Examining and Comparing the Critical Success Factors Between Business Process Management and Business Process Automation

Introduction

Business Process Automation (BPA) promises a plethora of opportunities to organizations such as cost reductions, improved operational efficiency, reduced errors, enhanced allocation of the workforce, and higher reliability and quality in business processes. The growing market of process automation solutions shows that companies are increasingly investing in BPA projects ¹. BPA solutions are offered by vendors with a variety of names such as BPM suite, BPM system, BPM platform, or BPA tool (e.g., Srivastava et al., 2020, 2021). These market solutions provide the IT systems for automating tasks and processes in the organizations, without much focus on analyzing, improving, and governing business processes. BPA is seen as an important factor to survive in a competitive market (Mevius et al., 2013). However, in the literature, BPA and the factors affecting its implementation have not been investigated separately from the broad discipline of Business Process Management (BPM) (Buh et al., 2015). BPM provides a holistic set of principles, methods, and tools to organizations to manage processes from end to end, covering the identification, definition, analysis, redesign, implementation, monitoring, and lastly, continuous improvement of processes (Dumas et al., 2018; van der Aalst et al., 2016). While process automation is a typical and core endeavor as part of the implementation phase of the BPM life cycle, it is not necessarily performed in all BPM projects (van der Aalst et al., 2016). An organization can also refer to a BPM initiative as a project that has mainly or solely process automation in its focus (de Bruin & Doebeli, 2015). BPA projects may have a different context than typical BPM projects; thus, the factors for their successful execution may differ (vom Brocke et al., 2016).Capitalizing on the increasing availability of advanced digitalization opportunities, e.g., Artificial Intelligence (AI), Industry 4.0, and Internet of Things (IoT), BPA projects are even more prevalent in organizations (Baier et al., 2022; Collins et al., 2021). However, organizations cannot obtain value from BPA if they do not define and analyze the processes they want to automate (Meidan et al., 2017). In summary, BPM and BPA are interrelated since a BPM project would typically involve BPA, though not in its core, and a BPA project would implement at least part of BPM activities, though not explicitly. This interrelated nature warrants not only the relevance of exploiting project management practices from each other for BPM and BPA but also the need for analyzing specific practices for their success separately.

Critical Success Factors (CSFs) are the conditions that can influence the successful performance of a project during its conduct (Bai & Sarkis, 2013). CSFs help to observe the areas that require specific attention and manage the project better. The identification of CSFs and their evaluation in diverse organizational settings have been a focus of interest in the BPM literature (Buh et al., 2015). Current studies have mostly identified a holistic and generic set of CSFs to support BPM projects (Gabryelczyk & Roztocki, 2018; Rizk et al., 2020; Rosemann & vom Brocke, 2015; Trkman, 2010; vom Brocke et al., 2016). How applicable these CSFs are to BPA projects, however, has remained rather unexplored. Analysis of CSFs related to enterprise systems that include process automation features, such as ERP, is a related line of research. However, those studies have mostly approached the topic from a broad IT adoption or BPM view (Al-Mudimigh, 2007; Alibabaei et al., 2009; Chang et al., 2010).