Towards Intelligent Robotic Process Automation for BPMers
This work addresses the problem of automating more sophisticated business processes for BPM professionals, but it is incremental as it focuses on identifying challenges rather than implementing solutions.
The paper tackles the limitation of current Robotic Process Automation (RPA) tools, which only automate simple, predictable business processes, by providing a classification framework based on market experimentation and deriving four research challenges to inject intelligence into RPA for broader adoption in Business Process Management.
Robotic Process Automation (RPA) is a fast-emerging automation technology that sits between the fields of Business Process Management (BPM) and Artificial Intelligence (AI), and allows organizations to automate high volume routines. RPA tools are able to capture the execution of such routines previously performed by a human users on the interface of a computer system, and then emulate their enactment in place of the user by means of a software robot. Nowadays, in the BPM domain, only simple, predictable business processes involving routine work can be automated by RPA tools in situations where there is no room for interpretation, while more sophisticated work is still left to human experts. In this paper, starting from an in-depth experimentation of the RPA tools available on the market, we provide a classification framework to categorize them on the basis of some key dimensions. Then, based on this analysis, we derive four research challenges and discuss prospective approaches necessary to inject intelligence into current RPA technology, in order to achieve more widespread adoption of RPA in the BPM domain.