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Article
Publication date: 14 November 2023

Osvaldo Braz dos Santos Moderno, Antonio Carlos Braz and Paulo Tromboni de Souza Nascimento

Research of currently limited literature sees Robotic Process Automation (RPA) as an important tool at the tactical level. However, the literature has not considered its potential…

Abstract

Purpose

Research of currently limited literature sees Robotic Process Automation (RPA) as an important tool at the tactical level. However, the literature has not considered its potential contribution to creating competitive advantages. This paper aims to link RPA and Resource-based view (RBV) literature, proposing a conceptual framework boosting RPA research as part of an organizational AI strategy.

Design/methodology/approach

This study applied a Systematic Literature Review (SRL), combining bibliometrics and content analysis. This study also built a new framework based on the updated RBV model that was transformed based on the RPA literature review results.

Findings

By bridging the two bodies of literature on RBV and RPA, this study manages to show the strategic side of the technology. Therefore, this study brought to light the most updated fundamental concepts of complementarity and scale-free fungible resources from RBV theory and AI technologies, applied to the domains of RPA, information systems and information technology (IS/IT) through the development of a new theoretical lens. Also, this study was able to elaborate on a new conceptual framework for AI strategy formulation to help organizations on their journey to AI utilization.

Originality/value

The authors did not find any research that has shown the strategic side of RPA, nor any that has used a theoretical lens based on the RBV theory to show this side. To the best of the author’s knowledge, this study seems to be the first to make the case for RPA's strategic potential.

Details

Business Process Management Journal, vol. 30 no. 1
Type: Research Article
ISSN: 1463-7154

Keywords

Article
Publication date: 31 July 2023

Emil Lucian Crisan, Diana Maria Chis, Eniko Elisabeta Bodea and Robert Buchmann

This paper reviews existing research to understand when, how and with what results robotic process automation (RPA) is implemented by organizations.

Abstract

Purpose

This paper reviews existing research to understand when, how and with what results robotic process automation (RPA) is implemented by organizations.

Design/methodology/approach

The authors have identified 84 sources across eight databases and have analyzed them through the lens of a context–intervention–mechanism–outcomes framework (CIMO). The CIMO analysis maps the contextual drivers, intervention approaches and value related outcomes associated with RPA implementation.

Findings

The result of the analysis is the identification of four mechanisms explaining the approach organizations take to implement RPA: digitizing business processes, performing knowledge work together with humans, replacing outsourcing with RPA robots and developing a new business model. Therefore, in this paper, in order to reduce RPA literature fragmentation, the authors take into account the digital transformation (DT) perspective, by considering RPA as one example of digital technology.

Practical implications

This study sensitize organizational adopters to the different mechanisms they can deploy to conduct RPA implementations to achieve different desired outcomes in response to different drivers. Moreover, having a clear picture of the key enablers and associated barriers to the realization of these alternative paths serve as a useful map to guide the implementation process.

Originality/value

The findings contribute to DT research by conceptualizing these mechanisms through which organizations deploy automation tools—such as RPA.

Details

Journal of Advances in Management Research, vol. 20 no. 5
Type: Research Article
ISSN: 0972-7981

Keywords

Article
Publication date: 7 April 2023

Alexander Serenko

The purpose of this Real Impact Viewpoint Article is to analyze the quiet quitting phenomenon from the human capital management perspective.

3789

Abstract

Purpose

The purpose of this Real Impact Viewpoint Article is to analyze the quiet quitting phenomenon from the human capital management perspective.

Design/methodology/approach

The methods comprise the analysis of 672 TikTok comments, the use of secondary data and literature review.

Findings

Quiet quitting is a mindset in which employees deliberately limit work activities to their job description, meet yet not exceed the preestablished expectations, never volunteer for additional tasks and do all this to merely maintain their current employment status while prioritizing their well-being over organizational goals. Employees quiet quit due to poor extrinsic motivation, burnout and grudges against their managers or organizations. Quiet quitting is a double-edged sword: while it helps workers avoid burnout, engaging in this behavior may jeopardize their professional careers. Though the term is new, the ideas behind quiet quitting are not and go back decades.

Practical implications

Employees engaged in quiet quitting should become more efficient, avoid burnout, prepare for termination or resignation and manage future career difficulties. In response to quiet quitting, human capital managers should invest in knowledge sharing, capture the knowledge of potential quiet quitters, think twice before terminating them, conduct a knowledge audit, focus on high performers, introduce burnout management programs, promote interactional justice between managers and subordinates and fairly compensate for “going above and beyond.” Policymakers should prevent national human capital depletion, promote work-life balance as a national core value, fund employee mental health support and invest in employee efficiency innovation.

Originality/value

This Real Impact Viewpoint Article analyzes quiet quitting from the human capital management perspective.

Details

Journal of Knowledge Management, vol. 28 no. 1
Type: Research Article
ISSN: 1367-3270

Keywords

Open Access
Article
Publication date: 31 May 2023

Antti Ylä-Kujala, Damian Kedziora, Lasse Metso, Timo Kärri, Ari Happonen and Wojciech Piotrowicz

Robotic process automation (RPA) has recently emerged as a technology focusing on the automation of repetitive, frequent, voluminous and rule-based tasks. Despite a few practical…

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Abstract

Purpose

Robotic process automation (RPA) has recently emerged as a technology focusing on the automation of repetitive, frequent, voluminous and rule-based tasks. Despite a few practical examples that document successful RPA deployments in organizations, evidence of its economic benefits has been mostly anecdotal. The purpose of this paper is to present a step-by-step method to RPA investment appraisal and a business case demonstrating how the steps can be applied to practice.

Design/methodology/approach

The methodology relies on design science research (DSR). The step-by-step method is a design artefact that builds on the mapping of processes and modelling of the associated costs. Due to the longitudinal nature of capital investments, modelling uses discounted cashflow and present value methods. Empirical grounding characteristic to DSR is achieved by field testing the artefact.

Findings

The step-by-step method is comprised of a preparatory step, three modelling steps and a concluding step. The modelling consists of compounding the interest rate, discounting the investment costs and establishing measures for comparison. These steps were applied to seven business processes to be automated by the case company, Estate Blend. The decision to deploy RPA was found to be trivial, not only based on the initial case data, but also based on multiple sensitivity analyses that showed how resistant RPA investments are to changing circumstances.

Practical implications

By following the provided step-by-step method, executives and managers can quantify the costs and benefits of RPA. The developed method enables any organization to directly compare investment alternatives against each other and against the probable status quo where many tasks in organizations are still carried out manually with little to no automation.

Originality/value

The paper addresses a growing new domain in the field of business process management by capitalizing on DSR and modelling-based approaches to RPA investment appraisal.

Details

Business Process Management Journal, vol. 29 no. 8
Type: Research Article
ISSN: 1463-7154

Keywords

Open Access
Article
Publication date: 3 April 2023

Kateryna Kubrak, Fredrik Milani and Alexander Nolte

When improving business processes, process analysts can use data-driven methods, such as process mining, to identify improvement opportunities. However, despite being supported by…

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Abstract

Purpose

When improving business processes, process analysts can use data-driven methods, such as process mining, to identify improvement opportunities. However, despite being supported by data, process analysts decide which changes to implement. Analysts often use process visualisations to assess and determine which changes to pursue. This paper helps explore how process mining visualisations can aid process analysts in their work to identify, prioritise and communicate business process improvement opportunities.

Design/methodology/approach

The study follows the design science methodology to create and evaluate an artefact for visualising identified improvement opportunities (IRVIN).

Findings

A set of principles to facilitate the visualisation of process mining outputs for analysts to work with improvement opportunities was suggested. Particularly, insights into identifying, prioritising and communicating process improvement opportunities from visual representation are outlined.

Originality/value

Prior work focuses on visualisation from the perspectives – among others – of process exploration, process comparison and performance analysis. This study, however, considers process mining visualisation that aids in analysing process improvement opportunities.

Details

Business Process Management Journal, vol. 29 no. 8
Type: Research Article
ISSN: 1463-7154

Keywords

Article
Publication date: 12 May 2023

Dahlia Fernandez, Omkar Dastane, Hafizah Omar Zaki and Aini Aman

Robotic Process Automation (RPA) is a digital transformation tool that demonstrated tremendous growth in research output as well as its application in the past decade. This study…

Abstract

Purpose

Robotic Process Automation (RPA) is a digital transformation tool that demonstrated tremendous growth in research output as well as its application in the past decade. This study attempts to identify essential research gaps and proposes future research agendas in the field by analyzing publishing trends, major stakeholders (authors, countries, affiliations, journals), key clusters and evolving themes by mapping the most recent research (2016–2022) in the field.

Design/methodology/approach

Preferred Reporting Items for Systematic Review and Meta-Analysis (PRISMA) was used to retrieve a total of 244 publications from the Web of Science (WOS) database for this analysis. The study then uses the open-source R program bibliometrix to conduct bibliometric analysis. A variety of tools and methods including collaboration network, word dynamics, co-occurrence network, thematic map and strategy map were utilized.

Findings

The analysis reveals the most influential stakeholders (country: the USA, author: Arai K, affiliation: Christ Deemed University), main clusters of intellectual structure (process mining, digital transformation, blockchain, information systems) and the evolution of themes (model innovation, artificial intelligence, big-data, design science and user acceptance) in the subject.

Originality/value

This study uses bibliometric analysis to provide a comprehensive overview of RPA literature which unravels the conceptual structure of the stream and proposes a research agenda for the future. Based on the growth of themes and the strategy map, this study may assist entrepreneurs and practitioners in determining field priorities for strategizing process innovation.

Details

European Journal of Innovation Management, vol. 27 no. 2
Type: Research Article
ISSN: 1460-1060

Keywords

Article
Publication date: 26 June 2023

Chetna Choudhary, Deepti Mehrotra and Avinash K. Shrivastava

As the number of web applications is increasing day by day web mining acts as an important tool to extract useful information from weblogs and analyse them according to the…

Abstract

Purpose

As the number of web applications is increasing day by day web mining acts as an important tool to extract useful information from weblogs and analyse them according to the attributes and predict the usage of a website. The main aim of this paper is to inspect how process mining can be used to predict the web usability of hotel booking sites based on the number of users on each page, and the time of stay of each user. Through this paper, the authors analyse the web usability of a website through process mining by finding the web usability metrics. This work proposes an approach to finding the usage of a website using the attributes available in the weblog which predicts the actual footfall on a website.

Design/methodology/approach

PROM (Process Mining tool) is used for the analysis of the event log of a hotel booking site. In this work, authors have used a case study to apply the PROM (process mining tool) to pre-process the event log dataset for analysis to discover better-structured process maps than without pre-processing.

Findings

This article first provided an overview of process mining, then focused on web mining and later discussed process mining techniques. It also described different target languages: system nets (i.e. Petri nets with an initial and a final state), inductive miner and heuristic miner, graphs showing the change in behaviour of the dataset and predicting the outcome, that is the webpage having the maximum number of hits.

Originality/value

In this work, a case study has been used to apply the PROM (process mining tool) to pre-process the event log dataset for analysis to discover better-structured process maps than without pre-processing.

Details

International Journal of Quality & Reliability Management, vol. ahead-of-print no. ahead-of-print
Type: Research Article
ISSN: 0265-671X

Keywords

Article
Publication date: 28 February 2023

Azumah Mamudu, Wasana Bandara, Sander J.J. Leemans and Moe Thandar Wynn

Process mining (PM) specialises in extracting insights from event logs to facilitate the improvement of an organisation's business processes. Industry trends show the…

Abstract

Purpose

Process mining (PM) specialises in extracting insights from event logs to facilitate the improvement of an organisation's business processes. Industry trends show the proliferation and continued growth of PM techniques. To address the minimal attention given to developing empirically supported frameworks to assess the nature of impact in the PM domain, this study proposes a framework that identifies the key categories of PM impacts and their interrelationships.

Design/methodology/approach

The qualitatively derived framework is built, re-specified and validated from a diverse collection of 62 PM case reports. With multiple rounds of coding supported by coder corroborations, inductively extracted concepts relating to impact from a first set of 12 case reports were grouped into themes and sub-themes to derive an a-priori framework by adopting the balanced scorecard as a theoretical lens. Concepts from the remaining 50 case reports were deductively grouped to re-specify and validate the proposed PM impacts framework. Further analysis identified interrelationships between impacts, which extends our understanding of the identified PM impacts.

Findings

The proposed framework captures PM impacts in four main categories: (a) impact on the process, (b) customer impact, (c) financial impact, and (d) impact on innovation and learning. The authors extended this analysis to identify the interrelationships between these categories, which vividly demonstrates how impact on the process mediates the attainment of the other three impact types.

Originality/value

The need for a deeper understanding of PM impacts within the context of contemporary PM practice is addressed by this work. The PM impacts framework provides a classification of PM impacts into four categories with 19 subcategories. It also identifies direct, moderating and mediating relationships between categories and subcategories whilst highlighting the role of impact on the process as a precursor to the other types of PM impact.

Details

Business Process Management Journal, vol. 29 no. 3
Type: Research Article
ISSN: 1463-7154

Keywords

Article
Publication date: 23 August 2022

Purnima Rao, Shubhangi Verma, Akshat Aditya Rao and Rajni Joshi

The purpose of the current paper is to identify the factors responsible for achieving business sustainability. This paper further attempts to develop a conceptual framework that…

Abstract

Purpose

The purpose of the current paper is to identify the factors responsible for achieving business sustainability. This paper further attempts to develop a conceptual framework that can help SMEs to achieve viable business growth through improved sustainable performance.

Design/methodology/approach

The study follows a methodical examination of literature published on SMEs during COVID-19. Specifically, the combination of keywords has primarily centred on SMEs, Business Practices, COVID-19 and Pandemic. The 155 research papers identified for the analysis have been classified as per geographical spread, type of papers, central theme, and theoretical foundations, which finally is followed by rigourous thematic analysis.

Findings

This research contributes to the SME literature by providing methodological, conceptual and practical rigour. The framework proposed by the research covers all the relevant areas which can be useful in preparing sustainable business trajectory for SMEs. It outlines the required directives for designing sustainable business practices for SMEs and includes macro and micro determinants. It also opens up future research avenues in different areas identified in the research. Future research can be performed on comparing business practices of SMEs across the emerging and developed economies.

Practical implications

In this study, we propose a framework that enables the design of sustainable business practices and thereby supports SMEs to combat any uncertain events or shocks. SMEs that can work on adopting sustainable business practices may sculpt novel avenues for growth and competitive advantage for their business.

Originality/value

The study is distinctive in nature as it is based on the examination of literature published during a phenomenological event (COVID-19) which depicts the sudden and unaccounted disruptions faced by SMEs and thereby strategies formulated around the significant glitches.

Details

Benchmarking: An International Journal, vol. 30 no. 6
Type: Research Article
ISSN: 1463-5771

Keywords

Article
Publication date: 14 June 2022

Alexander Serenko

The purpose of this Real Impact Viewpoint Article is to analyze the phenomenon of the Great Resignation from the knowledge management perspective.

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Abstract

Purpose

The purpose of this Real Impact Viewpoint Article is to analyze the phenomenon of the Great Resignation from the knowledge management perspective.

Design/methodology/approach

It applies the knowledge-based view of the firm to the notion of the Great Resignation, reviews the extant literature and relies on secondary data.

Findings

The Great Resignation has created numerous knowledge-related impacts on the individual, organizational and national levels. On the individual level, because of an accelerating adoption of freelancing, the future may witness an expansion of the category of the knowledge worker and a growing need for personal knowledge management methods and information technologies. Organizational effects include knowledge loss, reduced business process efficiency, damaged intra-organizational knowledge flows, lower relational capital, lost informal friendship networks, difficulty attracting the best human capital, undermined knowledge transfer processes and knowledge leakage to competition. Countries may also witness the depletion of national human capital.

Practical implications

Managers should learn how to use the available human capital more efficiently; realize the importance of universal succession planning programs; automate knowledge-centric business processes; facilitate knowledge-based IT initiatives by implementing self-functioning virtual communities, including enterprise social networks; restructure organizations to optimize intra-organizational knowledge flows; adjust strategies, products and target markets based on the available human capital; and create telecommuting conditions for people with disabilities who cannot be physically present. Knowledge management scholars are presented with a unique opportunity to convert the numerous theoretical insights accumulated within the boundaries of their discipline into practical application to facilitate the Great Knowledge Revolution.

Originality/value

This viewpoint offers managerial recommendations and inspires future Great Resignation investigations.

Details

Journal of Knowledge Management, vol. 27 no. 4
Type: Research Article
ISSN: 1367-3270

Keywords

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