Dawn Stephenson, executive manager for enterprise applications at Suncorp, said that it turned out Kofax - a $US240+ million business with over 1,000 people - had no experience with Agile. 'We had to walk them through the Agile process,' she said.

Agile is a decade old approach to systems development and involves IT and business people working closely together on system iterations and rollouts. It's an alternative to the traditional waterfall approach of systems design.

In Australia Suncorp has been the poster child for the approach since it began rolling out the Agile approach in 2007.

While Ms Stephenson seems happy with the final result she said that; 'With hindsight we would have envisaged that Kofax would have understood Agile earlier.' But she acknowledged that the Agile-awareness of the three companies considered for the role - Kofax, EMC Captiva and IBM's Datacap - wasn't tested when Suncorp was deciding which information capture platform to select in late 2010.

Despite the dearth of Agile capability in Kofax, Suncorp went live with the system in July - only two months after being selected. Suncorp is now mid-way through a pilot in its loans processing area which takes information sourced via Kofax and feeds that into IBM's FileNet content management system and the division's work flow.

As part of the pilot Suncorp will measure how much faster the loan process can be completed thanks to the information streamlining. Suncorp hopes to go live with the system in about six weeks.

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In the past the handling of loan applications at Suncorp was purely manual, with as many as 5,000 paper files in use and manually shuffled from desk to desk before being stored in compactus units. While Kofax will only be used to capture information associated with new loan applications it will take data directly from forms 9printed or handwritten) and feed it into the content management system.

At present the pilot is operating with an error rate of around 50 per cent, but Ms Stephenson said that was because Suncorp was erring on the side of caution and sending any forms that weren't crystal clear to an exception queue where the Kofax captured data could be compared with what was on the submitted form.

Martyn Christian, the company's chief marketing officer, who us currently in Australia, said that the system featured machine learning and that the error rate would drop quickly as a result.

'The intention is that this will ultimately be used across Suncorp,' said Ms Stephenson, although she acknowledged at that present it was 'difficult for some business units to see the need.' However she said that human resources was interested in using the inform capture technology during its on-boarding of new people - and she believed that it would have a role in the banking transformation project currently being planned for Suncorp.

Ms Stephenson said that by capturing documents, loan application forms and other information and storing them electronically it was possible to reduce the use of paper, cut down on the real estate costs associated with housing large compactus units, and also improve compliance.

Although there was some additional cost in terms of computer storage as a result of application forms being stored electronically it was 'insignificant compared to the compactus,' said Ms Stephenson.

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Kofax, which has 25 people in Australia and sells its systems directly and with systems integrators, has also installed systems in banks including the NAB and ANZ according to Mr Christian. He said that in the past information capture had been something of a 'blind spot for many business process owners,' but he said a survey that the company commissioned mid-year found that more than half of the companies surveyed were working on the area currently.

Kofax systems are designed to capture, classify, separate and extract data, validate it and then communicate it directly into applications such as ERP or CRM. Where decreed by the system rules established by the end user, the information can be automatically routed to an application, or verified by an employee first.

The company is currently prototyping an iPhone application which will allow information captured on an iPhone - including photographs of bills for example - to be collated through the Kofax system. Mr Christian said that would be available in the middle of next year.