the transformation of our business. 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 6). This results in a thousands of hours saved this quarter alone.”