Automating business processes was already witnessing increasing proliferation a long time before the COVID-19 pandemic reared its ugly head. However, the quick shift to remote working combined with COVID-19’s economic impacts has put automation into top gear. Enterprises are looking to enhance efficiency and minimize costs by minimizing staff time spend on tedious and repetitive activities. 

Robotic Process Automation (RPA) Platforms have conventionally driven this revolution, but with the increased demand for a plethora of use cases, several organizations are discovering that RPA utilities are inadequate. And they wish to add additional intelligence to automation. This is where the concept of hyperautomation becomes relevant. 

Hyperautomation 101 

Hyperautomation, forecasted by Gartner to be a leading strategic technological trend in 2021, is the concept that anything that can be automated within an enterprise should be. The analyst firm observes that its “driven by enterprises possessing legacy business procedures that are not streamlined, developing immensely costly and extensive problems for organizations. 

As Gartner observed, “Hyperautomation brings a group of technologies such as document ingestion, process mining, business process management, decision modelling, RPA with iPaaS, and AI-driven intelligence.” This theory has varying names: Gartner calls it hyperautomation. Forrester refers to it as Digital Process Automation (DPA) and IDC refers to it as Intelligent Process Automation (IPA).  

By comparison, RPA is a variant of business process automation: hardware or software systems go about automating monotonous, tedious, simplistic activities, and these frameworks function across several applications – just like staff members do. One of the hurdles with RPA, particularly in its preliminary days, is that it did not scale well. A 2019 report by Gartner discovered only 13% of companies were able to scale their preliminary RPA initiatives. 

Currently organizations have shifted their focus to hyperautomation, which is not just an extension of RPA, which was only the starting step in this direction. 

The term “technical data” details the state several enterprises ultimately find themselves in. It has its origins in legacy systems, suboptimal procedures and bottlenecks, unstructured data dwelling in silos, lacking centralized data architecture and security loopholes. Business processes are typically operational leveraging a patchwork of technologies and do not feature optimization, consistency, or coherency. In totality, they impact operational capacities and dampen value proposition to clients.  

Whereas a majority of tools are developed to find solutions to one issue or achieve one objective, hyperautomation brings together several technologies to assist organizations produce strategic benefits on the basis of the underlying operational setting. It concentrates on adding progressive intelligence throughout workflows over conventional automation solutions. Every aspect of the technology’s components is developed to improve an enterprise’s capability to smartly go about automating process. 

The growth and business advantages of hyperautomation 

Gartner analysts predict the market for software that facilitates hyperautomation will attain nearly 860$ billion in a mere four years from now. This is a quickly expanding market, and it’s not shocking provided that hyperautomation empowers enterprises to accomplish operational excellence and make sure resilience is upheld across business processes. Which organization would not desire this? 

Hyperautomation provides massive potential for various critical business advantages, which includes increased ROI, in addition to: 

Connecting distributed systems: Hyperautomation facilitates distributed enterprise software and data storage systems to interact seamlessly with one another so as to furnish in-depth analytics into process bottlenecks and to fuel efficiencies. 

Add decision-making to automation: Leverage artificial intelligence to automate the procedure of decision-making and take live data-based decisions just like any human agent would do. 

Facilitating your labour force: Reducing time-intensive, tedious activities and capturing staff knowledge to execute such activities will facilitate them to concentrate more on value adding activities. 

Digital agility: Hyperautomation compels all technological components to operate in tandem with business requirements and necessities. And this will assist enterprises accomplish a state of true digital agility and flexibility. 

Collaboration: Process operators can go about intuitively automating cross-functional activities, which includes collaboration amongst several stakeholders. It minimizes cycle time and enhances productivity.  

Transformation of processes 

Provided the breadth and scope of hyperautomation, it puts forth the prospect of revolutionizing enterprise procedures. Regardless of prevalent thought, it’s not merely an extension of robotic process automation (RPA), although RPA definitely is something in the right direction. A combo of technologies that encompass hyperautomation can be leveraged in conjunction with business process management to deliver revolutionary innovation in business document processing workflows.  

It is critical to observe hyperautomation as a stage-by-stage facilitator and not necessarily a big bang project that immediately provides a solution to all issues within a business. It takes time, but it is doable to surpass technical debt with the suite of functionalities conferred upon enterprises by hyperautomation, bringing with it massive prospect for revolution. This is what makes it a leading strategic technological trend.