Value can be interpreted in multiple ways depending of the organization and its goals. The purpose of this study is to examine the customer side value co-creation process in the context of RPA. It aims to find out which elements of RPA and which of the supplier’s actions result in customer side value co-creation and what kind of processes and roles are involved. The value co-creation is based on joined problem solving activities, which include problem identification, designing and producing the solution, implementation, managing value conflicts and organizing process and resources to create value-in-use (Aarikka-Stenroos &
Jaakkola 2012, 22). These activities will be examined in the case company through the below presented research question and sub-questions.
Based on the research objectives, the main research question is formulated as follows:
RQ: What are the factors that explain customer side value co-creation in robotic process automation?
The main research question aims to discover separate or connected factors that explain value co-creation in the context of RPA. The value co-creation is examined from customer
4 perspective, which means that the customer’s internal actions and the supplier’s customer related actions are assumed to create value during customer’s RPA operations. A preliminary view of the case showed that the studied companies are in different phases of RPA implementations and there are certain demographic factors that may affect the value co-creation process. A typical checkpoint for examining progress and making corrections in RPA implementations is two years (Willcocks et al. 2019, 3) and therefore, it is anticipated that customers expect diverse approaches from the supplier depending of their RPA understanding and maturity. Willcocks et al. (2019, 4) suggest that continuous innovation in all fronts lead to supporting organization’s broader digitalization agenda. Hence, the innovative actions are anticipated to reflect to customer value experience. The support of an organization’s strategy and management is assumed vital for companies’ RPA initiatives and eventually for value co-creation. Achieving optimal value-in-use might require considerable efforts in solving value conflicts (Aarikka-Stenroos & Jaakkola 2012, 21) and the value conflicts are identified to consider both customers internal and customer-supplier relationships.
To be able to answer the main research question, the following sub-questions are formulated as follows:
SQ1: Which roles are involved in the value co-creation process in RPA?
The collaboration activity roles in joint problem-solving process can be divided to customer and supplier roles. The supplier can be value option advisor, value process organizer, value amplifier or value experience supporter whereas the customer can be diagnoser, co-designer, co-producer, co-implementor, co-marketer and co-developer. Moreover, the roles are strongly connecter to supplier and customer resources. (Aarikka-Stenroos & Jaakkola 2012, 22) The objective of this sub-question is to discover which value co-creation roles are involved in the value co-creation process and how they relate to RPA specific roles such as subject matter expert, business analyst, RPA developer, project or service manager and process owner. Kostis and Ritala (2020, 2) present that projects that require the supplier to align its value creation activities closely with the customer, entail significant uncertainty between the partners and require both parties to integrate their highly specialized knowledge and inputs for successful implementations. Therefore, the sub-question one also examines
5 the aspect of role ambiguities, which are vague role expectations, unclear role descriptions, and uncertain role scripts (Rönnberg Sjödin et al. 2016, 108), and also considers that confusions and ambiguity regarding the interpretations of project specifications and inputs between partners often lead to delays or project failures (Kostis & Ritala 2020, 2).
SQ2: Which demographic factors affect the perceived value of RPA?
In previous studies, RPA has often been placed under company’s IT organization (e.g.
Willcocks et al. 2015a; Lacity & Willcocks 2016; Schmitz et al. 2019) and RPA CoE is often described as a unit under company’s IT department. However, some companies have chosen a different perspective to the ownership of RPA in which business units own the RPA practice or the ownership is divided between business and IT department (e.g. Rutaganda et al. 2017; Capgemini 2020). The size, structure, strategy, organization, level of outsourcing and culture of a company are expected to be significant factors that affect the perceived value and value co-creation. In addition, the transparency of RPA initiatives between the organization’s units and the measuring of RPA processes are expected to influence the perceived value. Moreover, the way to organize the RPA development and platform needs to be considered (e.g. Kedziora & Kiviranta 2018). Payne et al. (2008, 93) present that the created value can be greater when the customer understands the value opportunities and the customer is involved on the design and creation of the core values package. Therefore, the sub-question two has been placed to understand the relationship between the demographic factors and value co-creation.
SQ3: Which of supplier’s actions result in positive perception of value?
Customers often expect the supplier to lead the provision of the service (Aarikka-Stenroos
& Jaakkola 2012, 21). In traditional waterfall IT projects, customer defines the output of a project and the supplier is responsible for producing the pre-defined solution. Nevertheless, in the context of RPA, the suppliers can only rarely produce the solution by themselves since the outcome is closely related to customer’s business logic and operations. Hence, tight co-operation is required to enable the knowledge sharing and co-creation of a solution.
Especially in value co-creation, the supplier is expected to be a professional and to assist the customer in diagnosing, designing and producing the solution (Aarikka-Stenroos & Jaakkola
6 2012, 20) by offering technology or method related guidance to the customer. However, when the demands and responsibilities are unclear, the performance might be decreased (Rönnberg et al. 2016, 110). Supplier’s actions during a service provision are based on supplier value-creating processes (Payne et al. 2008, 88) and supplier resources (Aarikka-Stenroos & Jaakkola 2012, 22). The sub-question three is placed to examine which of supplier’s actions customers perceive valuable and how they reflect to the positive perception of value.