Process & Software Selection for Robotic Process Automation (RPA)

Robotic process automation (RPA) is a technology for office automation to imitate human behaviour when interacting with computers to perform digitized tasks manually, such as opening and closing applications, reading documents, entering data, and sending e-mails. As with any new digital technology answering the question of where to start and what is the right software, is challenging. In the case of RPA, the question of where to start depends on the selection of the business process to be automated and optimized. There are approaches for process selection in research, but they are relatively complex and have not been validated in practice. To fill this gap, we have simplified the process selection method and validated it on a practical example. We also present a simple method to select the appropriate RPA software. The criteria selection and evaluation were done with the Pairwise Comparison and Benefit Value Analysis method. This approach is relatively easy to follow and to apply in practice and thus also closes a gap in applied research.