How to Achieve Digital Transformation Goals with Hyperautomation
How to Achieve Digital Transformation Goals with Hyperautomation
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.
What is the Hyperautomation framework, and how can it help you achieve digital transformation?
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.
The limits of RPA for digitalization implementation
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.
This is where hyper automation comes in. The term coined by Gartner is more than a combination of two fancy words. They refer to the term as “hyperautomation” (one word) as opposed to “hyper automation.”
What is hyperautomation
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.
Why every founder and business leader must understand hyperautomation
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.
Getting started with hyperautomation. How to implement a hyperautomation strategy
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.
Choose a single platform
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.
Use hyperautomation in your marketing department
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.
Identify your business goal and let it guide you.
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.
- Gather insights on the workflows and processes involved.
- Identify the data and other inputs that will be needed to accomplish the processes.
- To do this, you need to identify automation opportunities in your business that could be beneficial.
- Remember to set your KPIs as you are setting your goals.
Which automation platform and technologies will serve your needs?
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.
- Use the tools that are relevant to you.
- Do you need low-code or no-code instances of hyperautomation?
These are questions you must consider:
- Learn more about these tools and which ones are available to you and your budget.
- Make sure your chosen tools are sustainable.
- Once you’ve researched and selected the right automation platform and tools that suit your business needs, make sure it’s scalable and sustainable over time.
- Find out hyperautomation use cases where your industry competitors are already leveraging the tech.
The benefits of hyperautomation
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.
- Imagine seeing business value creation as it happens and leveraging the intelligence and hyperautomation technologies to respond and identify new opportunities rapidly.
- Or seeing business value gets attacked by unprecedented conditions in a pandemic.
Boost productivity and the higher-level functionality and workflow streamlining that hyperautomation offers your organization.
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.
BPA, RPA, and Hyperautomation
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.
BPA solutions can be applied using BPA software tools
- These tools can execute repetitive business activities where human force can be substituted.
- As was mentioned with hyperautomation, BPA tools bring the possibility of creating a digital copy of an entire company.
- Companies apply this solution to cut costs, increase performance, streamline business processes for simplicity, and achieve digital transformation.
Difference between RPA and BPA
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.
The primary distinction between the two is that BPA software typically builds automation that is wholly integrated into the software being automated.
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.
BPA, on the other hand, has the potential to save businesses a lot of money in the long run.
Although the initial cost of the investment may seem extreme at first, the process pays itself through increased work efficiency.
Business functions that will benefit directly from hyperautomation
- Accounts payable
- Order management processes
- Customer service operations
- Abandoned cart automation
- Employee onboarding
- Document processing such as document approvals etc.
- Marketing
- Payroll
- Highly routine tasks like creating invoices
- Purchase order processing
Industries that can use hyperautomation
- Healthcare
- Supply chain
- Banking and finance
- Retail
Challenges of hyperautomation.
The challenges often sighted by IT leaders in their hyperautomation journey are as follows.
- Finding ways to measure success.
- Calculating the return on your investment.
- Selecting the right hyperautomation technologies and infrastructure.
- Getting buy-in from your company’s stakeholders and employees.
- Lack of previous business process information leads to complex and slow implementation.
- It may sacrifice customer experience and satisfaction during implementation.
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.
Image Credit: by RODNAE Productions; Pexels; Thank you!
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