Kina Blog

Imagine that you have a new person on the team, and you are showing them the specifics of the job they are going to be able to do.  You would take them through the work a step at a time.  Often the work is procedure oriented, and steps and validations might need to occur to complete the process.  There may be hand offs to other people or departments and these hand offs require people to look at documents or information that help them complete their tasks.   To get the new hire familiar with the procedures, you would show them the documents they should expect, and what to look for on those documents, and potentially what decisions to make based on information available, either on those documents or from other sources.

Well, instead of training a person, imagine Kina performing some or all of those tasks.  If a task in a business process requires review or validation of information, validation and comparison, routing, sending emails, and storing documents and data in locations, then you can deploy Kina to assist.

Like a person sitting at a desk receiving documents to review and make decisions via email, Kina listens for events in your environment and performs work that typically is done by people.  For example, Kina can be subscribed to an email list in your organization.  If there are documents or emails that you would like it to process, it can do that.   Things that Kina can do for you:

1. Subscribe to an email list and automatically archive, classify and store in a controlled location documents or email that pertain to combinations of people, events, places, and other concepts.
2. Key documents from clients can be grabbed and processed when they arrive, with their data being extracted and delivered to systems.  Or, emails and spreadsheets can be sent with the extracted information.
3. At the same time, Kina can grab incoming invoices, validate delivered goods with SKUs, and against a referenced purchase order. Then route the information and documents to the correct location and store them securely.
4. Or send alerts to the right department or people to review, add information if necessary and let Kina know to move it to the next step.

A key idea here is that you don’t have to do a big bang automation approach.  Instead, you can gradually automate tasks by having Kina perform certain steps in your entire process.  As you get comfortable with how Kina works, you can add more automation via Kina.

You can send work to Kina via email, placing it in a certain folder in your environment, from a scanner, or uploading it directly via the browser or via the API.

You can receive work from Kina via email, in a review queue within Kina, as well as it can place completed work in your shared folders, Box.com, DropBox, and Amazon S3.