ABBYY Vantage Reviews

Most of the use cases were invoice-related for sectors such as supply chain and finance. Sometimes, they were a little bit related to HR and payroll. We also had use cases for passports and IDs and documents related to HR and onboarding. 

I've also worked on a larger scale project for importing and exporting in Dubai. It had invoices, country of origin statements, and everything else that comes through with an import check event.

It was on-premise on all the projects I've worked on. I've never worked on it with the cloud. We would connect it to an RPA tool, such as UiPath or Automation Anywhere. So, it was a part of a larger solution.

Usually, it does the reading task for a document, such as an invoice, and that is a very mundane task for an employee when they have other stuff to do. It pretty much takes that off their plate. It gives them time to focus on bigger picture things or even look at the process as a whole.

It lessens the errors that can happen. An employee can be tired and read a number wrong, but if it is a computer-generated invoice, it is going to be of the best quality. If it is computer-generated, it will come out with zero error every time, and it will do it a lot faster than a person. It will extract the information and continue doing whatever you need to.

Verification station is a really good feature. It allows part-owners to be able to take a look at what comes out of the tool after a document, such as an invoice, is run through ABBYY. It also allows them to update it if there are any mistakes. So, it kind of gives them a little more control over what goes through the system and lessens the errors.

They say that they have invoice training or document training where if you put in a certain number of documents of the same type and you fix it once, twice, or a few times, it'll automatically be able to read the same document perfectly without you having to create a layout for it to follow. That has never worked properly for any project, so I just stopped recommending it completely. We spent time trying to test and getting a bunch of invoices to test it with, and in the end, it just didn't do what it needed to. If they fix that or if they can improve on that, that would be great. It will save a lot of time for a lot of people, and it will allow people with less experience with ABBYY to be able to use it.

The way FlexiLayout Studio and Project Station read a document, such as an invoice, is a little bit different. So, if you set it up in FlexiLayout Studio and create a template, it will read it just fine, but when you import it into Project Studio, sometimes, it will not read it the same way. The way both of them read is a little bit different. So, you have to go back, and you have to change it again, and it is trial and error until you get it right.

Its price should be a little lower. It is a lot higher than the competition.

The last project I worked on was in February of this year.

It is pretty stable. If I remember correctly, it has only crashed once, and I don't think it was a system issue. It was just some weird, bizarre glitch that happened at the time. Once the projects were live and running on the client system, we've never had any issues that I can think of.

Its scalability is good, but it also depends on how you're working on a project from the beginning. I like to put everything together, and I usually do think of it in a way that if we were going to add invoices in the future, it won't be a hassle. It is pretty scalable. I can have many different invoices on the same project. I can have a project going on the client-side for years and then just add to it if needed.

Usually, we have some type of business analyst whose main role is doing something that we call an OCR study. The business analyst would be reading the invoices and just telling us what the client wants to extract from them. On their end, they also make sure that the quality of the invoices is good for ABBYY. It can't be something that is written over and damaged or put in someone's pocket for a day and then in the scanner. It won't give us perfect results.

There would also be a developer who would take a look at the OCR study fed by the analyst and then think of how to develop each template. If you don't understand how you're going to design the whole project, you might need someone. Because we're putting it into another automation tool as well, after we've sort of developed everything, depending on the scale of the project, we may have somebody dedicated to just testing the submission before sending it over to the client.

We have plans to use it, and of course, it is a good product, but we work with what the client wants. So, if a client doesn't want it, then they're not going to be using it. It is not like a solution for every case in my line of work. It depends on if the client actually has a bunch of invoices or a bunch of documents that they need to read quickly. If that's the case, then we definitely recommend it every time. We recommend it over any other OCR solution on the market. ABBYY in itself isn't a perfect tool, but ABBYY is pretty good. It is not the best on the market at the moment.

I've been in contact with several people from ABBYY and their support staff. They're very helpful.

We were using the default OCR tool that came with the UiPath software. It is integrated with Google OCR and Microsoft OCR, which are okay for smaller, simpler documents, but they're not going to give you the control that you can have with ABBYY. The engine itself isn't as good.

ABBYY is definitely more mature. It's all-around better. If I pass through an invoice PDF, the percentage of getting everything right with ABBYY is higher than it is with the others. It is definitely a lot more expensive, but I can tailor what I need to each document, and I have multi-lingual support. I can pretty much just get behind what ABBYY is trying to read and make sure it is reading everything correctly, whereas, with Google OCR or Microsoft OCR, I just worked with whatever came out, and I had no control over it.

It depends. There are two types of installations. There is the standalone installation, and there is the server installation. The standalone one is very simple. It is just a normal install. You just push the license through the command prompt, and that's pretty much it. The other one is just going to take a little while longer depending on how you're going to deploy the solution for FlexiCapture on the system. From my experience, if someone is going to install it for the first time, they might need just a bit of help, but it is not that complex.

The duration depends on the solution. It depends on what a customer wants and how many invoices you're going to be preparing in ABBYY, but usually, we say that a good rule of thumb is about one to two hours for a normal invoice. If it has a complex table, then it may take three to four hours for an invoice. So, the time taken would depend on what the client actually wants. If we have five invoices for which the customer wants to use ABBYY, they can be created in a day or two days. We'll give half a day for installation, which also depends on how many servers we're going to be using. We'll give like another half a day for testing and pushing the project. So, maybe two days for five invoices is fair.

In terms of the implementation strategy, first, I would pretty much gather all the invoices the customer needs, and usually, if they are in the same sector and in the same business, they'll be very similar. If we have 50 invoices, I would rather waste an hour or two figuring out the similar invoices and then creating just 10 templates instead of 50. After that, I'd start with identifying the means of the values that I want to extract and figure those out in all of those 50 invoices, especially the ones that are going to be in the same template. Then, I'd get to work on those templates. Once I finish those, I'd push them to the project so that I can test them there, and if everything is working fine in the project, then I'd just give the solution to the customer.

We have definitely seen an ROI. Most of the ROI is related to time because it'll take a while for a human to go through a full process. If we assume that we have a process that takes a human or an employee an hour, that would be eight hours in a day. OCR would really cut that time by a lot. I'm also talking about adding automation to it, so I'm pretty much a little biased here. We can cut that time down by a lot, and once we do that, then we just have the whole process automated. It is not being done by an employee anymore, so that employee is free to do something else. So, you're saving time, money, and brainpower.

Its price should be a little lower. It is a lot higher than the competition, and if they just break the gap a little, then more people might jump onto their product. Their price is definitely a deterrent in the few cases that I remember.

They have monthly and yearly options, and if you want, they also have per project and per page options. We partnered with them for a few projects, and they provided us with a trial license that we use on our end for using the system, employing it, and developing the solution. On the client's end, they will charge them for the license because that's ongoing. They also get support and everything else.

They do charge extra for different types of installation. They have the standalone, which is pretty straightforward and a lot cheaper than the server installation. Server installation gives you a lot more, and it gives you control over the environment. They have a web management studio for the whole thing. You can create users and give people different permissions and track the progress of everything, so that's going to be a lot more expensive. I remember that one client was complaining about having to pay extra for having the Arabic language added to the system. I think they made all the languages free after that, but I'm not 100% sure.

I would advise first looking at what you're trying to extract from the documents that you have. If they are simple enough and are being extracted properly through a cheaper or a free OCR tool, then just use that. It is not going to be worth the price. If you have lots of invoices and some of them get very complex, and you'd rather have the control over making sure everything is fine, and you have no room for error, then it would be better to invest in ABBYY.

The biggest lesson that I have learned from using this solution is that when creating templates with different documents, make sure that you're using different identifiers for those documents. That's because, in the beginning, you might think that it would automatically know the difference between, let's say, an Amazon invoice and a Walmart invoice, but it won't unless you tell it. So, you have to make sure that those files are unique. You also have to make sure that what you've created fits perfectly for that invoice. If you leave a little bit of leeway, it is possible that something else will be picked up that you don't want, and then it will just ruin the rest of the process. It is no fault of the OCR. You just didn't restrict it properly.

I would rate ABBYY FlexiCapture an eight out of 10. It is not perfect, but it is the best I've used.

I use ABBYY Vantage in my company for extracting data from invoices, IDs, and contracts. I have also used ABBYY Vantage to extract data in English from different documents.

As my company operates in the Middle East, it is important for us to have a solution that accepts Arabic characters from documents. The most valuable feature of the solution is the extraction of data from passports and national IDs, a task that is generally difficult for most of the OCR engines to check data from such documents.

ABBYY Vantage is a product that does not include the Arabic language. From an improvement perspective, ABBYY Vantage should include the Arabic language.

I have been using ABBYY Vantage since 2018. My company has a partnership with ABBYY.

It is a very stable solution.

It is a scalable solution.

I work in a software company where there are more than 50 users of ABBYY Vantage.

The solution's technical support is very supportive.

In the past, my company used to use IQ Bot from Automation Anywhere. My company moved from IQ Bot to ABBYY Vantage to avail the latter product's features.

The product's initial setup is neither simple nor difficult.

If one uses ABBYY Vantage and is familiar with its components, I believe one can handle its setup phase. I think it is not a very basic solution.

The solution is deployed on an on-premises model. Depending on the projects undertaken by my company, I have also used the product on the cloud services by AWS.

ABBYY Vantage is a bit of an expensive tool. The payment model for ABBYY Vantage is such that a user needs to make payments for the number of pages consumed with the help of the tool.

I think my company chose ABBYY Vantage over other products in the market owing to the fact that it is a reliable product that offers stability, features, and capabilities to extract data from different documents. In our company, we tested ABBYY Vantage for many of our projects and saw that it delivers results.

I recommend ABBYY Vantage to those who plan to use it in the future, especially if you deal with complex, semi-structured, or unstructured documents since it is a dependable tool that provides high accuracy. Suppose a user wants to use a product to segregate financial documents and needs a tool that provides very high accuracy, then my company recommends ABBYY Vantage.

I rate the overall tool a nine out of ten.

The most valuable feature of ABBYY FlexiCapture is the ability to create your own template on the fly. You can train and classify, you can work with those different templates without the need to do special programming for it or with minimum programming. Additionally, the solution is supporting the Arabic OCR, both of these combined features are the most important for us in the Egyptian market.

ABBYY FlexiCapture could improve the performance. We are looking for better performance because it can be a lengthy capture process and the accuracy needs to be enhanced when it comes to Arabic.

In the next upgrade, ABBYY FlexiCapture could add invoices for the Arabic or for the Middle East because it's based on European or American standards mainly.

I have been using ABBYY FlexiCapture for approximately four years.

ABBYY FlexiCapture is stable, we did not find any problems.

In our usage, ABBYY FlexiCapture has been scalable enough. We had a cluster-based operation.

I rate the support form ABBYY FlexiCapture a four out of five.

The support could be more responsive.

I have used OpenText previously and overall the solution might work better, but for our use case, ABBYY FlexiCapture has all the features we need that are important, such as Arabic OCR, and is priced well.

The initial setup of ABBYY FlexiCapture is easy.

The price of ABBYY FlexiCapture is better than some competitors, such as OpenText.

I recommend this solution to others.

I rate ABBYY FlexiCapture an eight out of ten.

We are a logistics company, and, due to the fact that a lot of documents get generated on a daily basis, documents need to be processed and data extracted. That's our primary use case for this solution. We use it for a lot of data extraction.

The fact that IBM Datacap uses ABBYY's core engine for OCR, is quite useful for us. It makes them one of the key players as far as OCR extraction is concerned. 

The fact that they've packaged it very well in the sense that you have these field extraction batches which enable you to auto claim the documents, and you have these templates which are structurally laid out, which enables you to mark a specific zone from which data can be extracted. 

It saves us a lot of manual work.

The automation on offer is good.

Technical support, for the most part, is helpful.

A lot of things could be improved, especially if you look at the number of support tickets that we have created. Looking at those would indicate the things that can be improved. 

For example, more often than not, we are forced to rely on template creation in order to bring the accuracy of extraction to 100%. 

Even though the training works, it's not as good as it is made out to be. In our case, we've got thousands of suppliers and it is just not humanly possible for us to keep creating templates for each one of these suppliers. What we would need is an out-of-the-box extraction to be even more accurate, or for the training to improve in such a way that just the training should be able to give us a reasonable amount of accuracy. I know that 100% is too high a limit to aim at, however, even if we get close to 85% to 90% margin, it would be much better. Something that could do that out of the box would solve most of the problems.

ABBYY introduced a reporting data warehouse last December, however, that reporting data warehouse has its own fair share of problems. Something like accuracy and completeness of out-of-the-box recognition is something that should be available as part of your default reports in the tool itself. Right now, that is missing. 

ABBYY provides a document definition for an invoice, however, that invoice is a supplier invoice. In our organization, we deal with commercial invoices most of the time. The problem there is that supplier invoices. If you put them into the system, it gives you around 80% to 85% accuracy out of the box. However, with commercial invoices, you only get around 60% accuracy out of the box.

Based on the input that we have provided, ABBYY is now working on including the commercial invoices as well as part of that default invoice document definition. They are working on that as well. There are a lot of minor things that have come up. For example, when you create a template, ABBYY claims that you can export the default template that is generated as part of the training, and then make changes to that and then import it back. What we found was that the concept applies only to certain things. The training of the line items cannot be exported as a template. They said it's to do with the way machine learning was being applied and all that. However, these are all things which kind of increase the development time.

I have a couple of years' experience with this solution. I've been working with it since about 2019.

The performance can improve. Even though we have tried out the solution's provider, ABBYY, in terms of having more processing stations, all still boils down to the fact of how your application is configured. For example, in our case, we have about five processing stations in production. When we started off, it took almost 60 seconds to process one page because of the complex nature of our application. We had around five document types, and each type has to be classified based on a set of keywords, and then you had to apply the document definitions on top of them. Then it goes through this concept of the generic layout and the additional layout and so forth. Almost every page used to take about 60 seconds on average. Then we made a lot of tweaks to the application and then we brought it down to around 22 seconds per page.

That said, even then, when you're talking about the space that we are in, the domain that we are working in, sometimes a 100-page document has to be processed within around 30 minutes. If you take a 100-page document, only for processing that itself, it takes almost close to an hour. Then, what happens is that additional stages like verification, et cetera, by the time the data is exported and uploaded into the target system, it's taken too long.

With the normal ABBYY support, you go to support.abby.com and you raise tickets. The support is almost immediate. There are constant responses that come to you. However, what I've also seen is that there are a lot of complex problems for which we have not gotten the solution we need. While the response has been great, if you asked me whether all the queries for the problems that we raised have been solved, the answer is no. On the other hand, we also have a chance to interact with the ABBYY professional services team directly due to the contract that has been established with our organization. They are a wonderful bunch of people and there's this personal rapport that we have with them. We get in touch with them on a weekly basis and our query is resolved.

In our organization, it is the IT team that takes care of the installation. I do not have much information about the process and I wasn't really a part of it. 

We're just a customer and an end-user.

I'd advise users that, when you start off with your first project on FlexiCapture, choose a project which has at least something which can accommodate a very high pattern. For example, if you're going to go for a use case wherein documents have to be processed within the next 30 minutes, you're going to face a lot of problems. ABBYY is a wonderful tool, however, it has got its own set of constraints. It's very important to understand the constraints of the tool.

The strength of the ABBYY FlexiCapture license is the OCR engine. However, if you're extracting it to process millions of documents within a very small amount of time, that is not going to happen. 

It's very, very important for the final operators who are going to use the tool to understand what OCR is all about. The problems that we face are not technical at all. It is about trying to convince people, people who have been doing operations manually to change their processes. If you have a situation where people are looking at documents, looking at the data, and entering it into a system, and then come and tell them that the solution will extract that information automatically and they just have to verify that information, they'll need to change their approach. 

It's very important to get the business team who will be doing the verification into a meeting, in order to help them understand what OCR is, and also its limitations. 

You will need to specify the stock field and the zones. OCR is able to learn on its own and understand how to extract data from it. However, there are certain things that you will have to teach people. You have to tell them the fact that a page is converted into black and white, and that the gray areas either cannot be black or white as certain characters that are being recognized may turn out to be something else. OCR tells you the level of confidence based on what gets extracted. All this has to be translated to the business team so that they understand the tool and its limitations. If you do this, you can ensure the success of the project.

Therefore, while ABBYY, as a tool, is great, there is a lot of work that needs to be done before you start implementing it.

I'd rate the solution overall at a nine out of ten. We have had to initiate a lot of fixes, however, overall, it's quite good.

It is used for reading the invoice and working between customer ERP to implement RPA service, the robotic process automation. We've read the data from MD.

The OTR (Optical Text Recognition) is the most valuable feature of this solution. 

There is an area of improvement. For example, when we read the data from the OCR,  the accuracy is not good.

In future releases, I would like to see Thailand English integration in this solution. There is not a lot of Thai language integration, which is pre-dominantly an issue in Thailand.

It's been in use for the past year. We use the latest version of the solution. 

I would rate the stability a six out of ten. 

It is pretty low in terms of scalability. I would rate the solution a two out of ten. 

In Thailand, we've had to be the technical support,  especially as resellers. So there's not really a lot of technical support available in the Thai language.

Neutral

The initial setup is of medium complexity. I would rate my experience with the initial setup a six out of ten, where one is difficult, and ten is easy.

We have deployed it both on-premises and on the cloud.  

Overall, I would rate the solution a five out of ten. Specifically in Thailand, ABBYY Vantage does not have proper Thai language integration. So, when you're trying to read or analyze data that implements Thai language, it proves quite problematic.

We need to understand ABBYY Vantage to add some projects and push them to our customers.

I have worked on many different OCR extraction tools, like document understanding, which uses ML technology. Compared to other tools, ABBYY Vantage is better because it's very user-friendly. It has a wide variety where we can manipulate or code the document as per our specifications, like OCR or many more specifications.

Since we are using a trial version, we don't have administration access to create a tenant to integrate my OCR series with Postman. Right now, we are doing one POC, and to complete that POC, we need that access because it's a requirement.

I have been using ABBYY Vantage for a couple of months.

In my team, three to four people are using ABBYY Vantage.

Our experience with our FlexiCapture was good. In FlexiCapture, you have to create templates because it does not use ML or AI technology. We learned that ABBYY Vantage uses ML technology, and we want to explore it.

ABBYY Vantage's initial setup is very beautiful. We didn't face any hurdles during the setup.

The solution is deployed on ABBYY cloud in our organization.

Overall, I rate ABBYY Vantage an eight out of ten.

Our company uses the solution to develop structures for automatically reading customer documents. We produce the document definition for each layup and send data to customers. We have 40-50 developers using the solution in various departments. 

In the future, we will use the solution for automatic classifications of documents. 

The solution responds well to automatic document classifications with a 90% success rate. 

There are sometimes issues with calculations or integrations with the server when running multiple products with different languages. This causes data to not display properly in data fields. 

The system does not always train itself to recognize data properly from system leads. 

A more comprehensive training program should be available because free training books do not provide the level of detail needed. Sometimes, we encounter issues with an automatization but cannot resolve it even though we completed the associated training module. Training for particular scenarios need to be included in modules because integrations can be tricky or complex without these details. 

I have been using the solution for one year. 

The solution is stable. 

The solution is very scalable. 

We had one issue with speed where we could not achieve the minimum time for processing which should have been seconds. Otherwise, the solution is really fast with basic or fixed processing. 

Support does not answer tickets in a timely manner but eventually closes questions. 

For example, I have a few tickets for assistance with DVP, data pages, and working with multiple languages but support has not yet responded adequately to the email inquiries. I would like detailed information and an explanation for whether a shadow case can be used. I cannot authenticate, determine if available onloads would fix captures, or integrate without proper answers. 

Support should respond quickly to production issues. Time zones are an issue in getting responses because support works on Russian time. 

Support should have access to prior tickets to get a cumulative picture of issues a user has experienced. Generally, they do not have details from prior tickets to inform solutions so they base their answers on only the current ticket. Having cumulative knowledge will allow support to better understand a customer's situation and use case. 

I rate support a six out of ten. 

Neutral

The setup can be complex because it takes time to learn all the menu options. Our setup took one or two months because we wanted to ensure it was done properly. We do not use many of the menu options as our use case is rather basic. 

The help page is not very comprehensive or detailed. It uses code that is formal and the world is now more informal so some options might confuse users.

I have not evaluated other options. 

The solution is a good product but there is always room for improvement. I rate the solution a seven out of ten. 

We use ABBYY Vantage for invoicing problems and for unstructured forms and documents.
ABBYY is an older tool that specializes in data extraction, OCR, ICR, and other recognitions. The company or the department just has to decide the use case. 

I like the flexibility of the layout. For example, for the documents that we're using, this is the main feature that is very useful and makes it flexible for extraction.

It could be more intuitive. It's huge and has many options, and that makes it difficult. You have to go to Google and search for documents and videos to try and understand how it works. Some tools or processes or some parts of the process should be intuitive to make it easier for the developers.

Many of these tools are divided into many parts. You have to buy different parts, and you have to know the difference between features. Sometimes it's difficult for the developer because you don't have the old information available in cleartext. These things need extra plugins to try and collect the different parts in different ways. 

It would also help if they improved the engine for ICR. I know that people improved this tool, but it's not expanded right now. We need to use an additional plugin to design or code some parts using a toolkit. It's not properly included in the standard package. 

I have been using ABBYY Vantage for about seven months.

ABBYY Vantage is very stable. I don't have any concerns about it.

I know that scalability is available, but I don't have a big project reference right now. We have about 50 people using it right now.

In the last three or four projects, we used ABBYY instead of IQ Bot. I know that IQ Bot probably works with a simple OCR extraction without complicated decisions or business rules. If we have more complexity when it comes to the business rules, for example, the quality of the images, or apply different filters over the images and do other things with ABBYY, we use ABBYY instead of the IQ Bot. But IQ Bot is more flexible.

It's not easy to set up this solution. But once the installation is done, you don't have to configure anything. The main part is related to the server and the infrastructure people handle that.

For simple types of documents, medium-sized projects with 25 types of unstructured documents, with seven or eight field sections, it probably takes one week to deploy. This includes bulk extractions where the information is put into the different outputs. We mainly use this in our Excel template.

On a scale from one to ten, I would give ABBYY Vantage an eight.