Business process management (BPM) drives corporate success through effective and efficient processes. In recent decades, knowledge has been accumulated regarding the identification, discovery, analysis, design, implementation, and monitoring of business processes. This includes methods and tools for tackling various kinds of process change such as continuous process improvement, process reengineering, process innovation, and process drift. However, exogenous shocks, which lead to unintentional and radical process change, have been neglected in BPM research although they severely affect an organization’s context, strategy, and business processes. This research note conceptualizes the interplay of exogenous shocks and BPM in terms of the effects that such shocks can have on organizations’ overall process performance over time. On this foundation, related challenges and opportunities for BPM via several rounds of idea generation and consolidation within a diverse team of BPM scholars are identified. The paper discusses findings in light of extant literature from BPM and related disciplines, as well as present avenues for future (BPM) research to invigorate the academic discourse on the topic.

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Robotic Process Automation (RPA) is a comparably new way to automate business processes in organizations. It has been heavily adopted by practitioners, especially within the accounting discipline. However, scientific research seems to be lacking behind. There is no clear definition and no uniform understanding of advantages and disadvantages of RPA. To close this gap, we conduct a structured and systematic literature review to study published scholarly articles on RPA. We set out to identify advantages and disadvantages as well as best practices of RPA against the analytical background of the Business Process Management lifecycle. We can show that literature especially lacks information on quantifiable benefits of RPA. The collected best practices are especially relevant for practitioners. Based on our findings, we present an agenda for future research on RPA.

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With the impact of the Covid-19 pandemic, multiple organizations are experiencing cuts and changes in existing business concepts and face the challenge of adapting to the new circumstances. This short paper discusses preliminary results of a mixed methods based study on business process management capabilities. Using an existing BPM capability framework, we aim to show which configuration of BPM capabilities facilitates organizational survival and processual sustainment during crisis and contribute to both BPM theory and practice.