Last session here at Kofax Transform, and as much I’d like to be sitting around the pool, I also like to squeeze every bit out of these events, and support the speakers who get this most unenviable timeslot. I’ve been in a couple of the analytics sessions over the past two days, which are based on the Kofax Altasoft Insight product. Married with TotalAgility for process analytics, they offer a simple version with some pre-defined dashboards, a more complete version but tied only to the KTA databases, and the full version that has the full Insight functionality with any data sources including KTA. The focus seems to be only on document capture workflow analytics, with many of the default reports on things like productivity, extraction rates and field accuracy in the scan and extraction modules; although these are definitely important, and likely of primary importance to Kofax’s current customer base of capture clients, the use cases for their demos need to push further into the post-capture business processes if they expect to be taken seriously as a BPM vendor. I know that KTA is a “first mile” solution and the capture processes are essential, but there should be more to apply analytics to across the customer journey managed within a SPA.
The visualization and dynamic filtering is pretty nice, as you would expect in the Altosoft environment, allowing you to drill into specific processes and tasks to find problem areas in process quality and operator performance. Traditional capture customers in the audience are going to like this, since it provides a lot of information on those front-end processes that can become an expensive bottleneck to downstream processing.
We had another look at the process intelligence that I saw in an earlier session, monitoring event logs from capture workflows plus downstream processing in KTA or another system such as a third-party BPM or ERP system. Although that’s all good stuff, it does highlight that the Kofax end-to-end solution is made up of a number of systems strung together, rather than an integrated platform with shared infrastructure. It’s also completely document-centric since it uses document ID as the instance ID: again, well-suited for their current capture customers, but not necessarily the mind-set required to approach a more general BPM/case management market that is more data-centric than document-centric.
This wraps up Kofax Transform 2015. There is a customer awards dinner tonight that I plan to attend, then head home tomorrow. Thanks to the entire Kofax team, especially the amazing analyst relations crew, for inviting me here and making sure my time was well-spent. As a matter of disclosure, Kofax paid my travel expenses to be here, but did not otherwise compensate me for my time or for anything that I wrote here on my blog. Kofax has been a customer of mine in the past for presentations at Transform as well as webinars and white papers.
My next event is bpmNEXT in Santa Barbara at the end of the month — if you’re interested in the next generation of BPM or just want to hang with a bunch of BPM geeks in a relatively non-partisan environment, I highly recommend that you check it out.