To become automated, processes must be rules based and standard, and to ensure investment in the RPA brings a tangible return, then those processes should also be high in volume and low in value.

While a process does not have to satisfy all of the eight criteria below to offer an opportunity for your business, they give a good starting point to identify if RPA might work:

1. Process standardisation
   Process needs to be defined in terms of a set of unambiguous business rules (i.e. no judgement required)
2. Rules based exceptions
   Simpler processes with little exceptions in delivery
3. Manual work involved
   Process should have little automation support today and large amounts of manual work
4. Process stability
   Process should be well defined and stable
5. Number of systems used
   Process should typically require employees to access one or multiple independent systems
6. Transaction frequency and volume
   Processes should have a high number of transactions which are labour intensive, time-consuming, or has high-cost impact errors
7. Prone to error
   Manual activities in the process today result in errors due to human operator mistakes
8. Structured data
   Data needs to be structured, not unstructured (pdf/email)*

_{* Today, RPA is unable to directly manage unstructured datasets, requiring cognitive technology to first extract and create structured data using advanced capabilities, such as optical character recognition (OCR) and natural language recognition (NLR). RPA can then be applied.}