Business Process Management (BPM) &

Robotic Process Automation (RPA): Partners for

Operational Excellence?

Eric Tsui Knowledge Management and Innovation Research Centre

The Hong Kong Polytechnic University

Example of an order delivery process

An order delivery process As soon as an order is received, the wanted item(s) are packed and delivered to the customer. At the same time, an invoice is issued and send to the customer for payment.

Order

Pack

Ship Bill Customer

Why do we need to manage BPs?

• Foster a common understanding

• Consistency

• Alignment of operations with business objectives

• Conformance / Compliance

• Compare and improve (as planned, compare with past data, industry averages, identify improvements)

• Report / Traceability

• Predictability

• Scalability

• Support change

4

Is BPM a must to implement?

An order delivery process As soon as an order is received, the wanted item(s) are packed and delivered to the customer. At the same time, an invoice is issued and send to the customer for payment.

Order

Pack

Ship Bill Customer

BUSINESS PROCESS MANAGEMENT

Process

Identification

BPM Lifecycle

Monitoring and

Measurement of

Performance

Map and

Analyze As-Is

Process

Design To-Be

Procesess

Implement

Process

&

Set metrics

Phase 1 Map, Analyse & Design

2

Phase 2 Implement & Improve

1

• Identify

• Design

• Model/Simulate

• Collaborate

• Automation

• Measurements

• Benchmarking

• Visualisation

• Continuous

improvement

Definition of BPM

BPM is an umbrella term

Business Process Management

12

(Source: T. Davenport, Havard Management Update, Nov 2002.)

Types of knowledge workers

Business Context & Organisational Capabilities

(Source: R.T. Burlton)

Resource-based view

of a firm

A business process often involves

• Actors (people, systems) to perform a set of activities, manually or automatically, or a combination

• An activity can be a computation, processing/consolidation/redirection of data and/or information

• Decision(s) which can be made by human or computer

• Upon certain condition(s) being met, the state of an activity may be altered

• (If applicable) Stakeholder(s) from one or more business units, clients, partners, consumers and other external parties

• (Most likely) Involvement of IT system(s)

• The retrieval, flow & generation of new data, information & knowledge

BPM-related assets (Source: J. Boots, BPM boots on the ground, 2012)

16

RPA & BPM in action - Hong Kong ID card replacement

RPA tools need to handle increasingly complex tasks

• Check

• Capture (multi-sources)

• File

• Share (Email)

• Transform

• Route

• Data Input

• Record

• Validation • Compare • Calculate • Key-fill • Analytics • Security Trace

• Learn • Analyse • Discover • Detect • Recommend • Summarise

Basic Operation

Rule-based Artificial Intelligence

Maturity Model for process tools

RPA vendors at different levels

Major benefits of RPA

• Fast deployment

• High consistency

• Accuracy

• Compliance & digital trail

• Higher productivity

• Scalability

• Lowering cost?

What to look for in RPA tools?

• Capabilities / Features (especially on functions, interaction with peripheral devices, decision making logic, import/export of deployed scripts)

• Easy to use, fast to learn and deploy

• Standards (not proprietary but industry-wide, universal)

• Dashboard to show individual/overall performance, highlight area(s) needed attention, exceptions

• Self-monitoring, benchmarking, predictive capabilities etc (via a Cloud service)

• Interface with, or integrated into a BPMS

Current status and expected adoption of RPA tools

• RPA technology is probably only at 1% of its ultimate capabilities*

• RPA frees up 40% of employees' time to work on other tasks RPA is set to grow by 60% by 2020

• 55% of executives plan to use RPA in the future**

* LinkedIn

** Cognizant Inc.

Robotic process automation is best suited to apply to clerical data handling, re-purposing, re-keying or republishing activities that:

• can be mimicked by technologies that are script based

• use if-then conditional logic or employ artificial intelligence

• (unlike BPM) tasks that involve small numbers of users that would be uneconomical to automate using traditional IT

When to consider RPA?

When to consider RPA? (cont.)

• Tasks that do not vary every time they occur

• Access to structured data and data-driven decisions

• Well-documented, agreed or followed process

• Error-prone if carried out by human

• Volume?

Examples of RPA in F&A

(Source: Ernst & Young)

Starting a RPA …

1. Start small, simple, pilot first, build a Proof of Concept prototype

2. Extend from or link up with a BPM project

• RPA or

• BPM+RPA or

• BPR+RPA

RPA Benchmarking Report 2017

Business Process Management (BPM) &

Robotic Process Automation (RPA): Partners for

Operational Excellence?

Eric Tsui Knowledge Management and Innovation Research Centre

The Hong Kong Polytechnic University