Robotic process automation: a review of the state-of-the-art

Abstract

This chapter provides an overview of the trends and progress of research in robotic process automation (RPA). We first describe a summary of key research challenges presented in our seminal work in 2020. Next, we review the emerging research themes and progress of the research to address the 15 challenges associated with RPA to date. Our analysis discusses the high growth in the areas of intelligent automation, technical development and software practices, the emerging issues and remedial approaches for socio-technical and human-bot engagement, models for benefit realization and capability assessment. We also discuss the growing interest of organizations in RPA as a strategy for accelerated digital transformation. Our review identified that exception handling, organizational readiness, and infrastructure assessment are still under-researched areas. We recommend modeling, analyzing, and redesigning the process using business process management (BPM) principles before automating with RPA. We concur that RPA-enabled procedures will demand novel job design and cultural frameworks to effectively incorporate bots as a ‘digital colleague’ to overcome job loss fears. Finally, enterprise-wide RPA deployment requires interventions more than simply technology implementation and, therefore, vendor-agnostic governance structures, methodologies, and frameworks are needed for the effective and sustainable use of RPA in organizations.