There is some crossover with other tasks in this area as generally any task requiring little or no human intervention, generally, also meets other RPA suitability criteria. For example, any task which is repetitive in a very straight through processing way is also going to usually require little or no human intervention usually because it may be copying information from one place to another.
Any task which doesn’t require referral to a human, meets the criteria of no human intervention. From the basic level anything straight through has no human intervention. There may also be cases in which a referral is required once on every case processed in a specific process, but this can still be classed as an appropriate process for RPA as this one off referral might only take the human 5 minutes to process and the overall process takes much longer, so automating the whole process with 1 human referral is still more beneficial to the organization.
When human intervention can become too much is when it happens multiple times when processing 1 case, which can lead to delays and make human resource planning more difficult. In this processes it may still be possible to automate the process, but effort may be better utilised getting the process into its perfect start before automating.
Below are some specific examples where the human intervention is low and therefore automation is more suitable.
Data Entry and Validation
- Entering data from standard forms – same fields, same format every time
- Checking required fields are completed – date completed, signatures completed, identification received.
- Validating data against fixed rules – post code formats, numeric ranges
- Flagging duplicate records – matching by name date reference
- Updating case or account status.