It is a genuinely useful number and an easy one to mislead with. A high touchless rate achieved by defaulting ambiguous values is worse than a lower rate achieved by stopping on them, because the failures are invisible until a customer receives the wrong quantity.
The more informative pair of numbers is the touchless rate alongside what the system does when it is not confident. A product that blocks on an unresolvable unit of measure will report a lower touchless rate than one that assumes each, and will be the safer product.
Why it matters on an order desk
Ask any vendor what their system does with a line it cannot match — the answer tells you more than the percentage does.
Related terms
- Auto-pass rateAuto-pass rate is the proportion of order lines that clear every validation check without needing a reviewer, measured per line rather than per order.
- Exception queueAn exception queue is the working list of orders that could not be processed automatically, ordered so that the work needing a human decision is visible first.