Kofax Lands Large Distributed Capture Deal

Sorry for all the three posts in one day, but I've been working fairly heads down on a project for someone and haven't had a chance to post, even though I've seen some interesting news move. This story is another example - it's about Kofax landing a $400,000 deal with Rohm and Haas, a Philadelphia-based manufacturer of chemical products and materials and a subsidiary of Dow Chemical.

I guess the cool part of this implementation to me, at least, is that it's one of those combo distributed/centralized capture applications I've been talking about, where the user captures the paper at the distributed sites, but then does the data entry centrally. I think this is more common that people in the industry generally admit, especially as the MFP capture people try to introduce more intelligence at the device.

This is the first large deal in a long time that I remember that Kofax announced that doesn't include the Kofax Transformation modules - the automated data capture stuff. Rather its for VRS, Kofax Capture, and Kofax Monitor, presumably for ensuring quality images are captured at the distributed sites, so key entry (or another vendor's data capture product) can be used at the central site on a million invoices and other financial documents a year.

Enterprise Capture White Paper

This was written by JD Hicks is President of Imagine Solutions, and it's a fairly insightful paper on the advantages of distributed capture in the financial service market. Hicks' view seems to the that the advantages of centralized capture are already proven, but that financial services organizations shouldn't be afraid to push their advantage, so to speak, and see how they can optimize their scanning processes by moving them outward - closer to the customer/point of origin.

One of his last lines is “Nothing happens until a document gets captured" - a parody of an old sales adage, which makes a lot of sense, when you consider that you can't really begin an electronic workflow until you have electronic documents and data. Overall the paper is a good read that raises some valid points that financial institutions should consider. (Hicks also presents them, justifiably so, as principles that any organization can consider.)

New Link to Distributed Capture Blog

Caught up today earlier with Greg Cooke, VP of sales and marketing for browser-based capture specialist CAPSYS, out of Colorado. Although just a two-year-old company, its product has apparently been around for awhile and it has some fairly large installs. The occasion for the meeting was to discuss a partnership with open source document management software development firm Knowledge Tree. As KnoweldgeTree is primarily a Web-based app, the partnership with CAPSYS makes sense and both applications can be deployed in an SaaS environment, which is interesting too. The reason for my post is to let you know that CAPSYS has a blog on Web-based capture that I've linked to from my blog.

More Distributed Capture

As distributed capture is becoming an increasingly hot topic, I attended a couple presentations on it at the recent Kofax Transform event in Austin. Kofax has a pretty heavy duty distributed capture model for its traditional Ascent Capture, now Kofax Capture environment. This has both up- and down-sides. The upside is that you get plenty of functionality in areas like security and automated data capture. The downside is the administration required to support thick clients at each distributed site.

Kofax also has an interesting pricing model for its recently renamed Kofax Capture Network Server (KCNS). (That' s the product fomerly known as ACIS - Ascent Capture Internet Server). It lists for $2,200 per seat, whether it's being deployed as the centralized server or as a client. This is the same price as Kofax Capture. There is also volume-based licensing on top of the seat price. This could obviously get pretty expensive if you're rolling out a big application, especially if you have light volume at some of the distributed sites....

Which is what Kofax's Document Exchange Server (DES) is designed to address. This is Kofax's server-based capture platform designed to run in conjunction with MFPs. HP seems to be their major partner in rolling out DES, which we presume can be used to feed a KCNS server implementation. It's this type of hybrid environment that we think will dominate the capture landscape five to 10 years in the future.

One more distributed capture note. I recently authored a white paper Web-based capture for Oracle - which last year acquired Captovation - one of pioneers in Web-based distributed capture.

Distributed Capture Best Practices

The distributed document capture market, despite having been discussed for a very long time, is still very immature. This is my conclusion after doing quite a bit of research on this market over the past couple months. Is there a best practices for distributed capture? I haven't found anything definitive published on the topic.

So, first off, what is distributed capture? Well, it's basically truncating-or electronifying paper documents as far up the workflow chain as possible. This means that if loan applications, for example, are filled out at a branch office of a bank, they are going to be scanned there and sent digitally to loan processing center for approval and archiving. The advantages are that
1. distributed capture can reduce the time it takes to get the paper forms to the loan processing center,
2. it can save money on courier charges if the paper forms were being overnighted,
3. it can reduce the number of documents lost in transit as well as increase security around the transfer of the documents,
4. and it can put data entry related to the loans into the hands of the customer service rep at the branch, who is going to be more invested in the loan than a data entry operator at loan processing center.

Yes, all of these can be advantages, but there are some disadvantages too. For example, do you want your mid-level salaried knowledge workers, like loan officers, doing scanning and data entry when they could be producing more loans?

I guess the reason I haven't really seen a definitive best practices on distributed document capture is because there are so many diverse approaches to it, and to me, this is the sign of an immature market. I think I talked with four vendors in the past two weeks, all of which are promoting and selling distributed capture, but all who are doing it very different ways. Daybreak ICS, for example, uses a client server approach with a universal client for document scanners and customized release scripts from its server into ECM applications. eCopy also has customized release scripts, or "Connectors," as well as a universal interface, but its interface is primarily used on MFPs. Oracle, which acquired Web capture pioneer Captovation in the the spring, has a Web-based client with dedicated release scripts. ImageTag picks up images from a watched folder and files them based on data assigned to a bar-coded tag applied to the document before it's scanned.

All these different approaches lead to different workflows associated with distributed capture. All these vendors have had success, of course, but perhaps one reason the market has not caught fire the way many people are projecting, is because there is no standardized best practices. In other words, there's too much solutions providing/customization going on in the distributed capture space and not enough product sales.

I think some sort of flow-chart/questionnaire for end users with multiple sites is in order.
Any thoughts on this?

Kofax

Yes, we've been giving Kofax a hard time lately because of its constant reorganizations and lackluster financial results. However, a couple press releases from last week indicate some of the potential that the capture marketshare leader has for turning things around. The first involved an invoice processing win and the second a significant distributed capture win. These are the two hottest segments within the document capture space, and Kofax conceivably could be a powerhouse in both areas - not something too many vendors can claim.

Cheers.

Ralph