A few weeks ago, Kofax announced the availability of TotalAgility 7.0, which is a unified platform for the development and deployment of smart process applications. Kofax has spent the last few years developing and acquiring (over $100 million in acquisitions) the necessary capabilities in order to bring TotalAgility to market. TotalAgility functionality is broadly focused around solving the challenges of effectively processing real-time and information intensive customer interactions, e.g., new customer onboarding applications such as account openings, loan applications, healthcare patient admissions and insurance claim submissions. The platform is designed to improve the process and reduce the costs associated with complex applications and to enable organizations to leverage mobile devices during customer interactions.
TotalAgility 7.0 is a platform that offers a combination of capture, business process management (including AP), dynamic case management, data integration, analytics and mobile capabilities (HTML-5 based platform) on a single, unified platform.
So why is TotalAgility 7.0 a big deal? It represents yet another transition away from ‘Systems of Record’ towards ‘Systems of Engagement’. It is Kofax’s answer to the changing manner in which customers interact and communicate with businesses, suppliers with buyers, partners, distributors, etc. The modern enterprise has grown into an immensely complex organization with extended supply chains to match; as a result, enterprises today must place significantly more value in and increasingly rely on relationships with entities outside the four walls of the organization. Ultimately, this has and will necessitate closer connectivity between all of these entities.
What about accounts payable?
Yesterday, Kofax announced the availability of TotalAgility AP Automation, which is one of the smart process applications built on top of TotalAgility 7.0 (others include mortgage automation, customer onboarding, etc.) Previously, for AP, customers had to purchase separate products (e.g., invoice capture, approval workflow), however, with this launch everything is now available within one platform.
What also changes with this new product is Kofax’s addressable market for AP. Before with Kofax Markview, the focus was on SAP and Oracle customers exclusively and this will not change. However, for other ERP systems (which represent over 60% of the market), Kofax will make available TotalAgility AP Automation. In fact, Kofax already has a pre-built out of the box integration to MS Dynamics. In future releases, Kofax will introduce out of the box integration for other sizeable ERP providers such as PeopleSoft, Infor and Sage. Kofax, of course is not in the business of building hundreds of adapters so instead, the approach they took was to pre-build all the standard integration points (41 of them) to an ERP system across the AP process. This enables a much quicker and easier integration to any ERP system.
In addition to the pre-built ERP integration framework, TotalAgility AP Automation includes invoice capture and extraction for multiple invoice formats (paper, email attachment, EDI, photo of a document the system, etc), matching and validation as well as best practice AP workflow. For customers just starting out with AP automation, this solution will include a number of best practices and learnings based on Kofax’s experience in the space as opposed to starting from scratch. For example, Kofax has already developed various AP workflows (e.g., exception resolution or escalation) that the customer can use as is or decide to change. TotalAgility AP Automation can be delivered on-premise and in the cloud, however, for now it is only available on-premise.
This new direction from Kofax opens up a whole new market for the company by making Kofax solutions available and more accessible to a broader market.
