Exploring the potential of BPMN and robotic process automation integration in end-to-end business processes

Abstract

Nowadays organizations are in charge of implement many different and complex processes. Business processes are the most valuable asset of an organization. They have direct impact on the effectiveness of the services, the delivery of a product, the fulfillment of all third- party’s requirements, and ultimately revenue in case of corporations. The orchestration of the business processes is the challenging part since all the external and internal demands and requirements must be operated efficiently and sufficiently. In a world where the innovation and technology are constantly evolving, organizations with low active demand for technology and innovation services cannot prosper. In demand side organizations must develop a long-term strategy with the key consideration to sustain flexibility, agility and productivity in real time. In this regard, digital transformation is the solution. Business process and business process decision modeling and automation are the core part to achieve digital transformation. However, there is a plethora of available orchestration technologies and each of these technologies have different functionalities, notation languages and APIs and therefore the difficulty to choose and implement the proper one is getting increased gradually. The ultimate aim of this thesis is to analyze the business process modeling and the workflow automation by providing a real example of a business process. In order to accomplish that there is the need to use a standard notation language which will be Business Process Model and Notation (BPMN) and Decision Model and Notation (DMN). The end-to-end process will be implemented using Camunda Platform and Camunda’s tools. Furthermore, this thesis aims to explore the full value and potentials of Robotic Process Automation (RPA) combined with the BPMN capabilities and propose a methodology which can optimize the full automation of business processes. While RPA is a field which lacks academic research on theoretical and practical analysis, after detailed research, not only the possible areas and ways of RPA application will be analyzed, but also the benefits and the potential risks of bot use. Lastly, this research will indicate various methods of smoothing the process execution and analyze the benefits of digital initiative.