What Is Tungsten Automation Capture? A Plain English Guide

Tungsten Automation Capture is software that takes incoming documents, whether paper or digital, and turns them into organized, usable information that flows automatically into your business systems. It was previously called Kofax Capture. If your organization receives large volumes of forms, invoices, claims, or applications, Tungsten Capture does the work of opening, sorting, reading, and filing them, without someone keying the data in by hand.

This guide is for anyone new to the product: IT leaders evaluating capture platforms, operations managers tired of manual data entry, and executives who keep hearing “Kofax” and “Tungsten” and want to know what they actually mean.

Kofax Capture Is Now Tungsten Capture: What Changed?

Kofax was one of the earliest enterprise document capture companies. In January 2024, it announced that it had renamed itself Tungsten Automation. Its flagship capture product, Kofax Capture, became Tungsten Capture, often called Tungsten Automation Capture.

The rename was a rebrand, not a replacement. The product lines continued under the new name, and existing Kofax Capture customers did not have to switch to something new. If you see “Kofax Capture,” “Tungsten Capture,” and “Tungsten Automation Capture” in documentation, job postings, or vendor quotes, they all refer to the same product family.

What Does Tungsten Automation Capture Actually Do?

Think of Tungsten Capture as a highly efficient digital mailroom. Every document that enters your organization goes through roughly the same five steps:

1. Collect. Documents come in from production scanners, office copiers, email inboxes, fax, web portals, and file folders. Tungsten Capture brings them all into one place.
2. Read. The software uses OCR (optical character recognition) to convert scanned images into searchable text. It can also read barcodes, checkboxes, and handwritten marks on structured forms.
3. Sort. It identifies what each document is, such as an invoice, a claim form, or a signed contract. It also separates a stack of mixed pages into individual documents.
4. Extract. It pulls out the specific details your business needs, like a policy number, invoice total, patient name, or account ID.
5. Deliver. It sends the document and its data to the right destination. That might be a content management system like IBM FileNet or SharePoint, an ERP, or a case management application.

When something doesn’t look right, like a blurry scan or a missing field, the system flags it for a person to review. Everything else moves through untouched.

A Simple Example: From Mailbox to System in Minutes

Picture an insurance company that receives 5,000 claim forms a week, some by mail and some by email.

Without a capture platform, staff open envelopes, scan pages, figure out what each document is, type the claim number and policyholder details into the claims system, and save the file to the right folder. That’s slow, repetitive, and error-prone.

With Tungsten Capture, the mail gets scanned in batches and the emailed forms are picked up automatically. The software recognizes each claim form, reads the key fields, checks them against the policy system, and files everything in the right place. Staff only step in for the small share of documents that need a human decision. Claims reach adjusters faster, and fewer details get lost or mistyped along the way.

Document Capture vs. Intelligent Document Capture: Where Tungsten Fits

You’ll often hear two related terms.

Document capture is the broad category: getting documents into digital form and into your systems. At its most basic, that means scanning and indexing.

Intelligent document capture goes further. It uses recognition rules and, increasingly, AI and machine learning to understand what a document is and what information matters in it. That’s especially useful for documents that vary in layout, like invoices from hundreds of different suppliers.

Tungsten Capture sits squarely in this space. On its own, it handles high-volume scanning, classification, and extraction. It can be extended with Tungsten Transformation, previously known as Kofax Transformation Modules or KTM, for more advanced AI-driven extraction from complex or unstructured documents. Tungsten Capture is often part of a broader intelligent document processing strategy.

How Tungsten Capture Relates to TotalAgility

Tungsten Automation offers several products, and the names can blur together. Here’s the simple version.

Tungsten Capture focuses on getting documents in, understood, and delivered. It is the workhorse for production scanning and document intake.

Tungsten TotalAgility is a broader platform that combines capture with low-code workflow, process orchestration, and AI. Organizations often use it when they want to automate the entire business process around a document, not just the intake.

Many organizations run Tungsten Capture for years and later evaluate whether some workloads belong on TotalAgility. Others stay on Capture because it does exactly what they need. There’s no one right answer; it depends on your volumes, document types, and how much downstream automation you want.

Who Uses Tungsten Automation Capture?

Tungsten Capture is most common in organizations that handle large volumes of documents under strict accuracy and compliance requirements:

• Financial services and banking: loan applications, account openings, statements
• Insurance: claims, policy documents, correspondence
• Healthcare: patient intake forms, referrals, medical records, billing documents
• Government and public sector: applications, permits, benefits and retirement records
• Transportation and logistics: bills of lading, delivery receipts, freight invoices
• Any finance department: accounts payable invoice processing

When Should You Consider Tungsten Capture?

Tungsten Capture is worth a serious look if several of these apply to you:

• Your team spends hours each day keying data from documents into business systems
• You receive documents from many channels, like mail, email, fax, and portals, and want one consistent intake process
• You process thousands of pages per day, or expect to soon
• Errors or delays in document handling create compliance risk or slow down customers
• You need captured documents and data to land reliably in a repository like IBM FileNet or SharePoint
• You already own Kofax licenses and want to understand what you have before buying something new

When It Might Not Be the Right Fit

Tungsten Capture is an enterprise platform, and it’s not the answer for every situation. If you process a few hundred documents a month, a lighter-weight tool may serve you better. The same applies if your document types are almost entirely unstructured and conversational, or if you want a fully cloud-native, AI-first service with minimal configuration.

Some organizations already standardized on the IBM stack may also be better served by IBM Datacap. A good partner should help you compare options honestly rather than push a single product. For more on how older capture platforms compare with newer needs, see Legacy Capture, Modern Gaps.

What It Takes to Implement Tungsten Capture

Tungsten Capture is powerful, but it isn’t plug-and-play. A successful rollout typically involves:

• Mapping your documents. Which types come in, from where, and in what volumes.
• Designing recognition and extraction rules tailored to those document types.
• Setting up validation, so questionable data gets caught before it reaches your systems.
• Integrating with downstream systems like your ECM, ERP, or case management platform.
• Planning for ongoing tuning, because document layouts change and new document types appear.

This is where an experienced implementation partner matters. DAS has worked with Kofax and Tungsten deployments for more than a decade. We help with new implementations, upgrades from older Kofax versions, systems integration, and platform upgrades. If you’re already running Tungsten and want to get more out of it, read What Is Tungsten Capture — and What Can It Do for Your Organization?.

Not Sure If Tungsten Capture Is Right for You?

Whether you’re evaluating capture platforms for the first time or trying to understand a Kofax environment you inherited, DAS can help. We’ll look at your documents, volumes, and systems, and give you a straight answer on whether Tungsten Capture fits and what it would take.

Talk to a DAS capture specialist →

Learn more about our Tungsten Automation services, including our work with Tungsten Capture.