Two examples of how to increase the degree of automation in your business

Everyone who has worked with RPA has struggled with the amount of data. In practice, robots can only automate a small part of a company’s manual processes as only 20-30% of the data needed by the processes is in a fixed format. Increasing the level of automation has therefore meant replacing old information systems with new ones or changing the way customers operate.

Kofax Intelligent Automation technology is specifically developed to understand and interpret the information needed by processes. The capability of the technology is already indicated by the fact that in 2019, over 30% of all data retrieval solutions were based on Kofax products.

In the summer of 2020, Kofax released ready-made integrations with the most commonly used software robotics products, which will enable automation to finally extend to more and more use cases at a reasonable cost.

Let’s look at the situation through two examples.

Customer A

The customer company receives all invoices as electronic messages directly into the billing system. The accounting automation is based on the reference information found on the invoices and the implementation uses the rules of the invoicing system directly. However, in about half of the cases the reference information is in the wrong field of the xml message, in which case the automation does not work and the invoices go to manual processing. The customer has made a robot for this that would look for the correct information in the pdf included in the message, but this requires that the robot is taught the calculation templates used by all suppliers. Another challenge is that if a robot encounters a problem in processing an invoice it will not be able to transfer the work to a human, which makes work supervision even more challenging.

After the implementation of the Kofax TotalAgility (KTA) system, the customer’s robot redirects unclear cases to the Kofax workflow. It is sufficient that the KTA is taught about what kind of information should be retrieved from invoices. The machine then uses a variety of artificial intelligence algorithms to retrieve the correct information from the incoming documents.

If the KTA still does not find the correct information on the invoice, e.g. due to missing information, exceptional cases are automatically routed to the human work queue in the system. In this case users will be notified by e-mail to facilitate job control. The completed invoices are returned by the KTA to the robot, which completes the billing process.

Customer B

Our customer has been implementing automation with robots for a long time. The applications of the robots have been chosen according to where the data is in a structured format and thus also robotic. This has entailed a problem where the needs of the business no longer meet the limits of information systems, i.e. the development of automation has been restricted. With the help of Kofax KTA these bottlenecks can be broken, as the format of the data is no longer crucial and development can finally be done on the terms of business needs.

With the help of Kofax TotalAgility the steps related to extracting and submitting information have been reduced, workflows are speeded up and with it customer satisfaction has increased. Similarly, employees find it even more meaningful when it is not necessary to manually hack obvious things into the system.

We have been cooperating with Kofax for many years and have expanded our expertise specifically to become a leading expert in Kofax Intelligent Automation products in the Nordic countries. If you and your company have challenges similar to the above descriptions and you want to make your business more efficient, Lekab’s knowledgeable team is ready to help.

Interested?

Mikko Kiurunen

Mikko.Kiurunen@lekab.com