Contribution to Business Process Management Conference 2022 honored with Best Paper Award

At the recent International Conference on Business Process Management, Christian Flechsig from the Chair of Business Administration, esp. Logistics and his co-authors Maximilian Völker, Christian Egger, and Mathias Weske received the Best RPA Forum Research Paper Award for their paper “Towards an Integrated Platform for Business Process Management and Robotic Process Automation” (https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-16168-1_9). The article is the result of a joint research project of the TU Dresden and the Hasso Plattner Institute.

The exploratory study addresses the integration of the emerging process automation technology, “Robotic Process Automation” (RPA), into the traditional and widely used “Business Process Management Systems” (BPMS) to automate and enact a broader range of business processes. The paper focuses on applying the “Business Process Model and Notation” (BPMN) as a unified standard for process modeling and orchestration to provide more comprehensive analysis, optimization, and monitoring of processes and improve human-machine collaboration. Following a design science research approach, the paper derives several technical and organizational requirements for integrating BPMS and RPA based on a literature review and interview study. Building on these findings, a novel platform concept is developed, implemented via a functional prototype, and evaluated within additional expert interviews. Finally, directions for future research and organizational practice are outlined to provide starting points for a deeper investigation of this emerging topic.