Are you an IT leader feeling stuck in your digital transformation goals? You are not alone. One of the most challenging questions in digital transformation is how to go from vision to execution. You may not be as far behind as you think. You simply need to adopt a better approach. One approach that will make the whole process easier for you to achieve your digital transformation goals is called hyperautomation.
Let’s work through what this framework is and how it can help you achieve your digital transformation goals. However, before diving into the ins and outs of hyperautomation, you must understand where it comes from.
Companies in the past, have opted to use the RPA approach to meet their digital transformation goals. Technological advancements over the last decade have seen robotic process automation (RPA) become mainstream. RPA provides multiple benefits to businesses across various sectors. RPA is a flexible tool that can automate repetitive tasks with minimized human intervention.
As of June 2021, 20% of major organizations have adopted RPA. This is rising from the 13% adoption rate in 2020. According to Gartner, around 80% of finance leaders have implemented or plan to implement RPA.
RPA technology has been instrumental to the digitalization of companies and has subsequently led to growth in terms of ROI. Although, some companies have struggled to implement RPA and leverage its benefits. There have been complaints that RPA is not scalable, as only 3% of organizations have scaled their digital workforce using this technology.
Some companies have highlighted issues such as lack of resources as a significant challenge facing RPA adoption. Additionally, there are also issues of staff resistance, process fragmentation, and lack of clear vision. This is in addition to the cost of implementation and potential fear of disruption.
Gartner has identified hyperautomation as one of the top strategic tech trends to look out for. Hyperautomation in its most basic form is the smooth automation of business processes using advanced technologies. It is an emerging approach to automation
So naturally, RPA is one of the main ingredients of hyperautomation. However, it goes further than RPA. Hyperautomation is not a process but a framework that combines advanced technology to strategically automate as much of a business as possible.
To put it simply, it is the desire to scale RPA that has led to the concept of hyperautomation. In addition to RPA, other tools necessary in developing a hyperautomation strategy include no code low code tools and applications, integration platform as a service (IPAAS), AI, machine learning, natural language processing, etc.
The main goal of hyperautomation is to improve AI-driven decision-making through the combination of RPA, AI, machine language, and data science. This often also leads to the creation of a digital twin of the organization, which in turn optimizes business processes.
Gartner’s recent survey indicates that 85% of participants will either increase or sustain their organization’s hyperautomation investments over time, and over 56% already have four or more hyperautomation initiatives. Additionally, they mention that hyperautomation is rapidly shifting from an option to a condition of survival, siting outdated work processes as the No. 1 workforce issue.”
Secondly, the pandemic played a massive role in disrupting business processes across multiple companies. Considering hyperautomation literally creates a digital copy of your systems, it is no surprise that digital transformation and automation initiatives have rapidly grown since 2020.
For companies that managed to pivot, they ripped the benefits. Hyperautomation eases the burden that repetitive processes incur on an organization and its resources. The transformation that hyperautomation affords an organization enables it to operate in a more streamlined manner, often resulting in reduced costs.
Are you thinking of digitizing your business by implementing hyperautomation in your company? First, you need to make a plan for optimization with a clear goal in mind. What is going to be the focus of your hyperautomation strategy? Subsequently, you need to carefully pick the right tools to help you reach that goal.
Companies looking to implement hyperautomation solutions can choose to use a single platform. This may be an integrated solution sourced from a single vendor or a combination of multiple solutions that can be integrated by using APIs or web services. As a result, there is a myriad of hyperautomation technology out there.
One area of a company where hyperautomation can dramatically improve is in the marketing department. Marketing involves a lot of tasks ranging from following up with prospects to sending out emails to creating content, etc. With the concept of hyperautomation in mind, a marketer can leverage the power of business process automation (BPA) to digitize some of these processes and focus their attention on other more critical tasks.
What are you hoping to achieve with automation? The purpose of hyperautomation is to improve your business processes and consequently speed up and better your operations.
With your goals and measurement metrics, determine the automation platform and technologies that best serve your needs. Hyperautomation technologies have given rise to many tools to facilitate the process.
These are questions you must consider:
Combining RPA and AI technologies offers the power and flexibility to automate where automation was never possible before.
Hyperautomation provides a high-speed route to engaging everyone in transforming the business, supported by automating more complex work that relies on knowledge input from people.
Combining AI data science, artificial intelligence, and RPA creates an intelligent digital workforce that can take on repetitive tasks to augment employee performance. These digital workers are the change agents of hyperautomation, able to connect to various business applications.
The creation of a digital twin of the organization (DTO). This is important because a digital twin makes the previously unseen interactions between processes, functions, and key performance indicators visible.
It enables employees to work smart and avoid repetitive tasks and offers your business a range of tools to drive its presence well into the future.
This has several key benefits. First, it allows organizations to complete tasks with consistency, accuracy, and speed. This, in turn, reduces costs and generally improves the customer experience.
Business processes automation (BPA) leverages the use of AI and machine language to help companies automate repetitive tasks and scale complex processes. From this explanation of what BPA is, you can see how this is a hyperautomation process that does something similar to RPA but takes it a step further.
Although BPA and RPA are similar in their goals to foster digital transformation and optimize business processes for improved productivity, they are also very different.
While RPA usually follows how humans act to complete tasks, often using screen scraping and machine vision to manipulate data and software.
BPA has a higher tendency to make automation more seamless as technology becomes more sophisticated. This is because modern business has become extremely (much more) complex.
Businesses often have to manage data with a significant number of clients. And this is in addition to information related to their processes. There has never been a better need to understand the market and clientele today. RPA is incapable of evolving enough to handle such complexities.
Although the initial cost of the investment may seem extreme at first, the process pays itself through increased work efficiency.
The challenges often sighted by IT leaders in their hyperautomation journey are as follows.
Recognize that any new approach to business processes is bound to present challenges, and hyperautomation is no exception. But unfortunately, many companies do not feel ready to tackle automation efforts.
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