How TCG brought a unified platform to market for the next generation of process automation challenges

An interview with Patrick Ulrich, CTO in charge of development

What is the philosophy on why you built a platform rather than just a simple point solution?

Well, if I’m being honest, we were kind of pushed onto it - it wasn’t really our initial idea. The software product we were deploying at the start of TCG was what we liked to call "spaghetti programming", meaning there were no development or programming standards for the most part.

But truly, Arnold [von Bueren, TCG’s CEO] had mentioned that the market was - even back in 2005 - talking a lot about a process platform. At the time, there was so much merger and acquisition activity in the capture and process automation market that many were just looking to protect cash flow, not really putting as much creativity or investment into the future of their product portfolios.

At this time, a lot of ideas were floating around. Competitors like TIS [Top Image Systems, now Kofax] had a platform at the time, but we knew it required a ton of coding. We knew we needed to improve upon the concept: we wanted our platform to be configurable. When the TCG team reviewed what we had in 2006, we decided it had to be done in a better way and on a platform. In hindsight, it’s surprising how few companies made the jump to a process platform instead of a point solution. We needed to do it, because we couldn’t live with the way the original product had been architected at TCG and we wanted to improve on what was available in the market.

In those years, everyone wanted to have a platform but few managed to go there, which is even more surprising if you consider how well capture lends itself to processing on a platform.

Once we started, it became really clear from a technical point of view that having all of these activities encapsulated in a platform made the most sense for customers to gain the most efficiency and have the best chance for success.

As we see it, there are two big advantages to a platform:

• very flexible and adaptable to handle multiple processes, scalable volume and integrates to any line of business or other backend systems
• very easy to keep the product current due to its interoperability with technologies on top of the platform

We learned that when you need to change code, it’s not the whole platform that must be updated, tested, debugged, etc., it’s just the application or component. It also means that we can take along every customer, every integration, all the time, with the platform approach.

When you decided to make this a platform rather than a point solution, what were the big challenges that you expected and what did you think would be easy that wound up being difficult?

For initial customer deployments, we used a partner platform solution to ingest all documents, and to export after processing. The challenge was in creating components little by little from that original spaghetti code, as the most important processing part occurs between receiving the document and delivering it to the right place.

For the first few years, we continued to create components: a validation activity, an OCR activity, a learning activity, etc. This helped give us what we call today the “brain”of DocProStar, its application engine. One of the benefits of this platform was with every release, we delivered more activities and less spaghetti code. Probably the hardest part was taking those 3-4 years to rid ourselves of that messy code but we always made sure to keep the customers happy. Today, our customers have in the modern platform the collective years of experience of our product and development teams on how to optimize their processes with the latest technologies available.

We moved from a partner input/output platform to create our own, called Primus, which internally we call the “heart”, the process engine.

Excerpt of productive DocProStar/Primus process design (digital mailroom).
Some retouching done for privacy reasons.

Often I think software companies are afraid to rewrite their code, or to have “new” code in a product that you are putting in front of a customer. However, it’s probably the item that was so much less problematic than we thought in the beginning. When the platform is stable, it makes it possible to build components and applications and then use the platform to securely move the information around.

We are very proud of how stable and robust the TCG DocProStar platform is for our partners and customers.

Please explain the evolution of DocProStar. What was the initial pilot project? What were the hardest parts and were the easiest parts?

Well, when Arnold bought the company, TCG already had a number of customers. But we kept selling the product and installing the product, while we were doing all of that “re-creation” work in the background.

One difficult part was that we were selling while developing, and still - at times - selling spaghetti code. But to be honest, the customer didn’t really mind - what they are always looking for is a fix for their problem.

We selected smart partner solutions to sell with ours in the beginning, as I mentioned, and it wasn’t a huge struggle because we selected stable, robust solutions -- it was a safe sell for the customer. We remained a very responsive organization in this respect.

When we changed from the partner product to our own platform, one typically large challenge - the interfaces and integrations - needed to be changed. But this wasn’t the case for us because the application engine was written to work on any platform.

One of the easiest moves was converting our customers to the new platform. We were very honest about the change, and maintained consistent, clear communication. Additionally, they were only charged for professional services – the licenses were included as part of the upgrade path.

The large majority of our customers have migrated, all of whom remain very happy with their solutions.

This global, satisfied installed base of large complex environments is another reason that our management team made the strategic decision to move into the United States market.

All of this work validates our belief that the product is ready for the US market, a market which often challenges software solutions with its large volumes and complex requirements.

Now that the platform exists, tell us about how the platform works with other services and lines of business?

The TCG platform, DocProStar, allows us to be interoperable with the global software ecosystem that large, global organizations utilize on a daily basis. The whole platform is built on the SaaS concept, so the product calls different services in a modern and secure way. It’s RESTful inside and outside the product: anything you can call as a service on the outside can be integrated into the platform.

This applies even if you have a very old legacy system, as the TCG platform can usually consume from, or deliver data to, the older system without needing to upgrade that system.

This ability to work with legacy systems has proved very valuable to banks and insurance companies as well as government agencies.

And we have the architecture to be able to consume or deliver information as a service without high costs or complex project integrations - this includes new, modern, consumable services from providers like Google, Amazon and others that haven’t even been created yet.

This future-proofs our product; I’m sure there are things we can’t think of just yet that will be a need… things like IoT data, image recognition, etc. We built the platform in a modular fashion, so even if there’s some new capability we haven’t anticipated -- we don’t need to remake the platform, we simply change a module or create a new one but keep the rest of the code intact.

Considering all of this current and upcoming technology, what are some examples of how the platform uses TCG’s IP and other third party IP to perform AI and RPA inside of the platform.

The startup software scene often generates new nifty technology but often that new stuff is limited in terms of how to integrate it’s value into a real business process. Since our platform is all about automating business processes, we offer the capability of adding new tech quickly to our customers with the TCG platform.

For certain services, facial recognition might be a good example, we use a smart facial match service from one of the big three cloud providers [Microsoft, Google, Amazon] rather than build one ourselves. Also, we are OCR agnostic so we can work with any of the cloud OCR providers or any of the SDKs that are on the market. Our process engine comes with what we feel is the best document classification technology on the market today but if someone builds better document classifications tools, we will incorporate those into the process engine. The trick again will be an important understanding of when it would be best to bring this service into a client process, or how a client will want to validate the information that is returned from these services. This is where the smart platform can complement the features of innovative services.

A good example is this:  there are companies to whom you can deliver invoices via a portal and the portal will send back 30-40 different fields to the customer. But to us, that’s just 100% OCR. The client still needs to check the fields somehow for accuracy in the process; for example: we add fields together to validate values. But much more than that, the TCG platform helps decide where that invoice (or insurance claim, or loan) goes after the information is validated, then on to ensuring the right people approve it, matching it to the PO if necessary, finding the cost center, etc. These are things you don’t get from OCR providers. They only validate what is actually printed on the page, they can’t confirm its accuracy or understand what happens next in the accounts payable process. OCR is just OCR and we capture, perfect and process.

But this capability extends into other niche players as well, like Skilja, ABBYY, Blue Prism, who are today providing document classification, OCR or RPA to our clients - all can easily be integrated into the platform and leveraged alongside our own AI,RPA, capture and process tools. The platform’s strength is its ability to adapt all of the technologies needed for document and data process automation in the most efficient way. Once we get a client to onboard one process, it’s over. They see the value and add more and more processes and volumes.

We will continue to focus - on our end - on robust process automation capabilities, we don’t need to build everything into the platform.

How did you make decisions on what to build as your own IP and what to use from 3rd parties and why?

From the arrival of the document until the transaction is completed: that is where TCG wants the platform to perform. Sometimes you will need things like barcode recognition, OCR, document classification, data extraction, etc. but you also - in every transaction - need business rules, validations, checks and actions, rule-based workflows, flow-centric workflows... all of these things are available in the TCG platform.

If I can summarize what I’m saying, it’s really more about the platform being an infrastructure for automated end-to-end processing. Tech companies do a great job hyping people up on specific capabilities, but these are simply services that we can help you integrate along the way. Living in the organization’s processes: this is how we solve their problems.

Any new technology will have to figure out how it fits in whatever process it benefits, and we make that happen for our customers.

How do partners best utilize the platform for their services?

Often, our partners will use the platform to replace competitive capture products. However not everything is dependent on traditional capture. One of our largest partners rolled out a process automation solution for payment clearances for Swiss banks, it’s a special in-country requirement. They were able to roll out the same solution for different groups of banks - achieving easy scalability with the platform. Another partner is doing something similar, with the same document process, with another banking group in Switzerland. Partners see us as much more than capture. They can utilize capture alone, if needed, but most partners see us as a process automation tool, particularly if they are an application company.

As the platform adds more and more process abilities what will be the biggest benefits to the customers?

I can probably best explain this with an example. The TCG platform is being used quite a bit in the business process outsourcing (BPO) space. We have a client in Mexico, who utilizes the platform to process banking account opening applications end-to-end. Customers now enjoy a much faster account opening that is less error prone. Missing documents may be simply requested by email, uploaded through email and seamlessly integrated into a specific customer case file.

No matter from which channel or in which format the data arrives, TCG can manage it by applying the same rules, validations and flows to any type of data for any type of process.

What do you think is the next major trend in business process automation that people should be paying attention to today?

Right now, it often seems that processes are tied to a document or data, but in the future, we think it will be tied to understanding context. We are already seeing that images, pictures, videos will all be relevant to business processes in the future.

The platform can handle the end to end process and workflows no matter the media; we can group and restructure them as needed to ensure all the same business rules and workflows are met.

Please share a funny story that customers or partners can read that would give them an insight into the culture of TCG.

We have a customer where we are automating some of their most complex processes and doing some cool stuff inside their organization. They came to us with a request to replace a fax app and find a creative way to print paper that was needed as part of their internal process. So, in the end we will take on any process that will make a customer happy even if not the most "high tech".