Every rescued project had a thin exception list
We are regularly asked to finish or replace an automation somebody else built. The build is usually competent. What is missing is the answer to “what happens when the order arrives as a photograph”.
A flow that handles 80% of cases and dumps the rest on a person with no context has moved the work rather than removed it.
How we find them
- Ask what happened last week that was unusual, then last month
- Watch someone handle a case they describe as annoying
- Look at the actual data for the records that break the pattern
- Ask what the workaround is — there is always a workaround
- Ask the newest member of staff what confused them
The newest person is the best source. They still remember which parts made no sense, and they have not yet normalised the exception into invisible routine.
Where we put the human boundary
Four triggers send a record to a person rather than through: low confidence, high value, external consequence, and anything irreversible.
- Low confidence — extraction below a threshold, an ambiguous match
- High value — above an amount you set, regardless of confidence
- External consequence — sends a message, moves money, commits you to a third party
- Irreversible — anything that cannot be undone in a click
We make review fast, or nobody does it
A review interface that takes ten seconds per item makes a 20% review rate workable. One that takes two minutes means the queue grows until people start approving without looking.
So: source document beside the extracted values, cursor on the uncertain field, keyboard-only completion, and corrections captured so the same case is never queried twice.
And a stop button
Somebody in your business should be able to pause the automation in seconds, without calling us. When something is going wrong at volume, that matters more than any feature.
We build it in and we make sure the people who would need it know where it is.