Have you ever wondered how many man-days are spent in your company on handling incoming documents? Manual processing of invoices and orders, sorting letters and contracts, selecting financial documents etc. take a lot of resources. Such documents usually come from different sources and have varying structure and design, but contain similar types of data (company name and address, dates, sums, zip codes). These documents are called unstructured or flexible forms.

ABBYY's groundbreaking FlexiCapture technology is based on years of research and great experience in a variety of large-scale form processing projects for the government and large businesses worldwide. It allows you to automate capturing data from unstructured forms. All you need is a scanner and ABBYY FormReader empowered with FlexiCapture technology.

How does a human operator enter data from unstructured forms into a computer? When looking for data, the operator is guided by various form elements and additional information available on the form, such as field titles or measurement units. In order to detect the required data the operator analyzes areas around the form fields. FlexiCapture technology enables ABBYY FormReader to do the same.

FlexiCapture is based on the principles of Intelligent, Purposeful and Adaptable recognition (IPA), and imitates the way humans recognize objects. The purpose of FlexiCapture technology is to teach FormReader to find the required fields on flexible forms by using a special description. This formalized description, called FlexiLayout™, tells FormReader how to look for particular fields: the program will analyze the area surrounding each element and make inferences about the nature of the fields and their content. ABBYY FlexiCapture Studio is a new software tool supplied with FormReader that creates FlexiLayouts.

ABBYY FlexiCapture gives the system increased intelligence and flexibility and provides a solution for various problems occurring in data capture. Once you have created the FlexiLayout for your forms by using FlexiCapture, you won't have the problem of matching the templates with the forms that have similar data but different layouts. The program will find all the fields using the information provided by the FlexiLayout: location of the field relative to other objects on the form, type of data in the field, its size, lines drawn around the field, etc.

• Does your company use faxed and copied documents with distortions that cannot be compensated by traditional technologies?
• Do you process custom orders from different sources?
• Need to extract some specific information from text documents, such as contracts or business letters?
• Wish to develop a customized invoice processing application?

Then you may wish to take a closer look at ABBYY FlexiCapture Studio and how it works.

If you are interested in more detailed information about FlexiCapture Technology please find it in ABBYY White Paper "About ABBYY FlexiCapture Technology"