The Integration of ERP Systems and Technologies for Process Automation: A Bibliometric Analysis

In the context of Industry 4.0, economic entities that want to be successful on the market have to take into consideration the use of various technologies for digitalization and automation of operational processes. To make work easier and increase performance, ERP (Enterprise Resource Planning) systems can be integrated with other innovative solutions for automation, such as RPA (Robotic Process Automation). This paper aims to identify the main topics of interest in the field and the correlations between them, using a bibliometric analysis of the literature. The database included 284 publications extracted from Scopus. The search was carried out using keywords such as “ERP”, “RPA” and “automation”. Using the VOSviewer software, the answers to the research questions were obtained by analyzing keyword cooccurrence network, the evolution of the number of papers published in the period 2015-2024, the papers with the highest number of citations, and the countries that contributed the most to the field. The results illustrate that interest is growing in integrating ERP systems with digitalization and automation technologies. In the analyzed papers, automation-based solutions, such as software robots, are mainly chosen. The current research contributes to the literature by exploring the integrated use of ERP solutions with RPA, an aspect that is not much addressed in existing work. An overview of trends takes shape as this study can represent the basis for future research in this particular field, which is constantly evolving.