Business process management and robotic process automation: early deployment of a combined approach

Abstract

Optimizing a process to improve its efficiency is not a new concept. Many scientific areas have been benefited by the application of optimization techniques and so have business processes. The competitive and ever-changing business environments have led organizations into examining and re-designing their core business processes, aiming for improving their performance and market responsiveness. That led to the emergence of Business Process Management (BPM), a methodology a methodology that advocates for constant process re-evaluation and improvement. The optimization and the continuous improvement of business processes within a company, can give the advantage to the company to be more competitive by reducing its costs, improving the delivery quality and efficiency, and enabling adaptation to changing environments. But BPM was not the only methodology that emerged the previous years. Business Process Automation (BPA) is a process of managing information, data and processes to reduce costs, resources and investment. It is proven that BPA increases productivity and saves staff time and effort by automating key business processes through computing technology. A modern technology of process automation, called Robotic Process Automation (RPA), allows configuration computer software to emulate and integrate the actions of human interacting within digital systems to execute a business process. This thesis, after reviewing the most interesting approaches over those streams, focuses on the potential combination of BPA and RPA in order to achieve the greatest optimization of business processes. The result showed that BPM methodology and RPA technology complement each other. Although, the capabilities of BPM are proven over the years, RPA is a new technology and there a lot of dangers that should be considered before taking the strategic decision to implement it.