Travis writes articles dealing with various technical aspects of document capture and forms processing. He is fluent in Microsoft.NET and holds several certifications including ABBYY FlexiCapture and IRISXTract. As general manager and sales director, he controls the daily operations as well as manages customer accounts to ensure both customers and prospects are receiving the very best from UFC, Inc.
Travis has many years of experience with document capture software and content management systems. He also has wide areas of expertise including custom functions in ABBYY FlexiCapture, email API's, Microsoft SQL Server Reporting Services, and many other applications and platforms. He has integrated Amazon Web Services EC2 instances with several applications including the company's CRM system.
Learn in our ABBYY Vantage Demo how you can transform healthcare clinical/administrative data to a Health Level 7 (HL7) Format.
Hello. Today I’d like to walk you through our HL7 Converter Skill for ABBYY Vantage. And the process will be very similar to what you see on the screen here. We’re gonna bring in a document. We’re going to extract the data off of a clinical form, an administrative healthcare related form, so that we can get that HL7 data. We can route that document to human review if we’d like, and then we will output, of course, our HL7 format.
Let me kind of explain to you what we do within ABBYY Vantage. So within ABBYY Vantage, we will take our administrative forms and we will teach the software how to extract information that is critical on those documents, such as what you see here. This is a generalized consent form for a document, and we just wanna extract this information so that we can pass this between software systems. I’ve set up a sample here and as part of our HL7 conversion skill, when a document comes in and we’ve passed a document through this workflow, we will convert that data to HL7 format. So what I’ve done is I’ve loaded a sample here and I’m gonna go ahead and process this document.
The software is now uploading that sample and it is processing that for us. All right, that document is now processed. I have an HL7 format output here that I will share on my screen, and what you’ll see here is the HL7 format for that given document.
So this is a very common transaction process. The document comes in, we’ll extract that data and we’ll produce that HL7 format so that we can pass that to a downstream system or a web service or backend process.
[Music- “Engineered to Perfection” performed by Peter Nickalls, used under license from Shutterstock.]
Discover how to convert a Health Claim Form to a usable EDI 837 format in our ABBYY Vantage demo.
Hello. Today I’d like to show you our conversion to EDI, specifically format 837. Eight hundred thirty-seven is the format that we use for health claim forms. And what you see in front of us is ABBYY Vantage. So within ABBYY Vantage, we will teach the software how to classify and extract data from a health insurance claim form such as a CMS-1500, maybe a UB-04 or a dental form. Those would be the most common ones that we see here in our OCR industry. And our goal is to take that data that we’ve extracted and produce a standard EDI 837 format.
And as part of that process, what we’ll do is we will create what’s called a document skill in ABBYY Vantage. And we offer one here kind of out of the box where kind of a starter skill. You can get extraction up and running very quickly here within ABBYY Vantage by just lassoing fields and teaching the software where these data points exist on a health insurance claim form.
Once we do that, we’ll create what’s called a process skill where we’ll teach the software about how we’re gonna get documents in, how we’re gonna get documents out and if or when we want a human in the loop to review the extraction before we export that data. But the important part of today’s demo that you’ll see is that we’re going to drop a document in to our skill, we’re gonna extract the EDI format and then we’re gonna send that to our output.
So I’m gonna just gonna go ahead and drop our CMS-1500 sample form. I’ll show that to you here. It’s just obviously a very standard in this case, we got a fillable PDF and we understand that’s not always the case here in real life, but here we have a standard EDI fillable form. So we’re gonna go ahead and publish that here to our try any skill page. Now our software is processing that form and what we’ll expect on the output is an EDI 837 format.
Alright, our results are ready. So I’m gonna open up our EDI format file that we just received as an output to this document and bring that over here to our screen. And what you’ll see is what you would very much expect here. We have our output file, it’s an EDI 837 format, and it has the specific format that we’re expecting so that we can pass this data and the extracted information downstream to our backend processes and or systems that are expecting this EDI format.
[Music- “Engineered to Perfection” performed by Peter Nickalls, used under license from Shutterstock.
Adobe, Acrobat, and the Adobe PDF logo are either registered trademarks or trademarks of Adobe in the United States and/or other countries.]
Watch in our demo how to split a document that contains multiple invoices with ABBYY Vantage.
Hello. Today I’d like to show you some document splitting in ABBYY Vantage. And the cool part about this is that the software has the ability to split based on text that is found on the document. And one of the ways that we typically use this sort of functionality is with invoices. So a document comes in that may have multiple invoices in it. So let me show you an example of one here.
In this PDF I have just a few different invoices. They’re completely different organizations, completely different invoices, but these are coming in and we need to be able to automatically split them. So what the software can do is it will read these documents and based on logic and today’s logic is pretty simple. We’re gonna look for extracting the invoice number and splitting it when we see a difference. But we can get pretty advanced in the way that that sort of logic is applied.
So what will happen in today’s demo is a document is gonna come in. We will use the assemble skill to split a document. Now we have what’s called a document splitter skill that’s used to split it and we have full control over that splitting logic, and I’ll show that a little bit to you behind the scenes here in a second. But once we’ve split it, we will then formally extract using our Invoice US Skill. So we’re gonna split using our splitter skill. Now that we’ve split successfully, we will extract using our document extraction skill. And then just for review purposes, we’ll actually come in here and we’ll see that document here that’s ready for review and the reason why we’re doing this in today’s demo so that we can see that splitting actually taken place. Alright, let’s go ahead and fire off a splitter skill.
So now that we fire that off, the software now is going to perform that splitting. So it’s looking for differences in the documents and will auto split those documents. And then based on our process skill, we will route those for human review. So what I’m gonna do here is just monitor our skill monitor in ABBYY Vantage. And you can see we now have an invoice that is in the starting stage. And when that’s ready for review, it will go to what we call the Manual Review Stage. So that is our human in the loop step so that we can see these documents.
So now we have that transaction ready for human review so that we can see the splitting. I’m gonna go ahead and open up that transaction. A couple of things I want you to know is that within this transaction, I now have four separate documents. So if you remember, I had a PDF that had four pages in it and they were each individual documents, and now ABBYY Vantage has split that up for us. Not only that, but we have then after we split, we have then applied against each document, our invoice document extraction skill. So now I have every invoice, it’s content that we read off of it, and of course the line items and those sorts of things on an invoice that we would typically want to extract. So this shows us the power of splitting.
Now in practice, document splitting can be much more advanced. We can use page numbers. We can use differing text. We can look at every single page. So let me kind of show you then behind the scenes how this really gets implemented. So if we go back and we look at our process skill, you’ll recall that we have a document splitter skill that we referenced here in that process skill.
Now, if we go and we look at our invoice splitter skill, it’s pretty simple. We’re going to of course perform OCR on a document as it comes in. We will look for different extraction rules. And in today’s demo, once again, this is very basic. We’re looking for an invoice number. We’re looking for maybe something that indicates the first page of a document, but once again, this is all customizable at this point based on your document type. And then we have a splitter script, which gives us the ability, frankly, to go as customized as we want to for the splitting. So we give you a sample script here to start out with, and this is definitely something we can consult with, but here’s where we kind of tell the software, here’s when a new document starts and stops, and then what to do with merging documents into previous invoices if we don’t see a differing number of, in this case, invoice numbers.
So just a lot of control here that we have now that we have the ability to classify, extract the text, and then perform the splitting. And we have full control over then how that batch is kind of formulated here in Vantage, which eventually gets us to the ability to have just a beautiful batch that’s outlined here as we would expect it to.
So a little bit behind the scenes, but a lot of this is really just low-code, no-code options here where we can assemble automatically. And honestly, within minutes we could have documents coming in, in this case invoices just being split and then routed as needed for our downstream steps. So I hope you were able to take this content and apply it to your business use cases here. Just a lot of power at our disposal.
[Music- “Engineered to Perfection” performed by Peter Nickalls, used under license from Shutterstock.
Adobe, Acrobat, and the Adobe PDF logo are either registered trademarks or trademarks of Adobe in the United States and/or other countries.]
Watch our demo to learn how to extract document data with our ABBYY Vantage Connector and send it to Snowflake® to be stored.
Hello. Today I’d like to show you our Connector for Snowflake®. Now what this will do is take a document and its data that we’ve extracted from ABBYY Vantage and pass this over into our data warehouse and Snowflake®.
This is a very typical workflow for Vantage. So a document will come in, we’ll extract that data for the document, and then we have our send to Snowflake® Connector here.
It’s pretty simple. So what I have here is a warehouse and a database in Snowflake®. And as you can see here, I have a table called invoice item as an example. And as we flow a document through ABBYY Vantage, we will then populate this as our output step here. So I’ve preloaded a document here that’s ready to be processed, and I’m going to select our Snowflake® Connector, and that will start processing now. When I refresh our Snowflake® table here, we will then see that updated with the line items that we’ve extracted from that invoice. So once we’re done processing here and we see this status updated, we’ll go ahead and refresh our Snowflake® screen.
All right, so now this is processed. I’m just gonna go ahead here and click our execute button. And you’ll see here we now have extracted that information from Vantage, and we’ve populated our database here in Snowflake®.
[Music- “Engineered to Perfection” performed by Peter Nickalls, used under license from Shutterstock.
The word “Snowflake”, “Snowflake” and the “Snowflake” logos, and other marks, logos and titles are registered and/or common law trade names, trademarks or service marks of Snowflake Inc. Other materials such as the text, content, and product previews are also owed by Snowflake Inc. and/or its Owners. Snowflake Inc. reserves all other rights.]
Watch our demo to learn how to use ABBYY Vantage to extract information from documents and send it to Zapier®.
Hello. Today I’d like to preview our ABBYY Vantage Connector to Zapier®. Now, this opens up a variety in many, many thousands of potential third party integrations that we can do with this platform. And that’s the cool part about being able to use kind of a middleware like Zapier is that our options are pretty much endless here. So what we’re gonna do here and Vantage is we’re gonna bring in a document. We’re going to extract the information from the document, and then we’ll send that to Zapier where we then get that plethora of just third party integrations. And that will be considered our output from Vantage.
So when we go to Zapier, what’s gonna happen is we will trigger an outbound email. So we’ll bring the document from Vantage into Zapier, and then we will trigger that outbound email where we will, in this case, just provide some raw body information for that transaction.
And let’s go ahead and just trigger this off. So what I’m gonna do is just do our, try any skill page here. I’m gonna upload a document. And then we’re gonna go ahead and just select our Zapier skill here.
Now, what’s gonna happen is that transaction will get extracted through ABBYY Vantage. The results will be sent to Zapier, where then our integration and workflow within Zapier and third party integrations can happen. Now in today’s demo, we’re just sending that email, which I just received here, and this is just an email of the results. Now this is a hundred percent customizable. We can obviously do all sorts of things. We can parse the JSON that is returned from ABBYY Vantage and do intelligent things with it. But this really does open up an additional workflow option here that gives us the ability to kind of be endless in the way that we send that information and integrate this with our backend processes. So hope you enjoyed this video. Please reach out if you have any questions.
[Music- “‘Engineered to Perfection’ performed by Peter Nickalls, used under license from Shutterstock”.
“ZAPIER”, “ZAP”, “ZAPCONNECT”, and the “ZAPIER Logo” are trademarks of Zapier, Inc.The Zapier Software Platform displayed is also owned by Zapier, Inc. All rights reserved.
“Microsoft”, “Outlook”, and the software “Microsoft Outlook” are trademarks of the Microsoft group of companies.]
Watch our ABBYY Vantage Demo to learn how to extract and transfer data to an SFTP location.
Hello. Today I’m gonna show you our Secure FTP Connector for ABBYY Vantage. This gives us the ability to take a document that is passed to Vantage and then bring that down to our secure FTP site that we will use for processing.
So what you see here on the left is our FTP details, and then on the right is a copy of where that file will be downloaded to our FTP location.
So what we’re gonna do is we’re gonna go ahead and upload a sample document to our Vantage test site. We will then select our skill that we want process, and then using our SFTP connector, we will start that off and we will then here in just a short little bit, see that document processed through Vantage and of course into our FTP site.
All right, and there you go. That’s an example of our file there that is ready and downloaded for us to process. Hope you enjoyed this video.
[Music- “‘Engineered to Perfection’ performed by Peter Nickalls, used under license from Shutterstock”.]
Watch our video to learn how to convert a file to an Electronic Data Interchange (EDI) format by using our ABBYY Vantage Converter Skill.
Hello. Today I’d like to share with you our EDI Connector. Now this EDI Connector is very flexible. We have a lot of control over the type of EDI files that we output the format or standard that we use. But for today’s demo, we’re gonna simply use an invoice that you can see will flow through this process skill. It will be dropped into an FTP site. We will extract the details and then we will generate that EDI file and then produce an output. Now of course, that output and where we put that EDI file, we have a lot of flexibility with. We can drop it on an FTP site. We can post that EDI file to a web service. We can drop it in another third party system. So a lot of control over that. But what I’ve done is I went ahead and dropped a sample invoice into our solution.
And here’s that sample invoice. You can see here it’s just a very standard invoice. We have header information. We got line items. And what we’ve done is we’ve dropped that into ABBYY Vantage. Now, from there, we were able to extract and pull an EDI file here.
So when I open this and I show you that EDI file, you’ll see here that now I have an EDI, in this case 810 format that we are using to make sure that we generate this format in a consumable fashion that is meant for the next downstream steps. So we process that invoice sample. We have now generated this EDI file with the content that we need to continue the downstream processing.
So that’s really as simple as what this EDI connector does. I hope you enjoyed the preview. If you have any questions, please reach out to us.
[Music- “‘Engineered to Perfection’ performed by Peter Nickalls, used under license from Shutterstock”.]
Watch our video to learn how you can integrate ABBYY Vantage with Microsoft Teams®.
Hello. Today I’d like to share with you a very cool integration we built to integrate Microsoft Teams® into the ABBYY Vantage experience.
Now what I’ve done is I’ve uploaded a skill into our try any skill page. And what I’m gonna do is I’m gonna trigger a Teams® notification that happens after the extraction of this document takes place. So what’ll happen is this invoice will go into ABBYY Vantage. ABBYY Vantage will extract the details and when it’s ready for a human to be in the loop, which is optional, but there are reasonable cases of when a human is in the loop, we will trigger a bot notification, which could potentially happen to a single user or even a group of users. So once this is done here processing, you will see that I will receive a Teams notification.
Okay, so this document’s done. I just received a notification, and now if I open up my Teams’ window, you will see here that I have a document that needs review. I can see a status. I can see information about that document that was uploaded. And then just for human informational purposes, I can see some of the extracted fields that we extracted on the document.
Now at this point, I can also click the “Manual Review” button so that I can jump straight into Vantage to review that document, look at the data that I extracted, and make a decision on completing or rejecting that document. So this is a really cool integration that we can do to make sure humans are in the loop when we want them in the loop for an OCR process.
“Microsoft”, “Microsoft Defender”, “Microsoft Teams”, the Microsoft Teams Designs, “Office 365”, and “Teams” are trademarks of the Microsoft group of companies.
[Music- “‘Engineered to Perfection’ performed by Peter Nickalls, used under license from Shutterstock”.]
Watch our video to learn how to use the ABBYY Vantage – Assemble Activity to intelligently separate multi-page documents into individual documents and/or transactions.
Hello. Today I’d like to show you how we utilize the Assemble Activity within ABBYY Vantage. Now, the Assemble Activity gives us the ability to control and manage how we deal with multiple page transactions or even documents with multiple pages in it, or a document that has multiple documents in it, like what we see on the screen here. So what I have is a sample that shows six pages, but every page here is actually an independent document. So these are just some sample direct deposit forms. And you can see here every single page, even though there’s a couple different types, is its own independent document.
So what we’re gonna do is use the Assemble Activity to break apart this document the way that we expect it to be broken so that instead of six pages, I actually have six different transactions.
All right. So what you’ll see here is we of course have a process skill. And in our process skill we have our standard activities like input and outputs. For today’s demo, we’re gonna drop that sample into an FTP folder. So it’s pretty simple. We will then call the Assemble Activity. Within the Assemble Activity, we have settings here. Specifically in today’s, we’re gonna use classifications. So we want the software to look page by page and determine what the documents’ is, and we’re gonna tell the software, Hey, if you find one of these given direct deposit forms or document types, we want you to consider that the first page until you find another one.
So the reason why that’s important is because some documents aren’t always as simple as having single pages for every single document. So we wanna tell the software when to split the document by using this first page checkbox. So once a software does that, we’re gonna go ahead and classify the document, and then based on that classification, we will extract from the given document type. So of course we have our action pane here that determines the classification skill that we’re pointing to. And then here I have actually extraction for two different documents. If you remember in my sample, I actually have one called ACME and one called Custom Kitchens of Bayshore. So that’s what you see here is the extraction skills that we’ve set up here for each of those given direct deposit forms. And then of course, we will export that to the FTP folder.
But the critical steps are right here in the middle. Assembling the document. Now that we have it assembled, we wanna classify of course, and then extract that information from the given document type. So let’s go ahead and run a sample. What I’m gonna do is bring up our FTP client. I’m gonna navigate to our input folder, and I’m going to drag that sample that you saw into the input folder. Now, what the software’s gonna do, of course, is monitor the input folder here, and when it’s ready and it’s come to its next polling cycle, it will grab that document.
All right, You can see the software now has pulled that document. It is now an actual transaction. If we wanted to, behind the scenes, we would see that transaction in our skills monitor. But what we’re gonna do next is we’re gonna just monitor our output. And what we would expect in this output is for the software to find each of those individual files. And we’re gonna have it export a PDF and a JSON of that file extraction that we have for each of those given document types.
All right, so here is our transaction. If I go into our transaction, you’ll see I have the PDF of each of those and a correlating JSON. So the software did me two favors. It split up the document, and then based on the document type, it extracted the given fields for us here. So this is a perfect way and a perfect example of how we utilize the assemble methodology here on a process skill. I hope you enjoyed this video.
[Music- “‘Engineered to Perfection’ performed by Peter Nickalls, used under license from Shutterstock”.]
Watch our video to observe how ABBYY Vantage and Salesforce® can be utilized together to perform document classification and data extraction.
Hello. Today I’d like to show you our Salesforce® Connector for ABBYY Vantage. The concept of this connector is that we can have documents that flow in through Salesforce in a typical case management or customer portal arrangement. The document will come in potentially on a case. There will be some automatic triggering of a flow to ABBYY Vantage. So that as that document comes in, we can classify. In other words, determine that document type. We can also then extract information from that given document type.
In today’s case, we have a Salesforce case here in front of us, and I’m gonna be uploading a document that is a direct deposit form. This is just any sort of incoming form that we’re gonna post on the case. You can see there’s information here that we wanna extract potentially and use as detailed information metadata on that case.
So what you’re gonna see is we will trigger a flow from Salesforce. That document will go into Vantage. We will classify that document. And in other words, we will determine that that’s a direct deposit form. We will extract information from that form and then we’ll call Salesforce and provide that information back.
So as you see here, what we’ll do is we’ll just go ahead and upload a document. Now that that document is uploaded. This is where we could potentially have some automation. Now for today’s demo. I just have a little button I’m gonna push to trigger the automation, but this of course can be automated. So we’re gonna send that document over to Vantage. Now what’s gonna happen is, is when we refresh this screen, now that the document’s over in Vantage and going through that Vantage workflow that I just described, when we refresh this here, this description will have JSON of the details that Vantage has pulled off of that given document.
There is our description, which is really just detailed JSON of information that we’ve extracted. Now, of course, in a true automated fashion, we would probably take that JSON and parse it into specific fields on the Salesforce case. But the concept here is that we have Salesforce talking to a best in class OCR technology within ABBYY Vantage, and then providing that full loop back to Salesforce, where then additional automation can take place. So in a typical case management solution, we’d have documents flow in, we’d pass it to the OCR technology, and then the OCR technology in this case, ABBYY Vantage, would post that information back to the case where then we can triage and automatically inform that case with details that we found on that given document.
