Is Hyperautomation Revolutionizing Industries?

Hyperautomation has been named one of the top trends under Top Strategic Technology Trends for 2020 by Gartner. The recognition to this business-driven approach is well deserved for the progress it has enabled globally. But what is hyperautomation? As per Gartner, the core technologies enabling hyperautomation is the RPA augmented by AI and ML. This collaboration seamlessly strengthens operations while infusing flexibility into the structure.

Automation vs Hyperautomation

Automation has laid the foundation of several businesses across the globe. The process operates on huge infrastructure and is capital intensive in nature. Moreover, the limitations with automation have methodically steered the market towards a new option – Hyperautomation.

The novel concept can be simplified to an extent and termed as the process that automates the automation. Automation infused with smartness is how the process is gaining rapid adoption across industries. This smartness unlocks a lot of potential for the industries associated and converts that to high production volume.

The Hyperautomation Hype

The technology primarily streamlines corporate operations by cutting repetitive tasks and automating those that are manual. This has several positive implications. It enables us to accomplish tasks consistently, accurately, and efficiently. As a consequence, costs are reduced, and the user experience improves significantly.

Some of the hyperautomation benefits include:

1. Deploying Digital Workers: Retraining Robotic Process Automation with infused smartness results in an intelligent Digital Workforce capable of taking over tedious tasks and assisting employees. These Digital Workers are the hyperautomation’s innovators, with the ability to connect to a broad range of business systems, interact with structured and unstructured data, make evaluations to take decisions, and discover routines for automating opportunities.

2. Accelerating Complex Work: Employees can use the capabilities of hyperautomation solutions to automate the countless procedures within their position, allowing them to get more done, quickly, with a limitless resource at their disposal. Professionals may focus on more productive aspects, such as planning and strategy, by reducing manual activities.

3. System Agility: Your organization can move beyond the limited benefits of a particular technology to a level of genuine digital agility and flexibility at scale by combining all forms of automation. The power of integration that hyperautomation brings, allows a company’s askew technology and diverse data systems to interact seamlessly without the need for supervision.

4. Growth of ROI: Companies may analyze the actual ROI generated on a weekly, monthly, and yearly basis using relevant data, depending on the processes automated and departments streamlined, so that time and money get conserved.

The myriad range of possibilities this technology unlocks is vast and is capable enough to transform the operation process of companies entirely while generating surplus revenue.

The Hyper-tech

The technology does not function as a standalone platform but rather a cluster of technologies and tools working simultaneously to automate processes. Few of the hyperautomation tools include:

1. Robotic Process Automation (RPA): RPA is a type of process automation technology that allows your business users to automate a process based on a set of actions that would normally be performed by humans. By intelligently automating repetitive and mundane operations, you can reduce turnaround times, bridge operational silos, and boost ROI significantly. By redirecting issues automatically to the relevant department, you may reduce the need for human intervention and successfully eliminate inefficiencies.

2. Artificial intelligence: Machine learning (ML) which allows the software to find data patterns, natural language processing (NLP), and intelligent optical character recognition (IOCR) are the examples of intelligent processes available in a company’s tech stack. Using AI and ML-based learning capabilities to add intelligence to processes makes workload routing from inbound channels to the relevant departments much efficient. This allows for more informed judgments and gives your associations with internal and external customers an added enrichment.

3. Intelligent Business Management: Instead of focusing on automating a particular activity, this sort of automation encompasses the entire array of tasks needed in a full end-to-end pipeline. The employing of intelligent process automation to integrate the people, bots, and systems enables you to coordinate your end-to-end processes. This enables professionals to work, interact, and participate in business operations in a dynamic and virtual environment without compromising service quality.

4. Advanced analytics: You can optimize your hyperautomation efforts by leveraging tools, such as analytics and process mining to gauge the health of your business processes by selecting the right automation techniques, and making informed decisions. Also, examining data using techniques and tools to deeply evaluate a business’ processes, forecast business outcomes, and generate recommendations around decision-making enables you to realize maximum value and ROI.

Despite the numerous advantages and potential of this technology, a few limitations prevent its widespread adoption in all industries around the globe.

• Due to raw or poor-quality data and a lack of resources with technical skills to address it, many companies do not feel prepared to tackle automation efforts. There are retraining programs available to assist organizations in addressing these needs and developing an approach that is well-suited to achieving their objectives.
• Organizations also frequently miscalculate in determining where to begin, expand, or extend automation technology. A thorough examination is necessary for enterprise-wide optimization of processes, data, and people using hyperautomation technology.
•  Simply adding modern technology into the stack can result in scaling issues in the future. While technologies like AI and RPA can help achieve automation goals in a limited scope, customer experience and speed remain elusive unless they are connected to the wider process backbone.
• Many businesses lack a long-term strategic roadmap for their hyperautomation journey. They concentrate on tactical automation of routine tasks, which is beneficial in the short term but fails to address the overarching goal of hyperautomation.

These challenges pose several questions for anyone new to the concept such as what is the purpose of hyperautomation? Why is hyperautomation necessary? Will it really generate better revenue than the existing process? And many more. These questions could be strategically answered by incorporating a planned shift to hyperautomation. For instance, several organizations use CoE to brainstorm specific areas for hyperautomating. Let us take the use case of a finance firm processing invoices in bulk.

The firm would require a basic bot to collect invoices from multiple sources. These invoices could then be simply be scanned by OCR to understand the details of the invoice. The repetitive task generates the basic template for their hyperautomation structure. They can further utilize NLP engines to understand the preferred patterns for payment. Concluding this, the final bot shall interpret payment terms and handover to CoE.

The CoE can gauge and estimate the benefit loss factor of the optimization and tweak the process accordingly. This will allow professionals to focus their efforts on other productive tasks eliminating redundancy in the workflow pipeline.

In conclusion, the hype around hyperautomation is totally justified. It might not be the technology of the present but it definitely is the technology of the future.