Kostiantyn Ryzhevskyi - PeerSpot reviewer
RPA Architect at a non-tech company with 10,001+ employees
Real User
A good data extraction tool that is enterprise-ready, but can be quite complex to build and use
Pros and Cons
  • "We like the fact that this solution is enterprise-ready, so it can be deployed on-premises, scale it, etc."
  • "We would like the workflow building within this solution to be more transparent, which would allow us to model the process."

What is our primary use case?

We use this solution to extract data, and to combine it with other solutions to provide end to end processes.

What is most valuable?

We like the fact that this solution is enterprise-ready, so it can be deployed on-premises, scale it, etc.

What needs improvement?

We would like the workflow building within this solution to be more transparent, which would allow us to model the process.

Also, the large number of components within this tool can make deploying and managing the solution quite complex.

Lastly, we feel that the usability of the interface could be improved by the use of cognitive capabilities, to make it more user-friendly. At present it is quite complicated to understand how to use this solution, and can take time to master effectively.

For how long have I used the solution?

We have been working with this solution for two years, but we have been more actively engaging with it for the past year.

Buyer's Guide
ABBYY Vantage
April 2024
Learn what your peers think about ABBYY Vantage. Get advice and tips from experienced pros sharing their opinions. Updated: April 2024.
768,857 professionals have used our research since 2012.

What do I think about the stability of the solution?

This is a fairly stable solution. In our experience there have ben some issues, but these have not stopped production. Instead it has cost us time in order to contact support, understand the issue, and then to mitigate future risk.

What do I think about the scalability of the solution?

This is a scalable solution, as far as we are aware.

How are customer service and support?

The support for this solution tend to respond in a timely fashion. However, more complex issues may mean a delay in replies.

How would you rate customer service and support?

Positive

How was the initial setup?

This solution is fairly complex, even for expert users, to setup and deploy. There are a lot of components involved in the initial setup, and a lot of documentation to go through in order to deploy the tool successfully.

What's my experience with pricing, setup cost, and licensing?

The licenses for this solution are payable on a yearly basis, and are transferable from one year to the next, if they go unused.  The license payment also includes a number of support hours from the vendor.

What other advice do I have?

I would recommend organizations to evaluate this solution if they are looking into data extraction products. It is complex to implement and use, meaning it will require time to use effectively, but it provides good results.

We would rate this solution an eight out of ten.

Which deployment model are you using for this solution?

On-premises
Disclosure: I am a real user, and this review is based on my own experience and opinions.
PeerSpot user
Pratheek Shiri - PeerSpot reviewer
Abbyy Flexicapture Developer at Novigo solutions
Reseller
Top 20
A scalable solution that provides high-quality extractions and a responsive support team
Pros and Cons
  • "Verification Station is valuable."
  • "It would be good if the product provided an AI-based prebuilt model that predicts and gives output."

What is our primary use case?

We use the solution to extract the contents from documents like invoices and passports.

What is most valuable?

Verification Station is valuable. If the confidence level is lower than what we set, we can view it in Verification Station and correct it if there are any issues. For example, if the confidence value is 90%, and the confidence level of the extracted content is below 90, the documents will be pushed to Verification Station. We can check whether the document has been extracted correctly. If the values do not match, we can correct them.

What needs improvement?

It would be good if the product provided an AI-based prebuilt model that predicts and gives output. We can then verify and make changes if necessary.

For how long have I used the solution?

I have been using the solution for almost three years.

What do I think about the stability of the solution?

I rate the solution’s stability a seven out of ten.

What do I think about the scalability of the solution?

I rate the tool’s scalability a nine out of ten. Five to ten of our clients are using the solution. The number of users has reduced. There are other vendors who offer OCR solutions. Our clients are enterprise-level businesses.

How are customer service and support?

Whenever we have issues, we raise a ticket, and we get a response from the support team.

How would you rate customer service and support?

Positive

How was the initial setup?

The initial setup is not easy, but it is not complicated. It was pretty straightforward. I rate the ease of setup a five or six out of ten. The vendor provided all the documentation. We could raise a ticket if we had any doubts, and the team would help us.

What other advice do I have?

Compared to most solutions, it is a good product. It has a lot of features. The extraction it provides is much better than any other vendor. Overall, I rate the tool a nine out of ten.

Which deployment model are you using for this solution?

On-premises
Disclosure: My company has a business relationship with this vendor other than being a customer: Reseller
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Buyer's Guide
ABBYY Vantage
April 2024
Learn what your peers think about ABBYY Vantage. Get advice and tips from experienced pros sharing their opinions. Updated: April 2024.
768,857 professionals have used our research since 2012.
Shiwali Shukla - PeerSpot reviewer
IDP consultant at WNS
Real User
Top 10
An easy-to-use solution with good ICR and OCR capabilities, but needs more connectors and advanced workflows and better stability
Pros and Cons
  • "Its ease of use is valuable. It is easy to use and configure."
  • "They can have more advanced workflows. They can have some custom status in their workflow. It was there, but they can introduce more cases such as triggering an email or interacting with other systems with APIs. They can be included as stages in their workflow rather than doing it all by scripting."

How has it helped my organization?

We had to extract some data from a commercial policy, which can run up to 300 pages, for a client. It was a challenge to look for the action data and extract it out of those 300 pages. With ABBYY FlexiCapture, we were able to do that easily by using its repeating group feature. It was helpful. For doing the same in Kofax, we would have had to heavily rely on scripting. There is no way of doing it with low code.

What is most valuable?

Its ease of use is valuable. It is easy to use and configure.

Its ICR is really good at handwriting recognition. The last version of ABBYY FlexiCapture that I used was better than other tools such as Captiva and Kofax. The base OCR engine of ABBYY is also very good. In fact, Kofax was using ABBYY's OCR engine in the last version, but they came up with their own engine.

One good thing about ABBYY is the training. All the training courses are available in ABBYY University. They were not free initially. They were instructor-led, but now, ABBYY has made them open for everyone to learn, whereas with Kofax, you have to purchase training courses, and then you can learn. With ABBYY, everything is there in their knowledge base.

What needs improvement?

I have not used it in the last six months, but at that time, there were some stability-related issues. These were known issues. They might have already fixed them, and it might have been improved by now. We had raised tickets, and they were working on various tickets. The known bugs included crashing of the application when there were more than 500 pages in the configuration window. It did not work in such cases.

There were also issues related to the classification by training. There is a feature in ABBYY where you can classify the type of a document, but it was not very effective when you trained it on a lot of variations. It worked fine for up to 10 or 15 variations but for anything beyond that, it was a mess. It wouldn’t work.

They can have more advanced workflows. They can have some custom status in their workflow. It was there, but they can introduce more cases such as triggering an email or interacting with other systems with APIs. They can be included as stages in their workflow rather than doing it all by scripting. 

They can also work more on connectors. The ABBYY connectors are there for SAP and SharePoint, but they can include more connectors. ABBYY's usage has increased. I have seen many companies using ABBYY in recent times, and it will help a great deal if there are more connectors to connect with the end systems.

For how long have I used the solution?

I had worked with ABBYY FlexiCapture for around five years. Currently, I'm working with Kofax, and I have not worked with ABBYY for the last six months. The last version that I used was version 12.

What do I think about the scalability of the solution?

I have not seen FlexiCapture environments with a lot of users. At the most, I have seen 20 users, which included five or six business users, five or six developers, and a few people from the admin and config team. That could be because at the time of implementing a project, not many people were required. When we handed over the project, more business users would have been created. It all depends on the phase of the project.

How are customer service and support?

We did try to reach out to them for some of the challenges. They wanted us to take some proper services consulting, but we were able to manage on our own. We did not interact with the services consultant from ABBYY.

Which solution did I use previously and why did I switch?

I used ABBYY FlexiCapture in my previous organization. Currently, I'm working with Kofax. Both of these organizations are service-based, and they provide services related to implementation, development, and other things. The tool that we use is decided by the client. When we approach a client, if they have already purchased a license of ABBYY or Kofax, we have to execute the use cases by using that tool. Otherwise, it will be a loss of a lot of money for them. 

If they don't have a tool, we do try to suggest what would be best for them, but it is up to them to decide which tool they want to go for. They can go for ABBYY, Kofax, TotalAgility, or any other tool.

I would recommend ABBYY FlexiCapture for those use cases where only OCR is needed, and there is no need for business processes. That's because not much branching is there in the workflow. It does not have a powerful workflow feature. If you are using it in association with any BPM or RPA tool, there is the ease of configuration, extraction, and classification. That's one thing that I like about ABBYY.

FlexiCapture is a good product. It can be used for any kind of use case that requires OCR. Except for the unstructured content part, which is there in Kofax, I cannot think of a use case that cannot be solved by using this solution. It caters to most needs of the projects. ABBYY is positioning this tool as only an OCR tool, not as a BPM tool. Kofax is an OCR and BPM tool. That's the difference, but I would not like ABBYY to change it because that's what makes ABBYY the simplest. There is a single component, which makes it easier to understand. When you add more features and modules, the complexity also increases from an understanding perspective. We can suggest more features, but it would be a trade-off.

How was the initial setup?

It is a straightforward setup. If you have a cloud deployment, you just need your tenant. You simply start using it after installing a thin client on your machine. 

I have used ABBYY on the cloud. I had used ABBYY as a standalone installation on my machine. I have used ABBYY as a distributed solution within our VPN.

Deploying simple bug fixes in ABBYY doesn't take much time. It can be done within two minutes. When deploying the whole project from scratch, I have not seen it take more than 10 minutes. It can be done easily, and it is a straightforward process. To import from one environment, you just change the variables to cater to the needs of another environment. You just go there and import it. It is that simple.

What's my experience with pricing, setup cost, and licensing?

You need to purchase user licenses, and you also need to purchase the license for the pages. User licenses are required for your developers to use the developer tools, and you also need to ensure that there is a pool of licenses for the business users so that they can log in and perform their activities.

What other advice do I have?

It has a very simple GUI. When a person is using ABBYY FlexiCapture for the first time, I would suggest exploring all the features, especially the Flexilayout Language, because it is very easy to explore all the features. It provides you with a great level of flexibility to configure complex documents. ABBYY is no-code, but there are a lot of things that you can do by scripting in Flexilayout Language. So, I would recommend not restricting yourself to the GUI-based commands. You should go and try Flexilayout Language. It is a very powerful feature in ABBYY.

ABBYY is launching new products. It is not that they're not changing anything. They have launched Vantage 2.1, which is very good at cognitive capabilities.

While pitching their tool, every product's sales team tells clients about certain cognitive capabilities and other features, which might not be possible for specific use cases. So, client expectations should be set correctly. One of the clients was expecting us to use the cognitive capabilities of FlexiCapture, but FlexiCapture is not that cognitive. Vantage is cognitive, but FlexiCapture is not.

I would rate it a seven out of ten. There is ease of use and ease of configuration, but they need to include more features. They need to make the product more stable in dealing with more variants.

Disclosure: I am a real user, and this review is based on my own experience and opinions.
PeerSpot user
IT Solution Manager DMS & Low-Code at a manufacturing company with 10,001+ employees
Real User
Top feature is OCR capability; extremely reliable and time-saving
Pros and Cons
  • "Time-saving with increased levels of accuracy."
  • "Could be simplified, particularly the UI."

What is our primary use case?

Our primary use case is for processing documents and extracting data from them - using the OCR capabilities. Documents include invoices, purchase orders, things like that. I'm an IT solution manager and we are customers of ABBYY. 

How has it helped my organization?

We've had two main benefits from ABBYY. Screening documents is a time-consuming activity, which has no real added value by itself so the solution saves the company a lot of time. The second benefit relates to the energy involved in employees going through documents. It's tiring work and mistakes creep in. We now have an increased level of accuracy by using the solution. 

What is most valuable?

Clearly the OCR capability of ABBYY is the top feature in our context. We can rely on the ABBYY knowledge and experience to extract data and recognize texts in different situations and especially in different languages, particularly English and Chinese. 

What needs improvement?

The main thing they need to work on is simplification of the solution, particularly use of the search tool. Configuring is quite complex and it's not very user friendly, particularly the user interface if you're trying to figure it out by yourself and create some configurations for processing documents. I know they are working on it. We used the new ideas on page projects they recently released and that has been great for enabling non-IT proficient users to start configuring and using it.

What do I think about the stability of the solution?

The stability of the solution is good. 

What do I think about the scalability of the solution?

It's quite easy to scale. We currently have around 10 users, mainly IT professionals but also other users. I'm responsible for managing and maintaining the solution with a support team, and we generally carry out an annual upgrade, rather than an upgrade whenever ABBYY releases a new version. We use it every day and hope to increase usage as it would help more and more people at the company. 

How are customer service and technical support?

The technical support was good. 

How was the initial setup?

The initial setup was quite simple, perhaps slightly more complicated because it's on premise so it includes taking care of the architecture. I managed the project and we built a platform in a few months. A consultant worked with me and another solution architect during the initial period. The total setup took between two to three months. 

What was our ROI?

We haven't measured ROI but definitely as mentioned, there are many time-saving benefits.

What's my experience with pricing, setup cost, and licensing?

We are on-prem so we're just paying the license fee. They have a clear pricing model. You pay extra for the training content. 

What other advice do I have?

The main difficulty, as I mentioned, is to get people started on it if they're not specifically trained on ABBYY or not an IT professional. It's initially quite difficult and more so now that the learning material is not freely accessible online. Other than that, it's just a matter of following the documentation and using it. 

I rate the solution nine out of 10. 

Which deployment model are you using for this solution?

On-premises
Disclosure: I am a real user, and this review is based on my own experience and opinions.
PeerSpot user
IT Consultant at a financial services firm with 10,001+ employees
Real User
Solid with good support, saves times, and brings more employee satisfaction
Pros and Cons
  • "The whole idea of designing your own templates is pretty much the bread and butter of the product, but that's really the best part because you can design flexible templates."
  • "There is always room for improvement in any product. Some of the configurations for the machine learning models for invoice reading are fairly complicated. There is so much customization that is possible with that sort of thing, so it makes sense that there are a lot of options, but some of the more important ones can be a little better streamlined or more upfront. Currently, machine learning models are a little bit difficult to configure satisfactorily."

What is our primary use case?

I specialize in RPA. So, I started learning FlexiCapture to include it in the automation process. Instead of users having to manually enter information into a database or something like that, they can just load their digital documents to a certain location for ABBYY to decipher them, and then the bot and the automation could just continue along with that.

For one of the projects, it was deployed on a public cloud. For the other project, it was on-premise.

What is most valuable?

The whole idea of designing your own templates is pretty much the bread and butter of the product, but that's really the best part because you can design flexible templates.

There is also the AI part. They have their machine learning models that are pre-setup for invoices and things like that, which is also very handy. It is a really good feature.

What needs improvement?

There is always room for improvement in any product. Some of the configurations for the machine learning models for invoice reading are fairly complicated. There is so much customization that is possible with that sort of thing, so it makes sense that there are a lot of options, but some of the more important ones can be a little better streamlined or more upfront. Currently, machine learning models are a little bit difficult to configure satisfactorily.

There are a lot of solutions for different things, and they are all kind of headed in the same direction where they all do everything. I know that ABBYY wants to try and do a little more RPA. Solutions like UiPath, for example, want to eat ABBYY's lunch too. They all are trying to make an all-in-one solution for all possible automation needs. In that sense, ABBYY as a standalone product could use some more automation features. They are not there yet.

Its integrations with strictly RPA products, such as UiPath, Blue Prism, and other solutions, work when they work, but when they don't, it is a kind of a pain. Those integrations could use a little bit more support.

What do I think about the stability of the solution?

I have run into issues with the connectors that they developed for UiPath. I had one issue with that. It didn't want to do what we wanted. We had to change how it worked a little bit as far as the automation goes. It wasn't a huge issue, but it would have been much more convenient if had worked the way it was designed to. Otherwise, in terms of the stability of the project itself, I've never seen it crash.

Its performance is usually dependent on the hardware it is installed upon. That's not really an issue with the software itself. Its accuracy is good. It is probably one of the better optical character recognition packages that I've seen, but it still is not perfect because none of them are. It is the nature of the software, but it is pretty good. As long as the clients can provide reasonably readable documents, then it has got no problems as far as I'm concerned.

What do I think about the scalability of the solution?

It is actually relatively simple to increase the scale of the infrastructure that you install. When I was dealing with it, the licensing structure that they had was relatively affordable as compared to other solutions. The bigger the scale, the more affordable it is. These things change all the time, so I don't know if it is still current.

The projects I've been on were proof of concept and then we just rolled them into production on the first stage. It was pretty small scale, but they had plans to go large scale. One of the projects actually from my end was still just the small-scale stuff, but other departments in the company had already procured a rather large-scale ABBYY license, and it was in production. I had nothing to do with that section, but the company as a whole had a pretty large infrastructure for ABBYY itself. They were dealing with millions of pages per month or so.

For proof of concept, there were probably about four or five test users. For the second one that I worked on, it was planned to go to production from the get-go. It started out on small scale again with probably four or five users. So far, the scale is 20.

How are customer service and technical support?

I have used tech support, and they've been extremely helpful. There was a part of the solution I couldn't figure out myself. So, I enlisted their help, and they walked me through how to do what I needed to do. They set up a time within the next day or so, and they spent an hour with me. We figured it all out, and it was good. There is always room for improvement. Other instances haven't been as perfect as that, but that was certainly a shining example.

Which solution did I use previously and why did I switch?

When we did the first project, which was just the proof of concept that I was part of, they had older software from 20 years ago. There wasn't support for it anymore or something like that. They were looking for something that could handle a larger scale. So, they switched. We suggested them ABBYY, and that's where they went.

How was the initial setup?

For the clients for whom I worked with ABBYY, we would arrange for them to provide an environment. We would go into the environment and install ABBYY servers. If required, we'd also walk them through installing the clients on their machines, but generally, what we've been doing so far has been the support to an RPA project. They didn't really need to use ABBYY clients. It has all been pretty much backend stuff. We would install the infrastructure, set up the automation and its interactions with ABBYY, and then run tests in UAT. Once everything is ready to go, we do the final production deployment. After that, we have a week or two of maintenance before it gets off to a specialized maintenance team.

It takes about a week for the installation, but the development planning usually takes months or longer. At the time, I was pretty much doing it myself with support from a business analyst. The deployment of the infrastructure, the development of the automation and the ABBYY components, and then running the testing was usually just a one-man job with support from a couple of other people, such as a project manager.

Once we have developed the solution, there is a testing period where we just put it in their hands, and they throw all sorts of scenarios at it. We fix the bugs as it goes along. ABBYY does have a learning function where it can pick up on these changes when things arise, as long as the users are able and familiar with how to train it, which we show them how to do. So, maintainability is pretty good as far as I'm concerned. If there is something completely wrong and it is not reading anything right, then we have to go in and edit the templates, etc. Generally, if we set it up right and they learn how to teach it right, it is pretty stable.

What was our ROI?

The client got an ROI in reducing the number of hours that the users have to spend on a given task. Again, my solutions are not purely ABBYY, so it is hard to say how much of the benefit the ABBYY section alone was. Usually, ABBYY is involved because the users are spending a lot of time entering the information they see on a piece of paper into the system, whereas ABBYY can read it all in seconds. So, there is certainly great time savings. It then becomes a matter of comparing the cost of installation and the cost of developing the solution, licensing, and everything else with the costs and the time of those users. Even if it is pretty close to equal, they usually go for it because it is a much better environment for the users to work in and is less tedium. So, they have more employee satisfaction.

What's my experience with pricing, setup cost, and licensing?

It is more on the reasonable side as compared to the competition that I am aware of. I'm not an expert on pricing schemes for all sorts of things, but when we offer them a solution, we like to say we're agnostic. So, we offer more than one solution when possible. Amongst the ones that we've offered, ABBYY usually is the more reasonable solution on a big scale. On a small scale, they're all pretty similar.

As far as I understand, you pay a license for a number of pages, and that's pretty much it. It has just the rate per page, and it decreases as you scale.

What other advice do I have?

I've never done a strictly ABBYY solution. My solutions have all been ABBYY plus UiPath or something like that. After a solution has been deployed, there have always been bug fixes. Other than that, clients have always been extremely happy with this solution. They're excited they have to do less work.

If you have the right use case, it is definitely worth it. As a solution, I would rate ABBYY a nine out of 10. It is a solid solution, and support is there. It is good.

Disclosure: My company has a business relationship with this vendor other than being a customer: Partner
PeerSpot user
Andrew Doman - PeerSpot reviewer
Senior Manager at Wipro Limited
Real User
Top 20
Responsive technical support, reliable, and performs well
Pros and Cons
  • "The ability to extract and insert data, then structuralize it into the actionable format, would be the most valuable."
  • "The initial setup was relatively complex. The people who install it must be knowledgeable about what they are doing."

What is most valuable?

It would be during the data extraction process. The ability to extract and insert data, then structuralize it into the actionable format, would be the most valuable.

What needs improvement?

I would have liked to see them make it easier for business users to implement themselves. This is what they have done with Vantage, which is essentially a low code/no code, slightly enhanced version of FlexiCapture that is already available.

For how long have I used the solution?

I have been involved with ABBYY FlexiCapture off and on for approximately one year.

What do I think about the stability of the solution?

ABBYY FlexiCapture is a stable product. The stability is good.

What do I think about the scalability of the solution?

The scalability of ABBYY FlexiCapture is good.

This solution is used on a daily basis throughout the organization.

My company has approximately 230,000 employees worldwide.

How are customer service and support?

The technical support is good. They solve problems relatively quickly.

Which solution did I use previously and why did I switch?

I am familiar with IBM Datacap.

How was the initial setup?

The initial setup was relatively complex. The people who install it must be knowledgeable about what they are doing.

It took some time to get everything up and running properly.

What about the implementation team?

The deployment was completed in-house.

What was our ROI?

We have seen a return on investment, but I'm not sure how much.

It would be far too difficult. Because we obviously deliver these types of solutions not only in-house but also for a large number of other companies. There's plenty of ROI that we have managed to deliver for our customers, in particular, but I can't give you figures.

What's my experience with pricing, setup cost, and licensing?

I don't recall the pricing.

Which other solutions did I evaluate?

In terms of intelligent document processing, the company uses a variety of platforms, including IBM Datacap and ABBYYFlexiCapture, among others. We were constantly reviewing market products, and we were also doing things like Hyperscience. At the moment, I'm working on a review for Vantage, which is ABBYY's other recently released product, rather than FlexiCapture.

What other advice do I have?

We are partners with ABBYY.

If you are going to implement it, I would recommend a combination of engaging with a delivery partner to accelerate your initial setup and scalability and then building your own internal capability, which requires accredited users, in parallel.

Because FlexiCapture requires a significant amount of domain knowledge or technical capability to implement. I am not sure if this is outside the scope of your research, but if a company is looking to implement ABBYY products in general and does not want to require a significant increase in internal capabilities, ABBYY Vantage may be a better option.

I would rate ABBYY FlexiCapture an eight out of ten.

Disclosure: My company has a business relationship with this vendor other than being a customer: Partner
PeerSpot user
RPA Consultant at a financial services firm with 10,001+ employees
Real User
A perfect, comprehensive, and accurate tool for unstructured data
Pros and Cons
  • "There are a lot of options in ABBYY FlexiCapture, and it is very vast. I have worked with multiple OCR tools, and I found ABBYY FlexiCapture to be the most accurate tool."
  • "In IRISXtract, we can have master data, and we can set the master data. There are more options for taking any data and comparing it with master data. For a project, they have a dump from SAP for validation. This feature is there in ABBYY, but it is not extensive like IRISXtract. ABBYY is capturing the data, but there are not a lot of options to validate the captured data. It would be helpful if there are more options for validating the captured data in ABBYY FlexiCapture."

What is our primary use case?

I was using ABBYY FlexiCapture for invoices and purchase orders. We had invoices coming from a German client. From those invoices, we had to capture the invoice number, purchase order number, and invoice date. There were also line items, total quantity, and total sum. We had to take these things in an XML format or a CSV format. The outputs from these invoices were put into an application by an RPA project. So, we were basically using ABBYY FlexiCapture to capture all those details from invoices. In India, we have PAN Card and Aadhaar Card, and I was using ABBYY FlexiCapture to configure PAN Card and Aadhaar Card.

How has it helped my organization?

The client had around 400 to 500 vendors, and every day, the client was receiving thousands of invoices. It was a very hectic task for them to capture all those invoices into the application. It was not possible for them to capture all the fields by using any RPA tool because RPA can handle any structured data, but invoices are totally unstructured. So, we needed an intelligent OCR tool. That's when ABBY FlexiCapture came into the picture.

What is most valuable?

There are a lot of options in ABBYY FlexiCapture, and it is very vast. I have worked with multiple OCR tools, and I found ABBYY FlexiCapture to be the most accurate tool.

The key-value pair and relation were most valuable. Because the invoices were coming from different vendors, it was possible that they would come in different formats. The idea was to capture data from all formats. There were key-value pairs and nearest to the X coordinate or Y coordinate, and with a lot of hits and trials, I was able to get the exact fields configured for every invoice. 

What needs improvement?

There are very few resources of knowledge. Whenever I got any doubt, I have to raise a ticket into their support forum. I can't find anything in Google or on YouTube. There is no training material, so it was very hard to learn in the initial days. The information about other tools is available on YouTube and other platforms, but ABBYY FlexiCapture is nowhere available to learn for free. They have documentation on their website, but it is very basic. It is not adequate for working on any live project.

ABBYY FlexiCapture has given a basic kind of project for capturing data from invoices, but I feel it is not sufficient for Indian invoices. A lot of times, some of the fields were not getting captured for new invoices. For such kinds of invoices, there is a training field. So, we can train it for the fields that it is not capturing so that when the same kind of invoice comes next time, ABBYY FlexiCapture will pick up these fields from those particular areas.

Another pain area was that clients were not giving proper invoices. We had clearly mentioned the proper DP for these invoices, but few invoices were not readable from ABBYY. 

In IRISXtract, we can have master data, and we can set the master data. There are more options for taking any data and comparing it with master data. For a project, they have a dump from SAP for validation. This feature is there in ABBYY, but it is not extensive like IRISXtract. ABBYY is capturing the data, but there are not a lot of options to validate the captured data. It would be helpful if there are more options for validating the captured data in ABBYY FlexiCapture.

For how long have I used the solution?

I last used it six months ago.

What do I think about the stability of the solution?

It takes time to get it stable. If a client has a lot of customers, and a lot of invoices from different vendors are coming, then all those invoices will not work in ABBYY FlexiCapture until and unless we configure each and every one of them. 

What do I think about the scalability of the solution?

It is scalable. There is no other tool in the market that is as creative, as vast, and as accurate as ABBYY FlexiCapture. If you have proper and complete knowledge and all the training for ABBYY FlexiCapture, then you can make it scalable in the organization. You need proper training.

I am not sure about the number of users in the whole organization, but in my team, there were four people who were using it. There were also two people from the RPA side. They all were RPA consultants and developers. There was also a team for Power BI for putting information about the number of invoices processed on a dashboard.

After that project was live, I was moved to a different project. Other people came into the picture for the support role. I was put in a purely RPA-based project. I'm working in Blue Prism for the last six to seven months.

How are customer service and technical support?

If I send a query, they do reply. If it is a proper query with screenshots, they give you a solution very quickly. If you have a licensed version of ABBYY, they provide proper support.

Which solution did I use previously and why did I switch?

I've worked with IRISXtract, and I've worked with OCR tools of RPA solutions such as UiPath, which has its own document visualization tool. I find ABBYY FlexiCapture to be most perfect for configuring any type of unstructured data.

IRISXtract is not a good tool. I struggled a lot with that tool. ABBYY FlexiCapture is much better than IRISXtract. ABBYY FlexiCapture is using the ABBYY OCR engine, and IRISXtract is using the Google Tesseract OCR engine. ABBYY's OCR engine is more accurate.

ABBYY FlexiCapture and ABBYY FineReader are licensed, and we can't get them for free, whereas Google Tesseract is a free OCR. In terms of capturing a full invoice from start to end, at least ABBYY's OCR engine is giving line breaks and other things, whereas Google Tesseract OCR, as well as Microsoft OCR, are not giving it in a proper manner. They give everything as a single string without any spaces or a new line. So, ABBYY has more intelligence.

IRISXtract provides more options for taking any data and comparing it with master data.

How was the initial setup?

I initially worked on a PoC. I got a lot of doubts initially, and ABBYY's forum was very helpful. Whenever I posted any queries, they replied in minutes. The deployment was straightforward. We did the whole project in six months, which includes RPA and hosting into SAP application.

What other advice do I have?

Before starting any project in ABBYY FlexiCapture, it would be better to have a few sessions with their product team or technical team to clarify all the doubts. If you have started a project and in the middle, you ask for their advice, it becomes hectic because they might ask you to change your approach. So, getting any support from them initially is always helpful.

The biggest lesson that I have learned from using ABBYY FlexiCapture is that only by trying more, you can get to the exact solution. If you are working on an invoices project, you should try multiple types of invoices. The line item is a typical area because different types of invoices have different headers and columns. You need to make sure that you have proper knowledge before configuring any line items details.

I would rate ABBYY FlexiCapture a nine out of 10.

Which deployment model are you using for this solution?

On-premises
Disclosure: I am a real user, and this review is based on my own experience and opinions.
PeerSpot user
RPA Developer at a manufacturing company with 10,001+ employees
Real User
Well supported with the ability to customize templates; machine learning needs to be improved
Pros and Cons
  • "Identifies and extract relevant elements from a document."
  • "Machine learning needs to be improved."

What is our primary use case?

Our primary use case of this solution is for document processing. Whenever I receive an email from a vendor or business it gets processed to the ABBYY server. I've created a layout in FlexiCapture that recognizes the template, extracts the field and puts it into the Excel format. I mainly work with purchase and invoice documents and ABBYY checks the validation conditions of an invoice. I'm the manager RPA developer and we are customers of ABBYY FlexiCapture.

What is most valuable?

The advantage of the solution is being able to identify and extract the element you need from a document. The template can be customized for this. We can create our own rules to validate some values before exporting the results. 

What needs improvement?

I would like to see consistency improved. If the same document is uploaded twice, I might get a different outcome the second time. Machine learning needs to be improved. We have some issues with scanned documents that may have a quality less than 300 dpi and the quality isn't high enough for ABBYY to accurately read it, and it therefore requires manual intervention. There is scope for improvement which could include AI modelling and training. If AI is there then it will identify it in a better way. There is a field training option that already has an ML algorithm for it, but it's not much use. Hand-written documents have less than 50% accuracy. 

For how long have I used the solution?

I've been using this solution for a year and a half. 

What do I think about the stability of the solution?

We haven't had any issues with stability, I think it's better than other solutions. 

What do I think about the scalability of the solution?

I don't know about scalability because I'm the only user in the company. We deployed in the AWS server and we have a team who control everything. We currently have eight projects related to OCR which are in the pipeline. I have already trained two other guys.

How are customer service and technical support?

There is a forum for support but not many people are active. We have a license with them so we will usually receive a response within 48 hours. 

How was the initial setup?

The initial setup was okay, the difficulties came later with the poor quality of documents we received. 

What's my experience with pricing, setup cost, and licensing?

We pay an annual license fee, our management team that deals with that. 

Which other solutions did I evaluate?

I did a POC on all the different OCR tools in terms of the level of accuracy I get from each document. ABBYY and Amazon Textract did quite well, whereas Kofax did not provide as good a result. Textract reads the entire document data and provides raw data output in the string format. With ABBYY, I can add a field into the template and then extract it but in Textract adding a customized field is not possible.

What other advice do I have?

Anyone using this needs to know they won't get 100% accuracy. Human intervention is required depending on the quality of the document. Clearly, if the quality is good, the results will be better. ABBYY has been on the market for over 20 years so they're well supported including all other RPA tools. Competitively, I think ABBYY is better than other OCR tools. 

It's good to test the solution with multiple samples. Once you create a layout, test it with multiple documents and see what you're able to achieve. If I see that 30 out of 100 documents are not processed 100%, I'll retrain it to improve the accuracy level for when the same document comes in next time.

I rate this solution a six out of 10. 

Which deployment model are you using for this solution?

Public Cloud

If public cloud, private cloud, or hybrid cloud, which cloud provider do you use?

Amazon Web Services (AWS)
Disclosure: I am a real user, and this review is based on my own experience and opinions.
PeerSpot user
Buyer's Guide
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Updated: April 2024
Buyer's Guide
Download our free ABBYY Vantage Report and get advice and tips from experienced pros sharing their opinions.