IBM Datacap Reviews

Most of the algorithms in IBM Datacap are for capturing information on physical, tangible pieces of paper or documents, allowing them to be scanned, and associating them with an automated workflow.

Datacap can work in conjunction with FileNet most of the time. However, Datacap allows companies or government municipalities to take in information, scan it, and have it in a centralized database, so you can have an automated workflow structure for it. It speeds up a lot of internal processes, reduces human error, etc.

We use a lot of in-house ECM solutions and a lot of different technology solutions. We have our own CRM system. As far as Datacap and FileNet go, we scan in a lot of our documentation and have a lot of automated workflow structures for building RFPs in the government sector. Therefore, we can take a lot of information and scan it in, then it can tell us the differentiation in documents, etc. We try to be as paperless as possible. It's mostly digital these days. 

I'm working with the Connecticut State Troopers right now. We're implementing a Datacap and FileNet system for them. Their goal is to have their sex offender registry unit:

• They have about 120 to 150 mailed letters that come in every month or within a cycle of three months (90 days). 
• They have to tell people the location of theses individuals, where they are, what they're doing, and if they're still in the same location.
• They have to track and make sure that no one is being harmed by these individuals who have committed crimes.

Thus, we have integrated a system, which should be going live in the next few weeks for them. The Datacap and FileNet systems will work in tandem together to pull the information from the letters, mailing, and forms which have been sent out for the sex offenders into the system. Everything will be an automated workflow structure so they don't have to hire ten people to sit there and type in all the information or scan the information in and still have to type it. It should automatically pick up a lot of the details which are already on the documents, then be able to flag specific individuals, and tell the people who are working at the state trooper facility, "We need to check up on this person. This person moved."

This is one specific example that I could give you as far as the benefits go. It's a lot of time and money saved, and ultimately, it protects more people, because there is less human error. If someone is typing in the information and they screw up, it could be detrimental and somebody could end up getting hurt in the process. So, there are a lot of different perks to it.

• It reduces human error. 
• It saves time.

Automation is all about eliminating human error and saving time. Time is a way more valuable resource than money. You can take out loans and receive money from anywhere. Thus, time is a much more valuable resource.

The overall issue is the amount of money that you pay workers every year to spend time filing paperwork or sticking with a manual process. An example: In the state of Connecticut, we implemented a solution which was forms based, but inspired by IBM technology. We were able to eliminate a process which normally took 60 days and cut it down to six hours.

I would like to see integration of Watson AI technology into Datacap. AI could play a huge, pivotal role as far as where IBM technology's heading. Not only that, but where the world's technology is heading, as well.

We have been seeing all these different competitive uses and different, softer technologies along with a lot of copycats who have popped up. IBM is fantastic and phenomenal at being a differentiator. As time has moved forward, there has been less focus on the Datacap and the FileNet side, and there has been more focus on the next generation of technology, like AI.

IBM works in both the private and public sectors. 

As you're implementing the system correctly and you have the right people able to run and support the system, you will rarely ever see issues. When you compare that to a manual process, it's uncanny the amount of benefits that you can get from such a stable system.

It is very scalable.

The biggest thing that IBM has going for it on the customer service side is their ability that they have to create relationships.

My company adopted the technology in the mid-2000s because they wanted to make things faster, better, stronger, and more efficient. They also wanted to stay ahead of the competition and kept information secure.

It can take some time to implement. As long as the customer understands that they have to be patient with the entire process, it's very easy to work with people and have the level of the technology they want to work. However, everybody has to be onboard with it.

It is wonderful when you compare it to something like a Datacap or FileNet system, then to a manual process. For example, when you have to bring in more people to do a job, it takes training, time, knowledge transfer, money, etc.

The difference when you have a system that's already set in place with automated workflow structure, you can just bring people on, show them how to use this system, then they can work the system for 10, 20, or 30 years. What I have heard from IBM is, "If a job is replaced with automation technology, you increase newer jobs to be able to run automated systems."

So, you save a lot of time and money, but the benefit is you have people who are able to run the systems, check to see if there are any errors at all, and there are a lot less errors than a human system.

I do a lot of the business analysis or project management in our company. I have seen the difference that it makes to our customers to implement a technology like Datacap or FileNet.

I would definitely recommend this solution depending on the need and situation. If they need help with sales, or something along those lines, Datacap is not the first thing that I would think of. That would be more of a CRM tool. When it comes to wanting to eliminate a lot of human error, wanting to streamline a lot of internal processes, or even if it's just cutting expenses, increasing cashflow, and revenue overall for the business, then I would recommend Datacap, and additionally FileNet.

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 support clients who make use of IBM Datacap as an imaging solution where they scan forms and capture information in the system. Our clients have significantly improved efficiencies when opening accounts for end users. This solution has also helped in eliminating the manual process of getting documents signed and approved. 

The feedback from our clients that this solution has increased their efficiency and their turnaround time on opening any account for end users, thus attracting more customers.

The best features of this solution include auto-indexing. Using optical character recognition, it recognizes what is contained in a scanned document and indexes the information. There is no need for manual intervention.

Recognition between certain numbers and letters could be improved. Sometimes this solution misreads five with an "S" for Singapore.

I have used this solution for six years. 

The latest version of Datacap is very stable. Older versions of the solution used to get stuck but the overall stability and performance of the solution has been improved with version 9.1.7. 

This is a scalable solution. We are able to add additional Rulerunner servers if our business users or user base increases. We are able to have multiple nodes for the front-end and for the Content Navigator. We have total of 3,000 users across the United States of America.

The technical support from IBM is good. I would rate it an eight out of ten. 
There is sometimes a delay in getting support from the IBM team and we receive inadequate answers. If it is registered as a critical issue, we receive a response from IBM after one day which can cause our clients to lose business. 

Positive

If only one person was working on the deployment of this solution, it would take one to two weeks. 

The first step in setting up this solution is to install all the prerequisite software from IBM. Once installed, we run the installer on Rulerunner servers and on Taskmaster servers. We then install the IBM Content Navigator for use in the front-end followed by creating the default desktops of IBM Datacap.  The final step is to customize the solution using any plugins or any widgets based on our client's requirements.

IBM could offer more competitive pricing. This would allow them to attain more users. Some of our clients are considering moving to a different solution called Encapture which is similar but offers more competitive pricing. 

This solution is mostly used by financial organizations. I would recommend this product to all financial organizations who are looking to improve and eliminate their paper process and improve workflows. It could assist in reducing overall SLAs of manual processes.

This solution requires maintenance including the updating of patches, which have been released by IBM. Once a month, we complete a recycle of the complete Datacap setup and system maintenance. 

I would rate this solution a nine out of ten. 

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.

I work for a bank in Tunisia and we use Datacap for extracting information. We are partners of IBM and I'm a data and AI technical specialist.

I like the Rulerunner that can run Datacap Studio; Datacap Navigator is also a great feature and both help us develop apps. 

Third-party integration is slow especially through API calls because if you want to integrate between Datacap and BPM, it can only be done in that direction (and not BPM to Datacap). One of our customers needs it the other way and we had to make a development app for that to work. There also needs to be additional support for the Arabic language as the translation doesn't work well. Finally, I'd like to see an interface update in the next release.

I've been using this solution for three years. 

We use the solution continuously and stability is fine as long as the product has been installed with best practices.

We have between 200 and 250 users so the scalability is good. We carry out all our own maintenance, updates and fixes. 

I've contacted support many times, initially when we carried out the implementation and then again when we were in the development phase. They were very helpful and patient. 

If you're doing a custom deployment, it's easy. But if you're wanting a personalized setup then the initial deployment is complex because it requires a lot of research and there are numerous problems. 

I rate this solution eight out of 10. 

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.

Its main use case was to turn papers into electronic documents and extract data from the document.

The administration of the application following an error is most valuable. We are able to know easily when something is stuck in the system.

There should be an increase in the capacity of the workflows. Datacap is a little limited in this aspect. So, you cannot really implement all the possibilities. 

I started using it about 8 to 10 years ago, but I have not been using it all the time.

It is scalable.

I would rate them a four out of five.

Its deployment is quite fast. It's easy to set up, but it can grow quite easily. It can grow quite complex. You have a lot of options and possibilities.

It was done in-house.

For the development teams, it's not the easiest solution in terms of understanding how it works and how to develop things around it, but once you get the knowledge of it, it's quite fast. So, there is a steep learning curve at the beginning.

To read through the paper documents and get them to how you want, Datacap is not the best tool in terms of configuration. Datacap aims for bulk operation. It has a lot of possibilities and capabilities, but there are some products that are more focused and narrow in scope and are better. IBM has a couple of them as well. That's why I would rate it a seven out of ten. It's broad and you can do a lot of things, but on the downside, you are losing the abilities of a specific and narrow solution.