Robotic Process Automation use cases in academia and early implementation experiences

Robotic Process Automation (RPA) has emerged as a new sub-domain in software-based automation. RPA-based software bots promise to alleviate the tedium in labour-intensive tasks involving manual and repetitive operations. Therefore, RPA finds wide adoption across industries and domains. In this paper, RPA use cases for academia and document early implementation experiences are examined. The authors believe that the ease of implementation of RPA bots and their potential benefits shall facilitate the deployment of RPA across institutions resulting in efficient data collation and analysis while helping drive operational efficiency. However, while RPA bot development encompasses low complexity, maintenance and long-term seamless operation require significant software engineering effort, which must be factored in by institutions looking to adopt RPA for automation.