Decision support system for assessing business processes transformation to robotic process automation

Abstract

Robotic process automation (RPA) technology is used for business process automation. Actions are developed to mimic the user who performs the activity in the application's Graphical User Interface (GUI), and repeating the activities directly in the GUI. The focus of this study is building a decision support system for RPA transformation by identifying the factors impacting the business process suitability for RPA projects. Business process automation in an organization is incredibly beneficial and allow organizations to reduce cost while doubling efficiency. Though the selected business process is feasible to be automated, it might not bring the expected Return on Investment (ROI) due to incorrect evaluation of costs and benefits. Many organizations are reluctant to go for RPA transformation because identifying the business process suitability for RPA transformation is critical. We found little research conducted on business process suitability analysis for RPA transformation, although there are research papers and whitepapers on identifying the feasibility of automation. Therefore, we focused on developing a tool to decide the business process suitability in RPA transformation. We conducted an extensive study and identified the factors that are considered for suitable business process selection within the literature and in the industry practice. Then a Machine Learning (ML) model was developed to identify the business process suitability for RPA transformation. We used cloud hosted digital tool for easy access. The tool achieved 83% accuracy in identifying the business process suitability for RPA transformation for a given business process. In continuation of this project work, we hope in further improve the user-friendliness and accuracy level of the decision support system in future work.