Tungsten Capture (formerly Kofax Capture) is a suite of multichannel document capture applications.
$3,500
per year
Tungsten TotalAgility
Score 8.2 out of 10
N/A
Tungsten TotalAgility brings cognitive capture capabilities to the hands of business analysts and non-technical users to solve content-centric challenges, including classification and extraction from financial documents, contracts, forms and other information-intensive documents.
If there is a desire to extract text from emails, documents, spreadsheets, and faxes this is the perfect platform for that. The only thing it does, extracting information, it does well. External information in terms of flat files, databases, and web services can be tied into the platform as well to allow line item matching, address validation, and other features that make it just an overall great ingestion system.
Less appropriate would be where the customer is mainly concerned in how fast they can get the work done due to the performance issues in Kofax TotalAgility. The customer needs to weigh the overall elimination of functions that were done manually and how long it takes them to do these functions. They have to consider the overall time, not just the act of launching the form and completing it. Many manual functions should be replaced with the automation in the workflow.
One of the things we relied on Kofax was its connector with Oracle UCM and Filenet. It was easy to configure batch classes and set up release scripts to UCM or Filent
One other aspect of it was validation scripts based on external Oracle databases. It was very helpful.
After removal of dongle, it became easier to maintain the software.
Ease of use. The drag and drop configuration to create the processes makes the product easy to use and configure. Most of the icons are intuitive on what they are and how to use them. The use of the colored icons for each value also helps to know that that value is looking for.
Forms. The capture forms are easy to create and maintain. A new field can be added to the Extraction group and then the capture form is regenerated and that field is automatically added to the form with all the proper attributes. If an additional check box or field is added to the form, that field stays when regenerated. This differs from KTA 6.0.
Kofax has done pretty well integrating all the pieces of Kofax into one product. KC (Kofax Capture), KIC (Kofax Import Connector), KTM (Kofax Transformation Module with OCR), and workflow are all combined into KTA (Kofax Total Agility). This lets all of these features work together in one product. Kofax does keep adding more to the functions that maybe were left out original version. This makes Kofax Total Agility a robust product.
Kofax Capture's interface is antiquated and could use a refresh. An attempt was made two versions back to add ribbons and modernize the interface but anything below the first level looks and feels like a tired application.
Bugs that have existed in the platform for years are still prevalent and there is no priority to fix them. Features and critical bugs are regularly fixed but simple nagging ones that can cause a development project to close and lose all work is commonplace.
Licensing, while reasonable for lower volume solutions, becomes expensive once a project reaches a certain threshold. Ensure future planning capacity is done before purchasing to make sure it's a cost effective solution.
Exception management within the platform can certainly be improved upon. If a job is suspended for any particular issue integrations can be put in place to attempt to handle them but it is kludgy and does not always work as anticipated.
The administration interface is based on Microsoft Silverlight which limits it to certain versions of Internet Explorer and the interface has seen better days. Their other application, Kofax Kapow, has a much more mature and intuitive interface. This supposedly is being replaced in the next major iteration but I have doubts it will be successfully done.
The product is expensive. It is also the Cadillac of workflow platforms with document transformation built in. In many cases the product can do what you want it to do but there may be other more cost effective platforms.
Kofax Capture was less expensive than the IBM product and was easier to use than both IBM and Amazon in my opinion. The unlimited scripting of Kofax Capture allowed us to fully integrate the tool into our business processes to improve our automation and reduce errors. We also looked at a product from Nuance but at the time decided to eliminate it from our evaluation.
Kofax TotalAgility is a beast of a package that gives you a thousand ways to tackle a problem, but it may not be the best platform for your needs. It is more of an enterprise platform that integrates well with other systems with moderate development time. Other packages may be cheaper, easier, and faster to implement depending on needs.
We were able to decrease personnel expenditures as there was not a need for individuals to index documents prior to incorporating them into the record.
The product is a behemoth to stand up and is cost prohibitive well before it can be implemented. Long term vision planning must be done to realize a positive ROI.
It is costly to locate or train internal resources to implement the product successfully. It is very easy to be lost in a black hole if trying to implement it with no previous experience of an ECM platform.
Demonstrating the platform to key stakeholders from multiple departments will most likely lead to discussions where business processes can be automated allowing for a faster ROI.
