The Role of Connectors in the Kofax Ecosystem

Automation efforts can’t take place in a vacuum if businesses want them to succeed. Even robotic process automation (RPA) offers the most potential value when you can integrate its work or output into more places across your business. Unfortunately, the reality in many companies today is one of patchwork deployments and poor interoperability. Choosing the right platform to standardize on, such as Kofax TotalAgility, is the first step. From there, you can begin exploring the Kofax Marketplace for ways to refine your strategy.

Making connections between your business systems is key today. The Marketplace, with its wealth of software connectors, can help you make those links a reality—and change the way you work in the process. To understand the level of opportunity present in these simple tools, we must start at the beginning: what’s holding back business productivity today?

Data Silos Are One of Today’s Most Enduring Pain Points

How much does one part of your business know about what the other does? Is there clear visibility across an entire process, or are there opaque walls? Consider that the accounting department might want to deploy AP automation or tools for streamlining AR, but the sales team might be chronically late in sharing key information. Meanwhile, marketing teams can’t easily measure their impact or effectiveness, while the C-suite is left in the dark about answers to critical questions.

All these problems originate with the “silos” within which each department operates. Each major team in the business may use their own software systems and processes. When data does flow between teams or systems, it’s usually because of a manual workflow that requires an employee to dedicate hours out of their day. There’s no guarantee that such manual movements won’t lead to errors that can cause confusion or even financial losses.

Breaking down these silos to integrate your broader business systems is essential for staying competitive in today’s economy.

How Do Businesses Benefit From Better Integration?

Silos appear in many businesses because they develop naturally as companies grow and teams become comfortable with their way of doing things. Tearing down those walls is nonetheless essential to harmonizing the way teams work across the business. When successful, good integration:

• Opens the door to bigger and better automation opportunities.
• Makes it easier to achieve a positive ROI with automation.
• Increases cross-department visibility into major processes.
• Accelerates process modernization to respond to changing demands.
• Reduces costly human errors and boosts confidence in real-time data and long-term metrics.

To make all this possible, you need the right connectors to ensure your investment in the Kofax ecosystem reaches as far as possible.

What Are Connectors?

Connectors are software tools that facilitate the flow of data between different systems that normally can’t exchange information together. For example, a connector might take the output from the software robot’s process and then hand it off to a different robot that works in a different system. Some connectors facilitate the direct transition of data from a source system into a destination database.

Such functionality can help you quickly provide cross-department visibility. When someone in sales issues an order or when marketing invoices need to be paid, the right connectors help to move extracted information into a place where accounting teams can work with it immediately. Think of connectors as pipelines that bridge the gap between today’s most advanced business software.

How Do Connectors For Kofax Solutions Make a Difference?

Imagine the effort required to extract information from a scanned document and then transfer it to a different business system. Several modules may all need that extracted information. Without connectors, all that will likely happen by hand. With solutions such as Kofax RPA, Capture, and TotalAgility, plus the right connectors, you can build a highly automated workflow that drastically reduces the number of human touches required to complete a task. It’s not just faster or more accurate work—it’s work that lets you strive toward producing value every day.

Exploring for Connectors in the Kofax Marketplace

Building connectors from scratch for your business is a time-consuming process that demands engaging with professional developers. However, an easier, more cost-effective option is to automate with a prebuilt connector on the Kofax Marketplace: an online hub that features a wide variety of pre-built and customizable solutions that offer the functionality you need right now.

Established experts and developers familiar with Kofax platforms actively contribute to the Marketplace. For example, one can easily find dozens of ways to integrate Kofax apps with leading business platforms such as SAP and Salesforce. With both free and paid solutions, finding the approach that suits your company’s needs is easy here.

Making a Plan to Integrate Your Business

To successfully leverage the solutions available by choosing Marketplace assets, you should take a close look at your current processes. Identify where your silos exist. Speak with those involved in the work, such as your AP team, to determine where you lack critical integrations. Create a game plan for how you will connect your platforms and begin deploying more intelligent automation tools.

With that knowledge, you can better evaluate the suitability of the hundreds of solutions waiting for you in the Marketplace. Many contributors provide contact links for support, and some even offer their own consulting services. A better way of working is within reach—now’s the perfect time to take a closer look.

Start Exploring What’s Possible With Today’s Fully Integrated Automation

With apps and other solutions that facilitate immediate connections between your automation platform and your regular business systems, you can transform the nature of work across the business. Teams will communicate better, critical business processes will see improvements in KPIs, and you can reliably achieve a more robust ROI on automation technology.

It all starts in the Kofax Marketplace. With its blend of free and paid solutions, plus opportunities for professional support from highly experienced developers, you can begin shaping your plan today. With the appropriate connectors, you can expand the reach of automation to many more departments. Discover today how you can redefine everything from accounts payable to supply chain management, customer support, and much more.