ABBYY, a leading provider of document recognition, data capture, and linguistic technologies and services, today announced that Companies House has deployed ABBYY FlexiCapture to help the government agency automate their key document handling processes.

Companies House, an executive agency for the Department of Business Innovation and Skills, is using ABBYY FlexiCapture Server, to automate its paper-based business processes and reduce the high volume of paper it currently handles on a daily basis.

By integrating ABBYY software into its existing document workflow system, Companies House is able to reduce the intensive admin time and costs involved in handling paper-based documents, and introduce electronic data input from various sources, including email, customer services, and contacts handling.

FlexiCapture provides a single entry point to automatically transform the stream of different forms and documents into business-ready data, which is easily integrated into our workflows.

“We have also built an application for barcode identification to speed up the workflow process,” explained Carl Allen, Enterprise Architect at Companies House. “Once a document is scanned into the system, the reader delegates the task to the appropriate department for handling, and archives the file on our servers, saving us both time and money by reducing admin-intensive tasks.”

Initially, Companies House looked at a number of different technologies options, from developing the software from scratch internally to using applications from free libraries. Allen and his team also investigated other commercial offerings before settling on ABBYY.

“We needed a flexible solution that could easily integrate with our existing core systems and that gave a high recognition rate,” explained Allen. “The ABBYY product came with various pre-built tools and utilities that allowed easy 'zoning' of the forms and the ability to define a template. This was the main reason why we chose to work with ABBYY to create a digital document management system.

“The ABBYY software had good recognition rate, a flexible licence structure and lots of useful, out-of-the-box features for handling forms and template production. It’s a good bespoke solution that delivers exactly what we needed. The prototype of using ABBYY FlexiCapture has been so successful, we plan to continue to use it and expand the number and type of forms that we process in this way,” he added.

As a result of the integration, staff at Companies House are now able to extract data from forms and documents and directly embed the information into workflows to automate, separate and classify documents quickly. The FlexiCapture solution is particularly beneficial for large organisations such as Companies House, and other public sector bodies that work with huge volumes of documents.

It provides a cost-effective way to process forms and put semi-structured and unstructured documents into one stream — including document classification, data verification, and exporting for backend processing and archiving. It enables data capture to be integrated seamlessly into business applications, so that full control is maintained over document processing, data extraction and document routing.

”The digital transformation is a strategic investment at Companies House,” states Ed MacArthur, Head of Sales for ABBYY UK. “ABBYY's award-winning forms processing and data capture solutions are used by numerous government agencies and businesses all over the world and we are looking forward to working with them in the future.”