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.