Hyperautomation is a business-driven, disciplined methodology to swiftly discover, validate, and automate as many business and IT activities as feasible
Many people’s natural reaction to workplace automation is to shun it out of concern that it would eliminate their employment. However, it appears that this is not the case. The idea that automation will replace valuable jobs is flawed.
In contrast, automation has been shown to benefit humans by assisting them in learning and developing new abilities that are more beneficial to their businesses and personal careers. The goal is to free up businesspeople from manual, mundane tasks so they can concentrate on more fulfilling and creative work that will help organizations succeed and expand, not to replace existing positions. Automation is designed to perform laborious and repetitive jobs, whereas humans are designed to perform inventive work. This is how automation will be used now and in the future.
Having said that, automation technology actually hasn’t reached its full potential. It still isn’t available to the masses, but rather adopted and implemented at the top end of enterprises. Once automation technologies become mainstream enough to have a profound influence on small and medium-sized businesses (SMBs), that’s when we will see the proliferation of hyperautomation – the idea that anything that can be automated should be automated. Let me explain this concept a bit further.
The role of hyperautomation in solving critical business problems
Companies are turning to hyperautomation to run more effectively and accelerate digital transformation, whether they begin with minor tactical efforts or undertake CEO-driven strategic projects. “Hyperautomation” is a phrase that research firm Gartner created. According to Gartner, hyperautomation is a business-driven, disciplined methodology that businesses utilize to swiftly discover, validate, and automate as many business and IT activities as feasible. This means that in order to achieve hyperautomation, organizations must integrate the applications and systems they employ to provide their customers with products, services, and solutions.
The businesses of tomorrow in the technology sector will be the ones that do just that. But to get there, companies must first integrate the numerous platforms and systems they use to supply their goods and services if they want to automate procedures across all of their operations. This entails offering an integration platform as a service (iPaaS) to build integrations, application programming interface management (APIM) to expose the integrations as APIs, and a low-code development tool that enables users to build mobile and web applications using APIs and integration built using iPaaS and APIM together on one platform.
Along with this, companies should adopt bot technology to move toward hyperautomation. For instance, user interfaces (UIs) that users currently use to engage with apps will transform to chatbots or voice bots, effectively outlining the business requirement so that the proper application may be built. Bots may be leveraging integration, APIs, or high-end natural language processing (NLP) based services in the background.
Adopting hyperautomation is essential for staying ahead of these trends. There are a few ways businesses may benefit from hyperautomation as well as implications for consumer, internal, and business users.
See also: Hyperautomation is on the Two-Year Horizon
The principal uses of hyperautomation
When companies are looking to start their journey towards hyperautomation, they must first begin with the digitization process. This includes making sure that their handwritten records and analog data sources are converted to digital files. This is key to future growth, especially as many companies have shifted their operations to the cloud. A company’s capacity to shift quickly and adapt to a changing business environment is significantly improved by digitizing procedures.
From there, they can use hyperautomation throughout the business in a number of ways that provide them an edge. Let’s take a look at some of the use cases for workers across various industries.
The benefits for technicians
For instance, a tech business may need to launch several distinct programs if it has technicians working in the field who are monitoring the inventory management system and looking at things like invoices and appointment calendars. These apps might be challenging and complicated, but IT staff must learn and comprehend them.
Hyperautomation can eliminate the requirement for that. In these circumstances, a chatbot can aid in making judgments in the present state. Users may be able to communicate with several different apps using a single method, thanks to chatbots. The chatbot will offer the appropriate response once they ask a question. Users will ultimately engage with complicated UIs far less frequently—possibly even not at all—as they become accustomed to conversing with chatbots. This can be a game changer for technicians’ efficiency and productivity.
Therefore, technicians in this situation may inquire, “Do I have inventory for this part?” “When is the next available time period for me to visit this city?” Instead of requiring you to spend time manually checking by visiting several program UIs, it can provide an automated response to these queries. This makes it possible for them to accomplish their goals without having to comprehend the various programs’ sophisticated UIs and their range of available options.
The benefits for healthcare providers
When it comes to the medical field, physicians and pharmacists can also find hyperautomation very beneficial. Typically for prescriptions written by hand, doctors must either type them into a computer or give them to the patient directly, who then takes them to the pharmacy.
Doctors can take the handwritten letter and use hyperautomation to create a prescription for the pharmacy. From there, pharmacists can share it with the customer and instantly view it through the digital system. This is immensely valuable because it makes the prescription filling process seamless for teams and takes the stress away from having to keep us with handwritten files.
The benefits for sales teams
Additionally, let’s think about how hyperautomation helps internal users like salespeople. They might need to know what their attainment is in the past five years. They will probably need to get in touch with an IT professional who is experienced with customer relationship management systems and who can develop a chart that shows this information in order to learn this.
They may, however, instantaneously retrieve the previous five years’ worth of quota achievement if they go on an arc hyperautomation path by connecting their systems with iPaaS and making them accessible via a conversation AI software, such as Bot. The integrations and artificial intelligence used in this procedure bring the user’s replies back from internal systems.
Hyperautomation may be used in a wide range of industries and use cases. In fact, Gartner predicts that organizations combining hyperautomation technologies with redesigned processes will lower their operational costs 30 percent by 2024. The secret is to comprehend how to use it for your own business and be able to benefit both your enterprise and clients.
How SMBs can take advantage of hyperautomation
Hyperautomation is not just advantageous to larger businesses. It benefits SMBs in a wide range of ways as well. That said, adoption has typically been modest among SMBs up until this point. These businesses want to leverage sophisticated technologies, including iPaaS, APIM, low code application platform (LCAP), intelligent document processing (IDP), robotic process automation (RPA), and conversational AI, to promote hyperautomation, but doing so may be quite expensive due to license, staff training, and implementation expenses on top of already existing solutions.
To advance the business, they also want the appropriate set of technologies for hyperautomation that can collaborate and communicate with one another. SMBs require IT experts who are familiar with a variety of technologies from a variety of suppliers to do this, but most of these businesses lack easy access to such professionals.
Luckily, the emergence of newer, simpler, single unified platforms, which have all these characteristics to enable SMBs to start implementing the hyperautomation journey with a very modest investment, is the key to making hyperautomation a reality for SMBs. This will take the burden away from SMBs who may be apprehensive about hyperautomation due to costs and needs.
In fact, SMBs stand to gain the most from hyperautomation. The majority require more automated operations but lack the personnel to teach their staff about the numerous user applications, UIs, procedures, and tools. These businesses urge their workers to concentrate on creative and significant work for their business. It might take time to manually look for a certain part in the enterprise resource planning (ERP) system or schedule a call on a technician’s calendar.
Make strides toward hyperautomation no matter your company size
Utilizing hyperautomation, businesses may improve their operations in a number of ways. There are several actions that can assist enterprises to accelerate their journey toward hyperautomation.
When it comes to starting with automation, businesses should start small and then build more advanced projects gradually. Start by automating a simple task. From there, find the method that is crucial but not complicated. Find out more about the procedure and get insight. For example, look at how current processes function, where there are gaps, delays, and bottlenecks, and what potential there is for digital process automation. To achieve this, you can employ a process mining tool.
Once organizations have done this, they should determine the software applications, structured and unstructured data, and any additional inputs required to carry out the processes. It is important that they choose the automation platform and technologies that best match the needs of the business. This will enable them to automate business and technological operations and processes—often even the automated—to increase productivity and cut costs.
Finally, education is crucial. Continue teaching the team about the platform as soon as the hyperautomation infrastructure is set up and as you automate the entire process.
The reality is that the era of hyperautomation is here. By using these tools and insights, organizations of any size can make the move toward hyperautomation and future-proof their business.
