ABBYY Vantage Reviews

We use ABBYY FlexiCapture to recognize pictures or PDF files and transfer them to Word or Excel.

It's easy to use.

The integration with UiPath is not good.

I would like to see more documentation and guides to help gain more in-depth knowledge of how to use ABBYY FlexiCapture.

I've been working with this solution for about three or four months.

I have had no issues with stability so far.

I chose ABBYY because it had more solutions for intelligence automation, and it looked like I could combine it with other automation solutions. We currently have 20 to 30 users.

I recommend ABBYY FlexiCapture, and on a scale from one to ten with ten being the best, I would rate it at eight.

One use case was known as Manual Order and it was a type of invoice processing. When a customer had or was going to receive invoices from different distribution centers, which all could be accessed in different formats. For example, they could be different templates, be digital, and scanned. There could a wide range of variations. The purpose or the aim of FlexiCapture is to extract the information out of those invoices, such as a certain number of fields, which we need to extract from the invoice and that sent on into the SAP. For the SAP we were using Pega. There is integration between ABBYY FlexiCapture and Pega to solve the whole use case.

The second use case was for claims. For example, if a customer was supported to get a claim from the distribution center but some of the quantity was not being sent to them correctly or the price was not good, they would send those for correction. One claim could have multiple claims in between them that could have a price difference or quantity difference. It is more complex than device processing because it has more variations in the template. It has more business complex routes. On the FlexiCapture, we are extracting the data out of this document. We implemented some of the business tools and we are using Pega to revalidate the data in the SAP to correct it.

Additionally, we have four or five business processes that are already running in production with Blue Prism and ABBYY FlexiCapture.

While using ABBYY FlexiCapture we did not use the generic models that they do have for invoice and purchase orders. For one of the use-cases, the document was exactly the purchase order, but we are not using that generic model. We are creating the model from Scratch. However, if I was to compare ABBYY FlexiCapture with other IA tools, the machine learning and how the extraction is done is far better than competitors. This allows a lot less effort for the development.

The generic models have a lot of areas to improve. In our experience, we are not able to get good results in the generic models. From a developer's point of view, there could be more improvement if the source code is available on a broader scope. It is a low code platform but it requires implementing more complex code to be able to accomplish certain tasks. We are not able to tune the model on a programming level because we do not have the source code to do it. From a business point of view, ABBYY FlexiCapture is one of the best platforms for machine learning. The solution does not have anything related to RPA or robotics, but we can integrate it easily with a Pega or Blue Prism for these features.

ABBYY FlexiCapture has a lot of functionality but it does not have options to implement more machine learning business rules. It does not have the option to write the logic to implement other options according to the business. Most people do not like to choose ABBYY because of the lack of those functions, such as reading email or saving them to excel, they use other tools for these activities. If ABBYY had these functionalities more people would use it and it would be more useful.

I have been using the solution for approximately a year and a half.

The solution is stable. However, new versions come out frequently and our customers do not have a choice whether they are going to update since it is on the cloud. They still have to make sure it does not have any negative effect on their exciting solution in a bad way. 

There are times it takes a lot of time when we submit a document to FlexiCapture in between getting the results When this happens we raise a ticket to the ABBYY team and it gets released very quickly.

We have approximately four people in my organization using the solution. It is not the majority of the teams. We had five customers for which we were working with this solution, we had a trial contract with another tool, but due to some reason, the customer wanted to use FlexiCapture. I am one of those four people who have this experience in the ABBYY FlexiCapture.

We have plans to increase the usage of the solution.

My experience with customer service has been really good. I have not contacted them directly, but they do have forums. When we initially started, I had posted some technical questions and I did get a response from them.

ABBYY FlexiCapture is not very old which causes a limited knowledge base for assistance, this is possible because there are not a lot of people using it. There is documentation from the ABBYY FlexiCapture which is okay. However, if you start working with the solution, the practical knowledge is better than what you will find in the documentation.

Before using FlexiCapture we were previously using WorkFusion. It is an RPA or IA tool that has both the RPA plus machine learning. PNG decided to reconstruct those use cases and some others with the ABBYY FlexiCapture.

We did the installation for our own company, it is not very difficult because the customer service is good and are you will be given a particular team who will be responsible for the deployment.

We used the deployment team from ABBYY FlexiCapture for the implementation. The time it took was approximately two months including all customization and licensing.

Most of our customers have purchased an annual license and if you have multiple developers from other companies, you can assign the license on a monthly basis to developers. 

We have licenses for ABBYY FlexiCapture for our company.

We did evaluate other options with our customers before choosing ABBYY FlexiCapture.

My advice when doing the implementation is to do the practice mode rather than only going through the certification and documentation. It is better to implement the model, instead of using the generic model.

I would recommend this solution to others.

I rate ABBYY FlexiCapture an eight out of ten.

ABBYY Vantage is used for reading documents that require OCR or document intelligence, such as sales invoices.

The UI is user-friendly and ABBYY Vantage supports over 100 languages.

The handwritten recognition has room for improvement.

ABBYY Vantage is mainly available on the public cloud but for clients that use a private cloud, it is complicated to set up the solution.

I have been using ABBYY Vantage for two years.

I give the stability of ABBYY Vantage an eight out of ten.

I give the scalability of ABBYY Vantage a nine out of ten. The solution can handle millions of documents.

I give the initial setup an eight out of ten. There are two ways to utilize the solution. An individual can use the web-based user interface, which is easy to set up. If we intend to use the solution for bulk sorting, we'll need to use the API, which is also straightforward to set up. The full deployment can take a couple of days.

We implement the solution for our customers.

The price for ABBYY Vantage is at par with its competitors. I give the price a six out of ten.

I give ABBYY Vantage an eight out of ten.

We have over 1,000 people using the solution.

ABBYY Vantage offers better language support compared to its competitors, and it also demonstrates good connectivity and accuracy.

ABBYY Vantage is primarily designed as an enterprise-level solution that effectively fulfills OCR requirements. However, I do not suggest this solution for small companies or individuals.

We are using ABBYY FlexiCapture for invoices.

The most valuable feature of ABBYY FlexiCapture is the accuracy of the general extractions.

ABBYY FlexiCapture could improve in the maintenance, and there are some issues. You have to make efforts to do corrections. Additionally, it could be more user-friendly in terms of connecting between different solutions.

I have been using ABBYY FlexiCapture for approximately one year.

ABBYY FlexiCapture is highly stable. The processing time is very fast.

We have two people using ABBYY FlexiCapture in my company.

I have tested Vantage, and it is more user-friendly than the ABBYY FlexiCapture.

The initial setup of ABBYY FlexiCapture was not easy, mainly because you have to configure a lot of things. It depends on the installation itself if it's going to be on the server or on the same system, but either way, it is not simple. 

I rate ABBYY FlexiCapture a nine out of ten.

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.

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.