Robotic Process Automation and Organizational Efficiency: The Mediating Role of Process Innovation

Abstract

The technology of automating repetitive, rule-based, and structured business processes in organizations is gaining attention and is called Robotic Process Automation (RPA). Many organizations have embraced RPA to boost operational efficiency, shorten processing times, cut down on errors, lower operational expenses, and enhance the utilization of human and technological resources. But, the benefits of RPA on efficiency may not come just from automating the individual tasks. The adoption of RPA could also prompt organizations to reflect on current workflows, weed out redundant processes, streamline bottlenecks, account for uniformity, and rethink business processes. These changes are process innovations and could be an important pathway for organizations to gain efficiency from RPA. The impact of RPA on organizational efficiency and how it is mediated by process innovation were investigated in this study. Objective organizational process data was gathered before and after RPA implementation and a quasi-experimental case study design was used. Process completion time, transaction throughput, processing error, manual intervention, operational cost, and resource utilization were used to measure organizational efficiency. Process innovation was analyzed by process-mining analysis of organizational event logs with a focus on workflow sequence changes, manual activities, process bottlenecks, task duplication, process variation, and process integration. The pre and post performance measures were statistically compared and bootstrapping mediation analyses were performed to assess the direct and indirect effects of RPA. The study offered an empirical evidence to understand, whether RPA had helped organization to perform better by means of process innovation or direct automation. The research evidenced the following contributions to the literature on digital transformation, business process management, process mining, and organizational innovation: First, the research was based on the mechanism by which computer-based automation can lead to measurable organizational process performance improvement.