Completing Queue Items

[jgregor4]

Just wanted to get a general consensus on best practice for queue items. If a case is not going to be progressed due to a business rule, would you mark this as completed or as an exception? As the process has done what is expected and should not have progressed with the case fully it seems logical that the case is therefore complete and would be marked as such, however this has been questioned as others think it should be marked as an exception because it is a "Business Exception". I do think the word "Exception" has a different meaning in the process as to the queue items and wondered what other people thought. My concern about marking Business Rule cases as an exception is that it would make it more difficult (at a glance) to see if there are system/internal issues in the process in the control room as you could be faced with a big list of purple flags.

[Denis__Dennehy]

I think it depends upon what needs to be done next with that work item. If there is some work that needs to be done for that work item by a human, then it would be correct to mark the item as a business exception so that it can be reported out to a human to do whatever additional work is required that a robot could not do.  If there is nothing else to be done for the item, then I think there is a valid reason for the case to be marked as completed (because all work is complete) but to tag the item to indicate the type of work it was (which will show on performance reports). The word ""Exception"" should not be difficult for your RPA team to discuss or use.  There should never be an expectation that the robots will be able to do 100% of work, they should be seen as a junior team able to work the majority of simple work, not mature cognative workers that will be able to work everything.  This should be made clear to the business and your ROI calculations should have an expected exception rate built into it.

[DavidEdwards-Da]

In our environment, we mark those as a ""Business Exception"" as they broke a business rule. Our queue loading robots are always designed such that any out of scope cases are not added to the queue, so we never end up in a situation where there's a bunch of business exceptions simply caused by out of scope cases.

[MelissaSuarez_G]

As Denis said it really depends on what the automation is supposed to do next. In my case, I prefer to tag them as Exceptions. This gives me the opportunity to run some analysis about how clean the input data normally is.