Developing standard criteria for robotic process automation candidate process selection

Abstract

Robotic process automation (RPA) is a cutting-edge technology that provides software robots to repeat and mimic the repeatable tasks that a human user earlier performed. The use of software robots is encouraging because of their cost efficiency and easy implementation. Selecting and prioritizing a candidate process for automation is always challenging as all the business processes in an organization are not equally suitable for RPA implementation. Various studies have highlighted several criteria found in the literature for determining, prioritising, and selecting a business process for RPA. Nevertheless, there are no set standards for evaluating and analyzing a certain process or its tasks to determine whether they may be automated to use RPA. This paper aims to develop standard criteria and propose a consistent model to select and prioritize candidate process for RPA projects. To assess these criteria's applicability in the context of RPA, surveys among subject matter experts (SMEs) are used to validate them. Principal component analysis (PCA) and correlation are used to identify the top 20 criteria. Naïve Bayes algorithm is applied on the collected data for decision-making. The developed multi-criteria model exhibits strong precision and recall measures, with training and validation accuracy of 96% and 90%, respectively.