Documents pass through four main stages (Import, Recognition, Verification, Export) and as a result they are classified, recognized, verified and transferred into reliable, accurate, searchable and highly structured electronic data that can drive business processes across a department or enterprise.

ABBYY FlexiCapture provides powerful customization tools to accomplish document processing tasks of any complexity. Standard workflow can be extended through adding external modules and engines between or instead of current stages.

Importing

ABBYY document capture and data extraction software is compatible with a wide range of scanning devices supporting TWAIN, ISIS and WIA scanning protocols. Document images can also be imported into the program from:

• a folder, including automated import from a Watched folder (local or LAN)
• FTP server
• e-mail attachments from Microsoft® Exchange or POP3 mail servers

Import operations can be automated by using Import Profiles with pre-defined settings. While importing image files from the watched folder, ABBYY FlexiCapture can read the related information from the accompanying description file.

Along with centralized scanning, FlexiCapture offers remote document import which suits the needs of enterprises with distributed locations or remote business processes that prefer scanning documents at the point of entry for further centralized processing. The operator installs and runs the scanning client by simply clicking a link on a web page. The installation is fully automated and requires no administrative privileges on the computer. The Import profiles can be managed locally by the scanning operator or enforced centrally from the server.

FlexiCapture also provides a user-friendly web-based interface for scanning that can be accessed from anywhere, anytime by using a web browser. The web-based Scanning Station needs no installation. To start importing documents, an operator simply needs to open a web page and log in.

Recognition

The Recognition stage includes image pre-processing, document classification, data and text extraction and execution of validation rules. All the operations are performed automatically in the unattended mode on a server.

Image Pre-processing
The imported document images might need preliminary processing in order to provide the highest possible recognition quality. Image pre-processing includes such operations as:

• correction of page orientation
• inversion
• conversion to black-and-white
• de-skewing
• de-speckling

Automatic Document Classification
FlexiCapture identifies the document type and assembles one- and multi-page documents out of the mix of pages using advanced ABBYY technologies, which allow automatic classification of documents with variable layouts of any complexity including:

• Multi-page documents
• Documents with variable number of pages
• Documents containing multi-page tables
• Documents with image or text attachments

The Classifier can be trained automatically on a package of unsorted images requiring minimal participation from the user. The classifier is based on similarity detection, and is able to identify classes of documents and automatically find documents which belong to each class without any assistance.

Automated Data Capture and Text Extraction
ABBYY data capture software accurately extracts data and text from the fields specific for each document type using ABBYY award-winning multi-language recognition technologies. It offers:

• OCR for up to 190 languages including Chinese, Japanese, Korean, Vietnamese and Hebrew
• ICR (intelligent character recognition) for hand-printed text for over 110 languages
• OMR (checkmark recognition) for a wide spectrum of checkboxes
• Barcode recognition for a variety of 1D and 2D barcodes

ABBYY data extraction software are easy to configure and maintain. The administrator can “point-and-click” data fields for extraction on a training image set for further production level document processing. In addition, there is a unique capability of fine-tuning document descriptions in order to reach unsurpassed accuracy in locating and recognizing document fields.

Automated Validation of Data

FlexiCapture provides a set of predefined validation rules to ensure data correctness. By applying these rules data can be automatically checked against a database, checked to satisfy the format, checked if the sum is correct (for invoice capture tasks), brought to a standard (normalized) format and more. Any custom rule can be added using scripting language.

Verification

Verification is intended for manually checking the correctness of the recognized data and structure of documents, as well as for manual data entry. In the Key From Image mode, data that is not automatically recognized can be entered manually.  In this mode there is a reference image of the targeted field with space to key in the data.

To speed up and simplify the verification process, FlexiCapture offers several easy-to-use and effective verification modes, which can be easily accessed via web-browser.

Verification is an optional step that can be skipped if it is not required, in which case data is automatically exported after recognition.

Export

Extracted data and document images can be exported to various destinations:

• files;
• external databases (via ODBC);
• Microsoft SharePoint 2003/2007/2010;
• any business application, ERP or ECM/DMS system.

Documents can be also saved as searchable PDF/PDF-A files for archiving purposes.

Administration and Monitoring

For the purposes of managing user rights and monitoring the performance of the system, FlexiCapture 10 offers a web-based Administration and Monitoring Console that enables 24/7 supervision from any location. Rights and roles may be assigned to users, status of batches and event logs may be viewed and reports can be generated. The Crystal Reports Editor can be used by the administrator to generate custom reports with data that is populated directly from the FlexiCapture database.

Installation Types

Customization and Integration Tools