What is our primary use case?
We are using this product for natural language processing. Part of what it does is take our unstructured data and turn it into structured data.
Our industry is related to health and benefits, and one of the things that we do is to help companies secure good benefits that they can provide to their employees. There are a variety of things to consider such as demographics when we work with different carriers to provide companies with the best rates.
One of the problems that we have is the ability to process all of the carrier proposal documents for enrollment. There are different demographics, different costs, and different plans. Currently, all of the information is being processed by humans. However, we want to use machine learning to process it instead.
How has it helped my organization?
We rely on CMR Plus to process structured, semi-structured, and unstructured data, which is something that is very important to us.
This product has helped to boost our overall efficiency and performance. I would rate it an eight out of ten in terms of improving the way our organization functions. It has given us the ability to automate many manual tasks. Furthermore, it has helped us to collect the right data for our analytics. This is huge for us because it allows us to serve our clients more effectively.
Once the ML algorithms are deployed, the machine can deliver the benefit.
Our overall confidence in the data provided by this product is pretty good. We have to have confidence in the data.
Using CMR Plus creates value-added work for skilled workers. A lot of the manual back and forth, such as emailing Excel files and PDFs, is now gone. As a consulting company, it is important that we leverage the power of digital and machine learning, leaving more time for employees to tackle jobs that demand more skill.
The ability of this product to scale across businesses is good. We built a set of APIs around AntWorks, where the AntWorks engine is exposed. As such, we have a set of microservices that interact with it. This elasticity is important to us because it helps to handle the peaks as the workload is seasonal by nature. Furthermore, we don't want to overload or underutilize our server.
What is most valuable?
The machine learning capability is good.
The algorithm helps us to get the right data with less training effort.
The technology seems to be a little bit ahead of the standard NLP software. They use more pattern recognition, rather than basing everything on reading static text. The problem with relying on an unchanging text is that it can depend on things such as the formatting, and where things appear within a document.
This solution can process complex formats, which is helpful for us because we get a lot of PDFs and they come in many different formats. As an example, a carrier might include a list of their rates in a table, whereas a different carrier will write their rates into a paragraph, and yet another will put them into some sort of graphic. If you only capture text then you will only capture part of that data. Pattern recognition ultimately helps us to circumvent the problems in dealing with format variability in documents and allows us to capture the right data.
When it comes to predicting what it is that a document needs manual intervention, CMR Plus does it pretty well. They have a QA cycle that is usually able to highlight such data.
The content recognition ability, in terms of giving us only the data that we need and nothing else, is pretty good. It has a positive effect on our efficiency and by extension, it impacts our infrastructure costs.
What needs improvement?
We would like to see the overall accuracy increase.
Having the ability to measure accuracy is something that is important to us, so this is an areas that could improve.
The technical support could be more responsive.
Although the performance is good, there is some room for improvement in that regard. I would rate the performance an eight out of ten. Specifically, the speed of processing complex documents should be better.
For how long have I used the solution?
We have been using AntWorks CMR Plus for more than four years.
What do I think about the stability of the solution?
This solution is pretty stable. I would rate the stability a nine out of ten.
What do I think about the scalability of the solution?
We are considering deploying this solution globally.
How are customer service and support?
The technical support is pretty good. I would rate them a seven out of ten because they are decent but there is room for improvement.
Response time is one area that can be improved. They probably need more people than they have on the support team.
They should also have more people located in the US. The locality is sometimes a problem for us because of the difference in time. By the time we get to work, we have an hour and a half to two hours overlap with support. It would be better to have them more available to us.
How would you rate customer service and support?
Which solution did I use previously and why did I switch?
We tried using a couple of other similar solutions, and we also tried writing our own using an open-source product.
One of the other NLP products that we used was a SaaS solution from another major vendor. We found that in that case, the accuracy wasn't to the level that we needed with the amount of training that we put in. Training requirements are important to us, as is accuracy.
How was the initial setup?
The initial setup was straightforward. We did not find it complex, and three people were involved in the installation and configuration.
It took us a couple of months to get it deployed and working.
AntWorks is flexible enough that it offers multiple deployment options, which is something that I think is important.
What about the implementation team?
My team was responsible for the deployment and we worked directly with AntWorks.
In terms of maintenance and support, we have a support team for all of our technology. That said, there is minimum support required for our infrastructure.
What was our ROI?
We have definitely seen a return on investment from using this solution.
In terms of overall time savings, we can reduce processing time significantly.
What's my experience with pricing, setup cost, and licensing?
The pricing is good, and it's based on usage.
We were one of the early customers. On a scale of one through ten, price-wise, I would rate this product an eight.
Which other solutions did I evaluate?
When we considered developing our own solution using an open-source base, we figured that writing it would take us much more time. Time was not something that we had on our side. Moreover, we didn't think that we would achieve our desired accuracy without an even larger investment in both energy and time.
What other advice do I have?
I would rate this solution a nine out of ten. Spend time up front to learn about the product and how it can help your particular business case. Take it for a trial run with well-defined use cases.
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)
