Use hyperautomation for more sophisticated automation

Coined by Gartner in 2019, the term 'hyperautomation' refers to the next level of automation that goes beyond automating individual processes. Forrester, however, calls it “digital process automation,” while IDC calls it “intelligent process automation.” Regardless of the term used, hyperautomation uses a combination of next-level technologies such as robotic process automation (RPA), artificial intelligence, machine learning, advanced analytics, business process management (BPM), APIs, and more, working together harmoniously to automate complex business processes.

Hyperautomation goes beyond automation

At the core of hyperautomation is RPA, enriched by AI and ML, which even makes it possible to automate the processes that were until now considered impossible to automate. A good example being undocumented processes driven by unstructured data. Besides the tools and technologies involved, hyperautomation also encompasses the steps in automation namely: discover, analyze, design, automate, measure, monitor, reassess. Therefore, simply put, hyperautomation is a hybrid tool that enhances human capabilities to help complete processes faster and with greater efficiency.

Hyperautomation is not just automation. This is because it increases the sophistication level of automation by simplifying processes and enables decision making. Another marked difference between automation and hyperautomation is the additional robotic ‘intelligence’ that makes the processes smarter. This 'intelligence' comes from artificial intelligence and its allied fields of study such as natural language processing (NLP), optical character recognition (OCR), and machine learning (ML). These combined together enable bots to understand human speech, convert images to text, as well as identify patterns from given data sets.

Benefits

One of the biggest benefits of hyperautomation is that it accelerates the business transformation by automating complex processes that rely on information from people. When RPA is supplemented with intelligence, it enables automating the repetitive tasks to enhance productivity through what is known as digital workers. These digital workers work together with the humans for enhanced efficiency and productivity. This is made possible by the interoperability between disparate business applications, data—both structured and unstructured—and analytics that enable discovering new processes for automation, and in turn improve the scalability in operations.

Since hyperautomation is an amalgam of technologies, businesses are not stuck with a single technology and get the required agility in their business operations. They can integrate multiple technologies across the systems—legacy systems included—which makes for truly integrated processes that help drive seamless communication.

Another unique benefit of the technology is the creation of an organization's digital twin, which allows visualization of the interaction between processes, functions and KPIs. This intelligence allows the organization to hasten value creation by seizing new opportunities or improving upon the existing ones.

Hyperautomation enables organizations to leverage analytical tools and capabilities to optimize resources, which help reduce costs and increase revenue.

The article has been written by Neetu Katyal, Content and Marketing Consultant

She can be reached on LinkedIn.