IBM Datacap Reviews

I work for an insurance company, and we use Datacap for document processing.  

Datacap has performance issues when processing large volumes of documents. We're doing 18,000 pages daily. Scanning takes almost 20-30 minutes, but it normally takes one or two minutes. We informed IBM and opened a ticket for that. They forwarded the issue to developers but didn't give a specific timeline for it to be resolved. Version 8.1 is already at the end of support. 

We would like to see Datacap transition to a cloud-based solution with cloud storage. There is a web interface, but it isn't easy to use. 

I have used Datacap since 2014. 

The response times are slow. 

We used Kofax long before Datacap. I believe the last time was 2007. I prefer it because the configuration is straightforward, and the backend is also good. 

Configuring Datacap is a little complex. The time needed to configure it depends on whether you want to create a new profile or a new job. You have to put in a request to the vendor, and they will create the profile in two to five days. 

Datacap's price is high, but we purchased it in a bundle with our IBM Finance package, so we're not paying the market price for the individual solution. 

I rate IBM Datacap six out of 10. 

We use it to capture documents issued from the business processes. For example in the sales department during the exhibition of our business process, we procure a huge amount of documents that are in paper format. To make it easier, we use Datacap to use the OCR in order to extract data from the documents to make the research of the documents easier for our clients. I have around 40 people on my team who are in charge of digitizing the documents. We have to start with the existing documents to make the gap smaller between the past and present documents. Once we finish with one department, we have to give them the means to digitize the work and the ability to do it themselves and continue the work. 

I am dedicated to code digitization which concerns too many documents at the same time. The batches are very heavy. In the same batch, we can have up to 14 folders and each folder can contain up to 1,000 pages. It's different than classic capture in which the employee has one or two documents and wants to implement them in the solution. 

I like the features that we just started using. The 2019 project was an as-is migration. With Captiva, we had a basic recognition process that was based on the indexation of each document apart. 

In tier one for example, in Casablanca, they are dealing with 2,000 folders per day. On each team, I have four people and each one is in charge of preparing the documents to review these days. Second-tier is in charge description of the documents. This discussion is made on an Excel sheet and then it generates descriptive documents that go with each folder. So we have a main page in which we can find all the metadata related to this document and so on. We ingest all of the folders in the system at the same time and the system is able to recognize all those folders and automatically classify them on Documentum. What I liked about DataCap and what made us decide to move to Datacap instead of Captiva was the licensing. With Captiva we had to pay for each page, the licenses, there are a number of pages. For Datacap we have a licensing model which is based on the number of users. We are not limited in the number of pages. This is the first thing we liked about a Datcap.

The second thing that I like about Datacap is the fingerprint capture which is easy to configure on Datacap. From the form of the document, if a document is redundant in the same department, we can configure the capture based on the form of the documents. We tell Datacap to bring this information from a certain day and then we have a symantec capture which is the ability to read the page and identify amounts based on the meaning of the phrase. For example, if the sentence says that the total amount of this operation is $2,000, for example, it will understand that $2,000 is the amount and put it as meter data.

The interface can be more intuitive. What is in common with the big solutions like EMC tool, OpenStack, IBM SharePoint, et cetera is that the platform and the interfaces are not generally user-friendly. They are powerful. This is common in between all of those solutions. It's hard to customize those interfaces to be intuitive and to be user-friendly. We have to create a new interface up to par of these strong solutions to make it user friendly. I tried many solutions in my life and I never had a beautiful solution that is powerful. 

We have been using IBM Datacap since 2019. 

It's not very stable. We use IBM support to resolve some issues but they're not huge issues. 

We use it daily on several sites.

I would rate their support a three out of ten. IBM support is one of the strongest and maybe after the quarantine they will be more reactive. 

It is easier to set up than Captiva. The configuration doesn't depend on the technical admin. The business admin can handle the configuration. In the past, we had billions of documents. For each type of document we have to configure the system to apply the security and it's important to configure each document apart. When we had Capatra we had to go back to our partner and configure the document. Now we can add members of documents without asking for support from the IT department.

To deploy a departmnet took two months without much customization. For the standard deployment, it won't take more than three months .

For a company that wants to install Datacap, make sure to choose a suitable person to manage it. It can't be a regular IT person. You have to check the laws in each country before implementing Datacap. We have to know the law for a retention policy before starting to implement it. 

I would rate it an eight out of ten. 

Datacap has all of the features that we need. 

With Datacap, use cases are really across the board. Accounts Payable seems to be a really popular use case in terms of invoices, but we do everything from insurance to financial services, to state and local government. The great thing about capture is that every company has documents they need to capture in some format, so use cases are pretty versatile.

For the customers we work with as a partner, a lot of times the solution is geared at introducing efficiencies for the mailroom. If you think about an insurance company, where they're getting a lot of paper coming in, they traditionally have to scan it and have someone sit there and key from that image. 

Datacap can take a document, maybe not having seen it before, and can classify it automatically. It can do OCR, extract all the data from it automatically. With it, they're really introducing real cost savings because the documents go straight through, don't have to be touched, handled as much, can go to the back-end systems more quickly. There is real efficiency that gets introduced through technologies like Datacap.

The user experience. One thing that IBM did a few years ago was they standardized all of their ECM products on Content Navigator, including Datacap. If you're an IBM ECM customer you have FileNet, you have Datacap, you have StoredIQ and you have a consistent user experience, user interface. It's all web-based. They moved to the cloud. They're doing things like containers. They've got a roadmap that's pretty "emerging" in terms of where they're going, that gives you that complete solution.

Reporting and analytics seem to often be something of an afterthought. With Datacap, they've started building out some dashboards, but one thing we hear from our clients a lot is, "Well, gee, we really love reports. What Datacap has is not really helpful. We'd like something better. We'd like more dashboards." That's one area where we've seen some feedback that the product could do better.

It's a stable product. We've seen other capture products on the market and our view of Datacap is that it's best-of-breed. It's a complete solution. It has its areas where it could improve, but it's reliable, it's scalable.

One of our largest clients, a large insurance company that you would know, they're ingesting 500,000 pages per day through Datacap, a really high volume. They've scaled it out to over a hundred servers, but that's the way it works. That's the design of the product: it can scale out as much as you can add servers to it.

The setup is getting better. IBM has introduced some more configuration wizards and the like. But what we always advise customers is, if you're just starting in with Datacap, bring in a partner like us to do the first one, because we've been working with this type of technology for many years. It's becoming easier to set up but you really want to work with someone who knows it, knows how to optimize it, knows what the best practices are to really make sure that you're getting the most ROI from the investment.

I think it is top of the market but there's always room to improve on it.

We use Datacap for scanning Proof of Delivery and Proof of Pickup from our delivery agents and drivers. We have a defined workflow in Datacap, and we process these documents into our imaging system and PODs or POPs for paying the drivers and agents for deliveries.

Datacap provides remote users with the ability to scan documents using some plugins. Internal customers can scan their documents and define their workflows, like where the document needs to be sent and how it needs to be indexed. That is one thing I like about Datacap. Several documents get scanned during the day, and they come from agents, drivers, internal workers, and customers. 

While we are doing indexing, we tag the document type. It's programmed inside of Datacap to automatically detect the document based on a given template. It auto-indexes that document, which means that it automatically tags the correct document type to the scanned document.

Datacap's workflows are helpful. 

When I scan a document in Datacap that has a watermark or the document is a little distorted, the image output is poor. It either becomes completely black, or there is so much distortion that we cannot read the numbers or the addresses mentioned in the POD. When we scan a document, we expect the output to be at least 95 percent accurate. If IBM could work on that particular thing, I think it would be fantastic.

I've been using Datacap for around 10 years now.

I have seen complaints on the older version, but we haven't had any issues with the new version so far. However, it's only been a week since we did the upgrade. Versions 9.1.4 had performance issues. For example, it used to take an hour to complete a batch job.  

IBM support is good. We open a ticket on the forums, and our questions are answered in a couple of days. So I wouldn't say it's bad.

I wasn't around when Datacap was deployed, but they have done two upgrades since I joined the company. The process was tedious. We needed to upgrade the server and the client. If it automatically upgraded the client when we updated the server, that would be fantastic. 

When we updated the client, we lost all our settings, like the shortcuts and preferences. Those settings go into an XML file or somewhere. The upgraded client should retain that file. It should not be completely deleted. The user has to set it up from scratch, which is frustrating.

I would rate IBM Datacap seven out of 10. If you're implementing Datacap, you need to understand the solution from end to end. In other words, you need to know how the server connects to the client. If you think there is a clear delineation between the server and client, you'd be wrong. 

There is a lot of dependency between these two, and you need to make sure the configuration XMLs are in place before you implement anything. You should also ask the Datacap technical support team about every attribute they're going to touch. Otherwise, it's going to be a nightmare.

We use it for digitization and automation, meaning auto-classification of documents, boundary detection, and the flexibility of building a rules-based approach to building capture solutions. More importantly, we use it for extracting content from that data.

As a partner, 60 to 70 percent of the organizations we work with are in the financial industry: big banks and mortgage lenders. We find that we bring them a solution for separation of what they call "blob documents," large PDFs that contain anywhere between 100 and 200 document types. They want a solution to crawl through those documents, to break them apart, to understand the boundaries of the documents and identify them and, after that, to extract information from those documents.

The big thing these days is really the Insight Edition component and being able to build annotators to extract from literally unstructured content: paragraphs and information where there's no start anchor point to define where that data is located. There could be a number of entities in that which you have to draw information from. Being able to extract from them is really the differentiator today between this product and many of the other products like Kofax (KTM). ABBYY is one that provides something very similar, but it's not really known in the space yet.

I've always had my own gripes. Speed of OCR is one issue. It's a challenge because we have customers that have millions and millions of pages that they want this solution to crank through. In order to do that you have to have a large infrastructure in place, and that directly impacts licensing, based on the core count.

The user interfaces for exception processing can be tweaked. I commonly find that we try to tweak and customize some of those components to more of what the industry standard is. The product is still trying to play catch-up a little bit in those areas.

The stability all depends. I find that sometimes it's very stable, release after release, but I also find that sometimes you'll find bugs introduced, release after release. That's just something you just have to deal with, open a PMR to have them correct.

From a licensing standpoint, it's tailored for enterprises. It can be used for departmental purposes, but it might be overkill. It all depends on the use case. But it is enterprise, it is highly scalable with enterprise role-runners and by adding more hardware to the solution to generate more throughput of documents.

Tech support is knowledgeable. They've been quicker to respond than usual to my PMRs.

The installation and configuration are fairly simple. It's a standard install process, not overly complex. An argument across customers is that it is difficult to build solutions using IBM Datacap. I think they're continually trying to work on that. 

We also provide solution accelerators that we build on top of Datacap, to accelerate those processes so it's not as complex. That's one of the reasons why we hope that people come to our company, Imagine Solutions.

I rate Datacap at eight out of ten. I'm very versed in the product, I know it very well. It's very flexible. I like the flexibility because I have worked with other products that have more of a black-box approach. Datacap is not a black-box approach. You know what's occurring through that solution inside and out, and you can tweak it or tune it.

I rate it at eight, and not a nine or ten, because we constantly have the complexity, customers telling us this solution is complex, overall. We tend to train customers after implementations of a week to two weeks of our own guided training, but it really takes someone, hands-and-feet, working with this solution for quite some time to really grasp all the concepts. We implement complex solutions and, sometimes, it's not as easy for a customer to acquire that knowledge after our departure.

Datacap is basically used to ingest the documentation of the clients, either from paper through scanners or through emails. In most scenarios, we either do scanning or consume email folders. It has connectors to read emails.

Its version depends a lot on the client and the project. I've been using version 9.1.6, and some clients have been upgrading to the latest version 9.1.9.

In terms of deployment, IBM has a solution on the cloud, but the solution I deploy is on-prem.

We recently did a Datacap implementation for a client, and we used its functionalities to do a separation of the documents and automatically capture some fields from the documents that the client wanted to extract. Before that, the software they were using wasn't optimized to do that. They were manually doing the separation of the documents and capturing the values of the fields. With Datacap, the process is automated, and they can now just validate if the captured data is correct and if the separation is correct. After it is implemented for some time, it creates a database. So, it separates automatically more over time, and the program in the background validates everything. For most batches, the operators don't waste much time on this process. Previously, they used to waste plenty of time separating the documents manually. After that, they had to write the data from the documents. The data was then sent to another platform, such as FileNet, for further use by another department. 

It is very easy to develop this software. It is low code, and if you can't find the things you need on it, you can develop custom actions with more complex code underneath. They sync well, which is very useful for automating a lot of processes. It is a really valuable feature for the clients because we can ingest information and automate plenty of processes for them. The operators don't have to waste that much time on tasks. With Datacap, they can be automated.

I've faced some bugs or issues. They should do deeper testing of the product before releasing it because some of the bugs that I found were a bit simple. I understand that it is a massive product, and some of the functionalities can get overlooked.

Their platform for reporting bugs and issues works. Sometimes, it takes them too long to solve the issue, but eventually, they do. So far, every issue that I've found in reporting has been resolved, but their support can be improved in terms of resolving the issues faster.

In terms of additional features, I've been following the roadmap they have, and so far, it has been good.

As a developer, I've been using it for over two years.

The software always depends on the infrastructure of the clients because it's very network-based. If you follow all the recommendations that it requires, it is great. It works properly, and the performance is more than okay. If you have limitations in the infrastructure or network, it can be a bit tricky, but you can always find workarounds to solve the issues.

It is very easy to scale the solution for our clients. If you want to upgrade the product on processing, it's easy. You just have to check the license requirements and the cost because the cost increases if you want to increase the servers, specifications, and processing power, but it's very easy to scale the software.

I faced some issues, and sometimes, they take a bit too long to solve them. When you open a ticket for support, they do the initial testing to test the error on their side. After that, they send the error to the development team on their side. Sometimes, this process can take a while. There are several levels of priority when you open a ticket, but they could improve a bit in terms of how fast they work. I had some unpleasant talks with their first line of support.

I started with Datacap right away.

It is now very easy for me. For someone who is starting with the product, they have a manual, and it can be very straightforward if no issue occurs. If there are some issues, it can be a bit complex to solve when you're doing the setup. Because I already have a massive experience with the setup of the environment, it's quite easy. Even when I find errors, I manage to solve them quickly.

I do the implementation for the clients. In terms of maintenance, in the last few updates, they have been implementing some tools for it to be easier to monitor. It basically depends a lot on the implementation and the functions. It depends on the capability that a client wants, such as if they want something more robust or something with easier alerts when anything aborts or an error occurs. So, it basically depends on how much the client is willing to pay for a more robust solution. In terms of Datacap, you can set up more on the development side to monitor everything. You have a tool page if you don't want to automate monitoring for everything.

It varies, and it depends on the client's requirements and negotiations. Nowadays, Datacap is also included in the IBM Cloud Pak for Business Automation. 

Datacap can be very robust. It depends on the solutions that the client is using beforehand. Of course, if you're changing platforms, you're going to have an initial shock because it has different ways of working, but in the long run, it's a good solution to be implemented. It can automate plenty of processes, but you have to be willing to invest in it.

I would rate it a seven out of ten.

The main use is to scan/import document for capture, capture data based on OCR zones, verify the data captured and export document and data to the ECM platform or other platfoms if needed.

The user can use the client desktop or the plugin of Content Navigator to do all the required tasks.

We're working closely with IBM's technical team to ensure we can provide the necessary solution to our customers.

The solution has improved digitalizing all the document process

At the forefront of my thoughts, the standout feature of this intelligent product is its remarkable capability. This project we're currently engaged in revolves around streamlining workflows within both our company and the customer's company. 

It entails handling information from various documents with diverse formats and types, even when they contain the same data. The ability to connect this information with the appropriate database and recognize it irrespective of the format or source is an extremely valuable feature. Moreover, leveraging machine learning is crucial since our customer deals with an extensive archive of over five million documents. Machine learning can significantly alleviate the backlog by becoming well-versed in various scenarios they might encounter during their work once we've completed our application.   

Its weaknesses are primarily tied to the lack of available resources and expertise in the market to effectively support and provide solutions and services to each customer for seamless implementation. Expertise in this specific product is rare throughout the market. One key reason is the product's limited downloads. Additionally, archiving solutions are often perceived as complex and challenging, dissuading many companies from venturing into this domain. Consequently, partners who specialize in archiving solutions are always seeking straightforward, uncomplicated options that are easy to manage and meet customer expectations.

Since 6 years

I've had experience with several other product like Abby fine reader, Kofax Capture (formerly Ascent Capture) and OpenText Intelligent Capture (formerly Captiva)

In this particular project, I believe, as a system integrator, I might need to utilize various solutions from different vendors to address specific situations. I'm not exclusively committed to a single solution. However, in the project I'm currently involved with, especially since it involves a machine learning component, Datacap combined with other tools of the Cloud Pack for Business Automation appears to be a more robust and feature-rich option compared to competition. So, in this context, I would opt for Datacap. If the circumstances are distinct, I might suggest OpenText in an alternate scenario. My decision isn't solely mine to make. I need to engage in discussions with the customer and the technical team to determine the most appropriate course of action.

This is one of the highly potent benefit of Datacap. When properly implemented, it provides significant value, and users find it very enjoyable. During the proof of concept (POC) phase, customers interacted with the product's interface and were highly impressed by its quality and functionality. It received very positive feedback.Implementation would be considerably smoother if the necessary resources were available. However, as previously mentioned, the scarcity of resources may hinder the process, making it less straightforward.

This solution offers seamless integration with other enterprise products, which is my area of responsibility, focusing on government sector projects. Larger enterprise projects don't pose problems. It might be suitable for small businesses as well.

We have structured documents that need to be scanned. After the scan is completed, it is reviewed by one of our administrators, and then the documents are stored in the repository. 

There haven't been many improvements in the recent versions of the solution; OCR and OMR facilities have been the same. However, the installation of the solution is very simple.

IBM Datacap cannot fetch unstructured data properly; it always gives you wrong information, so no one uses this solution for unstructured data. Even for structured data, sometimes the administrators need to change the members under the characters. The reading efficiency of the solution needs to be improved. This solution is meant to focus on both structured and unstructured data to achieve the vision of the solution. 

I have been using the solution for two years. 

The stability of the solution is fine, but we are using two other admins just for the correction. These admins make structured data corrections and segregate between structured and unstructured data. 

I would rate the scalability a six out of ten. The integration of the solution is very complex. Many integrations come under installing these. This solution is going to come completely under Cloud Pak and BAW. 

The solution will be under Docker, which uses containers like Kubernetes. Our organization usually receives around five to eight thousand documents. 

Kofax is one of the other competitor solutions that I have used in a project. I think most users prefer Kofax over IBM Datacap. The cost of Kofax is economical, and the efficiency is more than this solution, which is why most users don't prefer IBM Datacap. IBM products are very expensive in the market. 

The installation of the solution is very simple. We need a CPE, a database, a batch file like a TIFF converter file and the complete round from the Taskmaster and a Rulerunner. Installation is designed in an efficient way. We have four to six hours of downtime, so it is more efficient to get covered for any upgrade. 

This solution is the most expensive in the market. 

I would rate the solution an eight out of ten.