This book constitutes the proceedings of the Blockchain and Robotic Process Automation (RPA) Forum which was held as part of the 18th International Conference on Business Process Management, BPM 2020. The conference was planned to take place in Seville, Spain, in September 2020. Due to the COVID-19 pandemic the conference took place virtually. The Blockchain Forum and the RPA Forum have in common that they are centered around an emerging and exciting technology. The blockchain is a sophisticated distributed ledger technology, while RPA software allows for mimicking human, repetitive actions. Each of these have the potential to fundamentally change how business processes are being orchestrated and executed in practice. The BPM community has embraced these technologies as objects of analysis, design, development, and evaluation. The 14 full plus one short paper presented in this volume were carefully reviewed and selected from a total of 28 submissions.

This book constitutes the proceedings of the BPM Forum held at the 21st International Conference on Business Process Management, BPM 2023, which took place in Utrecht, The Netherlands, in September 2023. The Blockchain Forum provided a platform for exploring and discussing innovative ideas on the intersection of BPM and blockchain technology. The RPA Forum focused on the use of the Robotic Process Automation (RPA) in the field of Business Process Management. The Educators Forum brought together educators within the BPM community for sharing resources to improve the practice of teaching BPM-related topics. The 18 full papers included in this volume were carefully reviewed and selected from a total of 39 submissions.

This book constitutes the proceedings of the Blockchain and RPA Forum, held as part of the 19th International Conference on Business Process Management, BPM 2021, which took place during September 6-10, 2021, in Rome, Italy. The Blockchain Forum and the RPA Forum have in common that they are centered around an emerging and exciting technology. The blockchain is a sophisticated distributed ledger technology, while RPA software allows for mimicking human, repetitive actions. Each of these have the potential to fundamentally change how business processes are being orchestrated and executed in practice. The 8 papers presented in this volume were carefully reviewed and selected from a total of 14 submissions.

This book constitutes the proceedings of the Blockchain, Robotic Process Management (RPA), and Central and Eastern Europe (CEE) Forum which were held as part of the 20th International Conference on Business Process Management, BPM 2022, which took place in Münster, Germany, during September 11-15, 2022. The Blockchain Forum is dealing with techniques for and applications of blockchains, distributed ledger technologies, and related topics. "The RPA Forum brings together researchers from various communities to discuss challenges, opportunities, and new ideas related to robotic process automation and its application to business processes in private and public sectors." The CEE Forum provides a discussion platform for BPM academics from Central and Eastern Europe to disseminate their research, compare results and share experiences. The 20 papers presented in this volume were carefully reviewed and selected from a total of 40 submissions.

This book constitutes the contributions presented at the Blockchain Forum and the Central and Eastern Europe Forum (CEE Forum) held at the 17th International Conference on Business Process Management, BPM 2019, which took place in Vienna, Austria, in September 2019. The Blockchain Forum deals with the use of blockchain for collaborative information systems. Conceptual, technical and application-oriented contributions are pursued within the scope of this theme. The Blockchain Forum received a total of 31 submissions; 10 full and 1 short paper were accepted for publication in this book. The objective of the CEE Forum is to foster discussion for BPM academics from Central and Eastern Europe to disseminate their research, compare results and share experiences. For the CEE Forum 16 submissions were received and 6 full and 2 short papers were accepted for publication. The book also contains one invited talk in full-paper length and 6 poster papers from the CEE Forum.

This book brings together experts from research and practice. It includes the design of innovative Robot Process Automation (RPA) concepts, the discussion of related research fields (e.g., Artificial Intelligence, AI), the evaluation of existing software products, and findings from real-life implementation projects. Similar to the substitution of physical work in manufacturing (blue collar automation), Robotic Process Automation tries to substitute intellectual work in office and administration processes with software robots (white-collar automation). The starting point for the development of RPA was the observation that – despite the use of process-oriented enterprise systems (such as ERP, CRM and BPM systems) – additional manual activities are still indispensable today. In the RPA approach, these manual activities are learned and automated by software robots, either by defining rules or by observing manual activities. RPA is related to business process management, machine learning, and artificial intelligence. Tools for RPA originated from dedicated stand-alone software. Today, RPA functionalities are also integrated into elaborated process management suites. From a conceptual perspective, RPA can be structured into input components (sensors in the wide sense), an intelligence center, and output components (actuators in the wide sense). From a strategic perspective, the impact of RPA can be related to the support of existing tasks, the complete substitution of human activities, and the innovation of processes as well as business models. At present, high expectations are related to the use of RPA in the improvement of software-supported business processes. Manual activities are learned and automated by software robots that interact with existing applications via the presentation layer. In combination with artificial intelligence (AI) as well as innovative interfaces (e. g., voice recognition) RPA creates a novel level of automation for office and administration processes. Its benefit potential reaches a return on investment (ROI) up-to 800% that is documented in various case studies.