In my experience with using FlexiCapture 9.0 along with FlexiLayout 9.0, there have been several problems or “gotchas” when it comes to defining an accurate, unstructured document:
- FlexiLayout is very robust in terms of its abilities to find almost any printed or written text on a page. However, you definitely need to sit down and PLAN how the document flows. Specifically, find out the static text elements that are always on the page, and then determine how their position relates to the data elements that you want to capture.
- When defining a data field in FlexiCapture Document Designer, be sure to take advantage of the customized dictionaries available. This narrows down what FlexiCapture looks for when scanning a document, and it increases the accuracy of the data extraction. This is especially true for address fields (street number, street name, city, state and zip)
- Make VERY sure that you know what resolution your production documents are going to be scanned in, and that the FlexiCapture document design matches that resolution. Failure to do this will cause you ENDLESS headaches when it comes to document recognition and accurate data extraction.
While the learning curve for designing unstructured documents in FlexiCapture and FlexiLayout can be daunting (especially when you have no classroom training), I have found that simple trial and error is the best way of learning both products. When you ram your head into a wall enough times, eventually the drywall will give way and produce a nice, big hole! <g>
Also, FlexiCapture’s ability to extract data from and route scanned documents makes it a perfect complement to iChannel. Both products can be used to form a seamless document management solution. After all, when you’re done extracting the data from a document, it begs the question: What are you going to do with those documents after that? Send them to entity specific and searchable file areas, of course.
