With the innovative technology available to us today, we can do so much more than we were able to just a decade ago. Professional teams are always looking for ways to move faster and accomplish more, and automation has been key to helping them reach their goals. As our adoption of automation has grown over time, new technologies and tools have become available, setting the stage for a whole new era of automation—one that makes its potential in optimizing business processes and improving the lives of employees even greater: hyperautomation.
What Is Hyperautomation?
Hyperautomtion is essentially an amalgamation of other related technologies that further enhance the effectiveness of the solutions they are intended to provide, and it is often considered as an advancement of Robotic Process Automation (RPA). RPA works on automating rule-based human processes, or tasks that are repetitive, with the aim of eliminating the need for human intervention. Hyperautomation, on the other hand, welcomes human actions alongside because, in hyperautomation, we're trying to simulate human intelligence. This is possible with the help of AI (Artificial Intelligence), ML (Machine Learning), analytics, and process mining.
Hyperautomation Example
To better understand what hyperautomation is, it might be helpful to explain it with a metaphor. Consider, if you will, that you're starting a new position at a bank. During your training for customer onboarding, you discover that they have a long and intricate procedure that they require you to carry out for each new customer you sign up. With KYC regulations in place, there's a lot of documentation involved, and the process involves the following steps:
- ID verification
- Screening of the customer
- Customer due diligence
- Providing a credit score
- Creating a report
- Account activation
Sure, this may be a standard operation for banks, but there are certainly a lot of steps in this process that could be automated successfully. With that in mind, how can we hyperautomate this process?
- Pre-trained bots can be deployed to extract details from the documents provided by the new customer. This data can then be fed into the bank system where a risk profile can be built with the help of ML.
- Next, human-in-the-loop and ML models can be used to enable the verification and validation of the information that was fed into the bank system.
- Historical data can also be used to train intelligent bots to improve their accuracy; this action is known as process mining.
Why Should You Consider Hyperautomation?
Although it's a relatively new technology coined by Garter back in 2019, teams across a multitude of different industries have been adopting hyperautomation. So, how can you use it in your organization, and why is it even worth considering at all? Well, to start, it can help you in the following ways:
1. Improved Team Productivity
Introducing hyperautomation to your team's processes can have the intended effect of empowering your employees to do more, bringing about a noticeable increase in productivity. By automating low-value tasks, you'll pave the way for your team to shift their focus to more high-value tasks that require creativity and a more human touch. With this approach, your business can operate more functionally and with greater agility, creating an efficient workspace that is more innovative and driven. Freeing up your employees from more mundane tasks also has a positive effect on overall employee satisfaction too.
2. Seamless Integration
Hyperautomation integrates with technologies across various systems and effectively bridges the gap between legacy and more modern systems. It also has the added benefit of improving process visibility and brings together data in order to generate more actionable insights
3. Increased Accuracy and Speed
Hyperautomation has the capacity to automate processes and perform complex tasks without errors. This naturally decreases error rates and improves speed and performance. Furthermore, the added power of AI, ML, and process mining enables the automation of end-to-end business processes which makes it easier for you to operate with a smaller, more nimble workforce. Adopting hyperautomation also decreases performance burden for both enterprises and employees alike.
4. Higher ROI and Reduced Operational Costs
One of the biggest benefits that hyperautomation can bring from a business perspective is an increase in revenue as a result of cost reduction. With hyperautomation, you eliminate the need for manual, resource-heavy touchpoints and can replace them with more streamlined, automated processes. How much can something like this save you? According to a prediction by Gartner, enterprises can reduce operational costs 30% by 2024 when they leverage hyperautomation.
5. A Boost in Analytics with More Targeted Marketing
This benefit is especially relevant for those in e-commerce and other similar, customer-centric industries. One of the main goals of these businesses is customer satisfaction, and having a more thorough understanding of your customers' wants and needs is paramount. With hyperautomation, analytics get a much needed upgrade that can significantly improve the performance of your company.
Take an online book shop for example—with hyperautomation implemented, AI bots can keep a tab on the number of site visits, customer behavior, purchase history, and so on. With this data, the bots can then make a series of educated predictions and recommendations. This provides the company with a greater insight into their customers so that they can make decisions accordingly.
How Does Hyperautomation Work?
Now that we've broken down what hyperautomation is and the benefits that can come with adopting it, let's take a deeper dive into how it actually works.
In general, the automation cycle follows the process of Analyzing, Improving, Automating, and Monitoring. But as we've already established, hyperautomation incorporates other technologies like AI, ML, RPA, and process mining. How do they work into the basic automation cycle?
Note: Hyperautomation doesn't include a pre-decided set of technologies. It's not a single technology in and of itself, but rather an integration of related technologies that can be incorporated depending on the use-case.
- Analytics: The first step in automating any process is to identify repetitive tasks, and analyzing huge sets of data can help us discover these patterns. Analytics is the examination of content or data using sophisticated tools and techniques to uncover in-depth insights and generate rules, and one of the most popular tools to do this is the Google data studio.
- RPA: Once we have our analysis in place and the rules defined, we can now deploy or create bots to automate these processes. RPA platforms and tools can do this job efficiently, and there are several tools to choose from that offer outstanding features for rule-based automation tasks.
Robotic process automation (or RPA) is a form of business process automation technology based on metaphorical software robots (bots) or on artificial intelligence (AI)/digital workers. It is sometimes referred to as software robotics (not to be confused with robot software)—source: Wikipedia.
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AI and ML: Leveraging RPA involves bots that can only automate rule-based tasks, so we level up our automation by introducing AI and ML. With these technologies in place, bots are able to learn and improvise when exposed to a history of data sets, and AI helps the bots to understand and respond with human-like intelligence. ML is a subset of AI that utilizes learning algorithms that enable them to learn and improve from previous experiences. With ML, the bots are capable of remembering previous data and predicting future actions based on it. Overall, AI and ML help the bots to work and respond in a more human-like capacity.
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End-to-End Automation: Once you feel that your bots are intelligent enough, it's time to apply hyperautomation from end-to-end, automating your business processes from start to dispatch. The entire process will result in a hyperautomated environment, and this would involve various other steps like bot orchestration, cognitive automation, process mining for business processes, and business interactions.
Hyperautomation: The Future of Automation
The fact that hyperautomation has been listed as a top trend by Garter the last three years running does much to suggest that it's going to replace traditional automation as we know it—making our tasks easier and our processes even more efficient.