ABBYY Vantage Reviews

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.

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.

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.

We use it for document processing. We have PDF documents, and we need to extract tables from those documents. We use ABBYY FlexiCapture to extract tables.

We are able to extract tables from PDF files. Before ABBYY FlexiCapture, it was done manually. We had to manually input tables into our banking system. We could automate that with FlexiCapture. It is also integrated with RPA. So, FlexiCapture just extracts the information, and RPA takes that information and enters it into the banking system.

Its OCR Engine is very successful, and it is the leading OCR Engine. It also has NLP support. 

In FlexiLayout Studio, you can create your own variables. It works great for semi-structured documents.

Their tutorials are not enough. They can improve the tutorials and maybe add more examples in their tutorials. Currently, if you want to learn ABBYY technology, it is very difficult. There are just a few resources, such as YouTube channels and blogs. There are not many resources for learning ABBYY.

It would be great if they can make a community edition to use ABBYY. Currently, if you want to try ABBYY, you have to contact a salesperson and take a trial license, which is complicated. They should just give a community edition or a free edition with a few features.

Its licensing is very expensive and should be improved.

I have been using this solution since 2019.

We didn't encounter any crashing. It is stable, but it has some bugs. For example, the PDF quality is very good, and you can read the text easily, but sometimes, ABBYY FlexiCapture reads it incorrectly. It is not very frequent, but it can cause a problem for some of the documents.

For such bugs, we open tickets with ABBYY, and they try to solve the issue. If they are able to solve the issue, they send us the solution, and we apply that. Sometimes, they weren't able to solve it, so they took that ticket to their backlog, and after a new release, they notified us that they have solved a problem in the new release.

We don't have a problem with scalability. In the beginning, our volume of documents was small, but it has increased about 10 times. It works without any problems. If we want to increase its capacity, we put another machine, and it defines a processing station. So, we can increase its capacity easily.

Currently, I am the only one using it in my company. I do all the administration and create new templates. Its maintenance is also done by me.

We plan to increase its usage. At the moment, we are using ABBYY in just one project, but there are upcoming projects that require ABBYY.

Their tech support was successful. I would give them a nine or a 10 out of 10.

The deployment process was a little bit tricky for us. We didn't take professionals for the installation or deployment process. We learned how to deploy it from other sources such as YouTube or blogs, and we did it ourselves, but it took about a week to deploy. Now, if I want to deploy it, it will just take one or two days. At that time, we didn't have ABBYY expertise, so we learned how to do it and tried to deploy it. Three people were involved in its installation.

Its maintenance is done by me. It requires some manual effort. For example, for some templates, I do some updates, and there is some manual work. I go to document definitions and remove the other one. I then upload the new one and do some settings.

For an operational process, about 40 people were dedicated previously, but now, five people can do the same work by using ABBYY integrated with RPA. It is not just ABBYY; there is also the RPA part. ABBYY is used just for data extraction from PDF files.

Its price is a little bit high and can be lower. Its licensing is very expensive. I don't remember exactly, but for each page, it is about four or seven cents, which is too expensive.

Before using ABBYY, we considered many products. We considered Ephesoft and other document processing engines, but ABBYY was the most successful one. There may be other successful vendors, but they don't have very strong support in our region. ABBYY's support is very strong in our region. Other tools also do not provide on-prem installation. They are cloud-based, so we chose ABBYY.

Their sales team was great. They were very helpful, and their technology is great. 

If you are looking for an on-prem solution, ABBYY would be better, but if you are looking for a cloud solution, you can use other platforms. Google and Microsoft have great data extraction tools that are cloud-based.

I would rate ABBYY FlexiCapture an eight out of 10. Its licensing price is high, and there are no training materials that you can use easily. There should also be a trial or community version.

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.

We use this solution mostly for processing Brazilian servicing invoices and personnel documents and contracts, such as personnel ID cards.

I am a strategic partner of ABBYY here in Brazil. I deploy this solution for the customers. We mostly deploy it on a customer's cloud infrastructure. It is not the cloud side from ABBYY. It is like on-premises, but it is in the cloud of the customers.

Most of our customers work with RPA. On the cognition side, you have to look at the document and also create some intelligent rules to validate the data from the document. We give the bots the ability to put documents to be processed, and then the bots give back the results to move on to the next task in the process. In the process on which bots are working, there are two high-value workflows that require finding things and using judgment. Both are conditional logic.

When talking about documents, RPA can read the full text of the document, but it cannot understand the rules of a document as a human does. This is something ABBYY can do very easily. You put some rules in the ABBYY task, and ABBYY will say, "Okay, so this invoice is $20, and 10% tax is $2." If the tax is $3, ABBYY will say, "Look! There is a mistake here with this tax amount." ABBYY is able to understand the content and the context of the document and give it back to the RPA to go on with the task.

The most valuable feature is the ability to scale for big processes. We are able to process 1 million pages a day. Its accuracy is also very nice. It is a good feature that they have. 

It is an independent platform, which is its biggest advantage as compared to other solutions. It is also very stable and powerful. It is 100% on time.

They should improve the RESTful API side of this solution. Currently, fully RESTful API is not available in the on-prem version, which is really a problem, and we have to work around this limitation. The cloud version already has a fully RESTful API, but the on-prem version doesn't have a fully RESTful API, which is a big mistake. It is easy to solve, but they aren't solving it quicker. They are taking a long time. Nowadays, most people don't go to the interface. They like to use RESTful API.

I have been using this solution for about 20 years.

It is very stable and powerful. 

It is easily scalable. It is for all kinds of customers. Our customers are small, medium, and large businesses. RPAs are used in all kinds of organizations nowadays, and documents are always involved. RPAs are used even for testing and learning, and documents are always a problem.

Our clients do plan to increase the usage of this solution in the future. FlexiCapture is able to scale or spread in the department without having the need for any other RPA tool or AI tool.

They are very good and fast. If you find any vulnerability or there is an issue in scaling this solution, they are very fast in fixing the issue.

It is very easy to deploy but only after we have handled the security side of the customer. It is not complex, but, like any other server-based solution, things have to be clarified with the security team and the IT team. The biggest friction is not involving all the teams from the customer side, especially the security teams.

Our implementation strategy is to involve everyone two or three months before. This is because the businesses that purchase the solution sometimes don't have a good relationship with the IT team. We go to a workshop with them and try to understand their concerns, which takes two or three days. Its installation takes one or two days.

Our clients evaluate Kofax, UiPath, Brainware, and Nuance. The competition is big here. FlexiCapture is the most independent solution. It is an independent platform, which is its biggest advantage. You are not dependent on other solutions. In UiPath, you depend on scaling the RPA to spread OCR.

I would highly recommend this solution. My advice is to engage with a professional services provider at the beginning for installation, deployment, and training. Don't try to do it on your own because it is a very powerful and big solution. You'll have to learn it before you try to use it. Don't do it yourself. 

I would rate ABBYY FlexiCapture a nine out of ten. It is missing only RESTful API.

We are using this solution for PDF reading capabilities for some invoices. We also utilize it to read DW4 forms.

There are many others to compare with such as Google and Microsoft, but we haven't seen any specific distinction that stood out with Abbyy.

They were the most used, which is the reason we chose them.

Abbyy is really good in terms of reading OCR.

There has always been a challenge with Word and PDF reading capabilities. This is an area that needs improvement.

There are certain controls like radio buttons and checkboxes that when reading PDFs, really doesn't go well with the RPA.

We work with Abbyy and UiPath. Abbyy provides its API to be utilized with UiPath, and that is how we use it.

We have been working with Abbyy for at least one year. We have one or two projects that we have worked on with Abbyy.

Abbyy is a stable solution.

It's not really scalable. When it comes to PDF reading, we are very specific to that particular document and that template with some of the verbiage.

I have not seen it to be more scalable with any OCR capabilities.

I have not contacted technical support.

Previously, we didn't try any other solutions. We have to have that screen gripping capabilities and OCR. UiPath with Abbyy was the right choice.

The initial setup is straightforward.

We did not go with the licensed version of this solution.

It's more trial and error, but Abbyy is still really good in terms of OCR. If you have a consistent use case, then I think that Abbyy is the right fit.

I would rate Abbyy Vantage an eight out of ten.

Our primary use case of this solution is for our invoice project. We wanted to capture the sales and use tax data from our invoices. I'm a senior manager and we are currently customers of ABBYY, hoping to become resellers in the future. 

I think the machine learning capability of ABBYY is pretty good. You can create your small frame model and then the software works well, applying that training to extract the data out of other invoices.

I think that the tool is really complex. It works well, but in terms of rolling it out to a large audience that is not very tech savvy, this tool might be a little too much for them to handle. I think there needs to be some sort of simplification for that kind of user. ABBYY has the FlexiLayout Studio tool which is used for creating layouts for semi-structured and unstructured documents. It's pretty complex and we'd like to see some simplification there.

I've been using this solution for four months. 

I think that once it is installed, the solution is stable. There are no issues that come up. 

When it comes to scalability, you might need to install multiple instances of these stations. It comes in two pieces, one is a server and one is the stations. The stations can be scaled up, and can connect to the centralized server and work well, but I think that if you wanted to have it scaled for a large number of users you might have to think about creating some wrappers around it.

We have a user base of around 50 to 100 people but we are gradually rolling it out, so I think right now we only have 20 users who are actively using it, but down the road we expect that to come close to 100.

In general, the ABBYY support is pretty good. They are very responsive and try to resolve any issues.

I think installation is pretty straightforward, except that if you are using a distributed version, then there are some prerequisites in terms of IAS that need to be installed beforehand. That makes it a little challenging, but I think if you have the right support from ABBYY you can manage that easily.

The ABBYY license is calculated by pages and it all depends on how you negotiate the licensing with them. If you have a pretty large use case, you might get some discounts, but if you have a pretty small use case, they might be firm on the price.

We did our due diligence on a number of solutions and we found ABBYY to be more widely known and they've received pretty good reviews. That's why we chose them along with the fact that their licensing is decent enough. The other solutions we looked at were not as good as ABBYY and were more expensive. 

I think each company needs to make a judgment as to whether you can handle a technically challenging solution, because ABBYY is challenging. If you need to have your people trained ahead of time to get some support built into your organization, you should do that. If your organization is not very tech savvy, this solution might not work for you very well.

We still need to carry out more evaluations. For example, the out of the box, SDK support. I'd like to know how much free SDK support we would get if we try to build a wrapper around ABBYY. I think those are the things that we need to evaluate on our end, but overall I think we are pretty happy with this tool.

I think this is a good solution and would rate it an eight out of 10.