Robotic Process Automation in the Automotive Industry - Lessons Learned from an Exploratory Case Study

Robotic Process Automation (RPA) is the rule-based automation of business processes by software bots mimicking human interactions. The aims of this paper are to provide insights into three RPA use cases from the automotive domain as well as to derive the main challenges to be tackled when introducing RPA in this domain. By means of an exploratory case study, the three use cases are selected from real RPA projects. A systematic method for analyzing the cases is applied. The results are structured along the stages of the lifecycle model of software development. We provide information on every lifecycle stage and discuss the respective lessons learned. In detail, we derive five challenges that should be tackled for any successful RPA implementation in the automotive domain: (1) identifying the right process to automate,(2) understanding the factors influencing user acceptance, (3) explaining RPA to the users, (4) designing human bot interaction, and (5) providing software development guidelines for RPA implementation