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2018 | OriginalPaper | Chapter

Identifying Candidate Tasks for Robotic Process Automation in Textual Process Descriptions

Authors : Henrik Leopold, Han van der Aa, Hajo A. Reijers

Published in: Enterprise, Business-Process and Information Systems Modeling

Publisher: Springer International Publishing

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Abstract

The continuous digitization requires organizations to improve the automation of their business processes. Among others, this has lead to an increased interest in Robotic Process Automation (RPA). RPA solutions emerge in the form of software that automatically executes repetitive and routine tasks. While the benefits of RPA on cost savings and other relevant performance indicators have been demonstrated in different contexts, one of the key challenges for RPA endeavors is to effectively identify processes and tasks that are suitable for automation. Textual process descriptions, such as work instructions, provide rich and important insights about this matter. However, organizations often maintain hundreds or even thousands of them, which makes a manual analysis unfeasible for larger organizations. Recognizing the large manual effort required to determine the current degree of automation in an organization’s business processes, we use this paper to propose an approach that is able to automatically do so. More specifically, we leverage supervised machine learning to automatically identify whether a task described in a textual process description is manual, an interaction of a human with an information system or automated. An evaluation with a set of 424 activities from a total of 47 textual process descriptions demonstrates that our approach produces satisfactory results.

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Title: Identifying Candidate Tasks for Robotic Process Automation in Textual Process Descriptions
Authors: Henrik Leopold
Han van der Aa
Hajo A. Reijers
Publisher: Springer International Publishing
Book: Enterprise, Business-Process and Information Systems Modeling
Print ISBN: 978-3-319-91703-0

Electronic ISBN: 978-3-319-91704-7

Copyright Year: 2018
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-91704-7_5

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