Digitalisierung und Automatisierung im Reporting – Untersuchung der Auswirkungen automatisierter Berichterstattung

Abstract

Information has become one of the most valuable goods not only to base decisions on but also as a resource for companies. Therefore, the ability to efficiently process information is a key part for securing economic success. Coupled with this process of gathering, evaluating, and presenting information are a variety of standardized tasks done by the internal reporting. Digitalization and automatization can play a central role in optimizing these tasks. Over the past decade, solutions like robotics process automation (RPA) have given companies progressively more opportunities to improve processes by automating them. Thanks to other developments in the information technology sector, even more actions and tasks can now be automated. Automation has become widely accepted by companies as one of the key solutions for a wide range of problems. If most literature studied general concepts when reviewing the use of automation for internal reporting processes, this study objective was to have a practical study of a real time implementation of multiple automation processes. Therefore, to analyse more comprehensively the impact and the opportunities of automating reporting processes, this study was conducted to assess the efficiency of automated processes. Based on the analysis of the planning, the implementation and the results of new automated processes, this study has shown that automated processes do improve productivity and reduce costs as previously shown in the literature dealing with digitalization and automation. But it has also revealed the difficulty of measuring the real improvements compared to manual labour. Lastly, when a company wants to improve the efficiency of its reports, this examination of automated reporting tasks has shown the importance of taking a global approach when dealing with the automatization of the entire information process.