Developing Organization's Processes With Robotic Process Automation - A Case Study

Abstract

Competition requires firms to continuously polish their processes, and one source where improvement has been explored is digitalization. As a single technology related to digitalization, this thesis studied Robotic Process Automation (RPA). Purpose of the study was to identify how the case study company overall had implemented RPA and additionally which processes could be suitable to implement RPA in a single department of case study organization. 
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\nRPA is a software robot working manual and structured tasks implemented in the graphical user interface. The main benefits in this type of automation are the lower development cost, easier development and quicker implementation. Earlier research of the topic shows that processes with high volume or high value of transactions, are executed in stable environment, have low cognitive requirements, have possibility to break down into unambiguous rules and have limited need for exception handling are seen as promising characteristics considering implementation of RPA.
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\nThe research was conducted through semi-structured interviews with total of 13 persons within the case study company and evaluation part of the test RPA was conducted through observation. Study found out that the case study company’s implementation can be described with down-to-top approach where the business users were involved to development from beginning and the benefits of automation of processes was seen as more than only time-saving. Furthermore, it was noted that there are no restrictions of the area where technology could be implemented, but more of the process itself. In the case study department, overall 19 processes related to reporting, manual data transfer between systems and manual financial transactions in ERP were found out to be feasible for RPA, but only few of these could be justified worthwhile with automation. Main lesson learned from the creation of test RPAs was the same as in earlier research, that standardization and stabilizing the process before implementation is recommended beforehand.