Kofax TotalAgility. The best choice in most situations.

Rating: 8 out of 10

October 25, 2018

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

My company utilizes TotalAgility as a platform to provide workflow automation, document management, and decision making processes to companies looking to supplement or replace their mail center operations. The platform allows us as a solution provider to provide customized implementations that can easily be scaled and handle unique instances of document extraction, routing, and interfacing with a customer's external systems with ease.

Pros

TotalAgility excels as a workflow platform that at a basic level can easily be implemented by BAs or junior developers while also being a platform that can easily be extended to provide a very customized and unique solution for a business.
Utilizing the components from Kofax Transformation Modules, Kofax Input Connector, and KCNS allows for the platform to have a very powerful data extraction feature set that makes it more powerful than its competitors.
The platform, being .NET, allows for developers to easily understand and extend the SDK and API either through native integration with the application or through its web services integration.

Cons

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.

Likelihood to Recommend

The platform is an excellent solution for companies looking for a workflow automation system that can be used across departments and its return on investment becomes apparent once it is introduced in production for a business. Its ability to route work tasks dynamically between employees and outside parties, implement SLAs, and get information to a back-end source is excellent.

Verified User

Consultant in Information Technology (10,001+ employees)

Vetted Review

Reseller

7 years of experience

Kofax TotalAgility has its place even with some issues.

Rating: 7 out of 10

Incentivized

May 17, 2016

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

We resell Kofax TotalAgility to companies. Those have been order entry departments in some companies and others have been in the AP department for invoices, approval, etc., at other customers.

Pros

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.

Cons

Performance especially with IE. All of our KTA customers so far have the policy to use IE company wide. Most of them have had to go to different browsers because IE is just too slow and causes too many problems. Kofax keeps improving but more advances are still needed.
Mandatory fields. On capture forms, it is very hard to get a field to be mandatory. We have had to use a work around that can be complicated to accomplish this. The user is able to delete the data in a field and unless you put business rules for each one, they are able to complete the activity with invalid data. This happens for drop down lists as well.
Communication between the document tab of a form and the activity tab. Data does not go between these forms. We have had to use a global variable to get this communication. Since the forms know about each other, I would like to see something developed to make this easier.
Field validation in the Extraction group used in the validation form. Sometimes these are recognized and used right away. Others do not and it does not seem to be anything consistent to know what is missing.
Some of the TotalAgility SDK methods are not consistent in how they function. Some methods with this issue are GetWorkQueue2, GetActivities2, and GetJobs4. These inconsistencies have caused us to have to replace them with our own written SQL statements and processes.
Errors in validation for the line item table in APAgility. It is very hard to validate and display errors with data in the line item table. In another comment I stated that the Business Rules added in the Extraction group field validation do not always fire and work as expected. This just adds to the complexity in trying to validate a column in the table. This would apply to straight KTA as well as APAgility.

Likelihood to Recommend

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.

Gail Perian

Implementation Specialist in Professional Services at S4i Systems (11-50 employees)

Vetted Review

Reseller

3 years of experience

View profile

Kofax TotalAgility has its place even with some issues.

Rating: 7 out of 10

Incentivized

May 17, 2016

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

We resell Kofax TotalAgility to companies. Those have been order entry departments in some companies and others have been in the AP department for invoices, approval, etc., at other customers.

Pros

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.

Cons

Performance especially with IE. All of our KTA customers so far have the policy to use IE company wide. Most of them have had to go to different browsers because IE is just too slow and causes too many problems. Kofax keeps improving but more advances are still needed.
Mandatory fields. On capture forms, it is very hard to get a field to be mandatory. We have had to use a work around that can be complicated to accomplish this. The user is able to delete the data in a field and unless you put business rules for each one, they are able to complete the activity with invalid data. This happens for drop down lists as well.
Communication between the document tab of a form and the activity tab. Data does not go between these forms. We have had to use a global variable to get this communication. Since the forms know about each other, I would like to see something developed to make this easier.
Field validation in the Extraction group used in the validation form. Sometimes these are recognized and used right away. Others do not and it does not seem to be anything consistent to know what is missing.
Some of the TotalAgility SDK methods are not consistent in how they function. Some methods with this issue are GetWorkQueue2, GetActivities2, and GetJobs4. These inconsistencies have caused us to have to replace them with our own written SQL statements and processes.
Errors in validation for the line item table in APAgility. It is very hard to validate and display errors with data in the line item table. In another comment I stated that the Business Rules added in the Extraction group field validation do not always fire and work as expected. This just adds to the complexity in trying to validate a column in the table. This would apply to straight KTA as well as APAgility.

Likelihood to Recommend

Gail Perian

Implementation Specialist in Professional Services at S4i Systems (11-50 employees)

Vetted Review

Reseller

3 years of experience

View profile

Tungsten TotalAgility

Reviews

Kofax TotalAgility. The best choice in most situations.

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

Pros

Cons

Likelihood to Recommend

Kofax TotalAgility has its place even with some issues.

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

Pros

Cons

Likelihood to Recommend

Reviews

Kofax TotalAgility. The best choice in most situations.

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

Pros

Cons

Likelihood to Recommend

Kofax TotalAgility has its place even with some issues.

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

Pros

Cons

Likelihood to Recommend