A rule-based method to effectively adopt robotic process automation

Abstract

Robotic Process Automation (RPA) is an emerging software technology for automating business processes. RPA uses software robots to perform repetitive and error-prone tasks previously done by human actors quickly and accurately. These robots mimic humans by interacting with existing software applications through user interfaces (UI). The goal of RPA is to relieve employees from repetitive and tedious tasks to increase productivity and to provide better service quality. Yet, despite all the RPA benefits, most organizations fail to adopt RPA. One of the main reasons for the lack of adoption is that organizations are unable to effectively identify the processes that are suitable for RPA. This paper proposes a new method, called Rule-based robotic process analysis (RRPA), that assists process automation practitioners to classify business processes according to their suitability for RPA. The RRPA method computes a suitability score for RPA using a combination of two RPA goals: (i) the RPA feasibility, which assesses the extent to which the process or the activity lends itself to automation with RPA and (ii) the RPA relevance, which assesses whether the RPA automation is worthwhile. We tested the RRPA method on a set of 13 processes. The results showed that the method is effective at 82.05% and efficient at 76.19%.