Robotic Process Automation (RPA) Adoption: A Systematic Literature Review

Abstract

Robotic process automation (RPA) is a recent technology that has recently become increasingly adopted by companies as a solution for employees to focus on higher complexity and more valuable tasks while delegating routine, monotonous and rule-based tasks to their digital colleagues. The increased interest, reflected in the increasing number of articles regarding approaches and test cases, has triggered the necessity for a summary that could extract the more generalisable ideas and concepts about these software robots. This paper used a Systematic Literature Review (SLR) approach to find and synthesise information from articles obtained on this subject. This research identified the most general implementation approaches of successful RPA adoption cases, observed benefits, challenges commonly faced by organisations, characteristics that make processes more suitable for RPA, and research gaps in the current literature. The findings presented in this paper have two purposes. The first is to provide a way for companies and organisations to become more familiar with good practices regarding the adoption of robotic process automation. The second is to foster further research on the subject by complementing the current knowledge and proposing new paths for research.

A lean approach to robotic process automation in banking

“…Also, the importance of describing suitable processes for automation has been mentioned and thoroughly discussed in Refs. [ 8 , 33 ]. These characteristics are fundamental for the possible standardization of processes and insights into what RPA can do, presented by analyzing current RPA vendors and their functionalities.…”

Business Process Automation in SMEs: A Systematic Literature Review

“…Costa et al [61] and Moreira et al [60], through an SLR, resume the characteristics of a process suitable for automation with RPA. This study characterizes the process by rule-based, mature, structured data, high volume, digital data, routine, few exceptions, and multiple systems.…”

“…As a result of the search, the authors of this study considered that a description of the protocol of literature review or systematic literature review (SLR) in 17 publications - [15,31,39,42,[47][48][59][60][61][62][63][64][65][66][67][68][69], related to the area of study in this SLR, Business Process Automation in SMEs (Table I). The other studies have a theoretical background based on literature only for contextualizing the core of each paper.…”

“…How to? RQ5 Stravinskiené and Serafinas [15] x RPA x x Wewerka and Reichert [31] x RPA x x x Noppen et al [39] x RPA x x x Engel et al [42] Cognitive Automation x Herm et al [47] x RPA x x Enríquez et al [48] x RPA x x Vanwersch et al [59] x x Moreira et al [60] x RPA x x Costa et al [61] RPA x x x Syed et al [62] x RPA/IPA x x Ng et al [63] x IPA x x Sobczak [64] RPA x x Hindel et al [65] x RPA x x Kouriati et al [66] ERP x x Zayas-Cabán et al [67] x Workflow automation x x Plattfaut et al [68] x RPA x x Santos et al [69] x RPA x Some SLRs (Table I) are based on RPA [15, 31, 39, 47-48, 60-62, 64-65, 68-69], others in IPA [42,62,63], and others in workflow automation [67] or ERP [66], but not on automation technology in general. Relatively to the factors that can influence automation positively, the focus of the CSFs listed in [66] is related to ERP Systems, and in [68], it is related to RPA.…”

Towards Intelligent Automation (IA): Literature Review on the Evolution of Robotic Process Automation (RPA), its Challenges, and Future Trends

“…This notion feeds into the topic of RPA, a software solution ostensibly designed to limit the repetitive, non-value-added tasks humans perform (Baranauskas, 2018;Costa et al, 2022). Low-complexity business tasks are overtaken and concurrently pave the way for human workers to embark on more meaningful work.…”