Automation strategy for a business process: a real case study from analysis to implementation.

Business process automation is part of the digital transformations that companies are facing today. Due to the popularity of the topic, many solutions and strategies are available on the market, choosing the best one is not an easy task. This thesis aims to highlight what are the necessary steps to automate a business process and what “automation” really means. The entire study is based on real use case of Deltatre company to automate its costs review process related to third-party providers usage. To test the hypothesis that choosing the right automation strategy can bring value to the company, first of all, has been defined, analyzed, and redesigned the business process to be automated in order to point out the requirements for automation. Robotic Process Automation and Traditional automation have been compared to get the best one to fulfill the expectation resumed in KPIs. While the main trend in these days is to push on RPA tools, the cost review process was automated developing an in-house software application that respects the principles of microservices and event-driven architecture to guarantee the modularity of the application itself over time. In 3 months, monitoring the effects of the automation, it was possible to observe positive results. The automation brought significative cost reductions, it removed repetitive tedious tasks increasing the job satisfaction of company’s personnel. These results suggest that automation can bring value to companies that are investing in its adoption. Anyway, process automation cannot be considered as a one-shot task, on the opposite, it should follow the same life cycle of any software application: requirements collection and analysis, development, testing, maintenance, and monitoring to get to a winning automation strategy.