Integrating Robotic Process Automation into Business Process Management
As of today, robotic process automation (RPA) is a prominent process automation technology, which uses software to replace humans at operating graphical user interfaces. However, RPA is limited in scope and, in order for it to be established successfully,
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· Business process
Introduction
Robotic process automation (RPA) is an emerging technology to automate business processes that are driven by user interaction with software systems. It is characterized as generic term for software that mimics human interaction with graphical application interfaces [1]. Thus, human resources are replaced by software robots, which results in decreasing costs and increasing efficiency and consistency [5]. The emergence of RPA is an important development in process automation, labeled as “fastest-growing software subsegment” in 2018 by the IT market research company Gartner1 . However, RPA is limited in that many techniques required to successfully implement it lay outside its scope. This includes gathering the necessary information for automation enactment, dealing with exceptions during the execution of automated processes, and managing process automation on an organizational level. Existing research suggests to solve these problems by combining RPA with business process management (BPM). More specific, most works propose integrating RPA with BPM. RPA is considered more successful, or even only successful, when combined with BPM [5,6,8,9]. While Kirchmer et al. [5] already 1
https://www.gartner.com/en/newsroom/press-releases/2019-06-24-gartner-saysworldwide-robotic-process-automation-sof.
c Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2020 A. Asatiani et al. (Eds.): BPM Blockchain and RPA Forum 2020, LNBIP 393, pp. 132–146, 2020. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-58779-6_9
Integrating RPA into BPM
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present a so-called value-driven robotic process automation approach, including formal methods for RPA enactment and suggesting to integrate them into BPM, no concrete solution for the integration is described. In this paper, we propose an integration solution, from a software architecture as well as a methodology perspective, to position RPA into BPM. To evaluate our approach, we implemented a prototypical software solution and applied our approach to a use case scenario. The remainder of this paper is structured as follows: Sect. 2 describes the fundamentals of RPA and BPM. Following, Sect. 3 lists the limitations of RPA to motivate the need for putting it into a larger context and allow for a discussion of our work. In Sect. 4, we explore the existing work that suggests an RPA-to-BPM integration, and examine the proposed approaches. Section 5 and Sect. 6 present our main contribution: A concrete integration solution, consisting of software architectural and methodological means to implement RPA processes in a BPM context. Section 7 evaluates the technological feasibility, applies our solution to a use case, and discusses general findings and shortcomings. In Sect. 8, the main results are summarized and future work is investigated.
2
Preliminaries
This section outlines our understanding and assumptions about BPM and RPA. A general architecture of the underlying systems of BPM and RPA is detailed as it serves the upcoming sections. 2.1
Business Process Management
According to the definition
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