Current events have sped up the need for businesses to work faster and more efficiently.
Business leaders are assessing their people, processes, and platforms looking for ways to reduce waste and save costs.
Automation is at the top of that list – and hyperautomation is emerging as a priority for businesses that want to remain competitive and relevant.
However, organizations must first assess their automation capability and tailor each enterprise automation initiative to their needs.
In this article, we’ll explore the concepts of hyperautomation, RPA (Robotic Process Automation), their benefits and the role RPA plays in hyperautomation to improve your business process management.
What is hyperautomation and what are its benefits?
Hyperautomation involves optimizing business processes by identifying, assessing, and automating as many tasks as possible through multiple technologies.
Successful hyperautomation fuses tech, data, and human intervention to speed up output, increase business productivity, and free up bandwidth to focus on more critical tasks.
Your hyperautomation journey might look like this:
- Discover which tasks are ripe for automation
- Analyze the components of each complex process
- Design an automated version of each repetitive task
- Deploy task automation using an appropriate hyperautomation tool
- Measure the results of your hyperautomation efforts
- Reassess whether to pivot, scale, or revert the repetitive task to its manual state
Hyperautomation technology confers many benefits to a business. These include:
- Fewer delays: Customers get faster responses and report greater satisfaction
- Decreased operational costs: Spend less time and money on existing processes
- Faster output: Scripts run instantaneously with little to no intervention
- Productive staff: Staff get back more time to spend on important tasks
- Increased efficiency: Your automation journey helps you do more with less
What’s an example of hyperautomation?
Let’s use a customer refund process to illustrate the difference between manual tasks and automation.
In a typical refund process, the steps would be as follows:
- A customer fills in a paper form
- The clerk enters that data into their CRM…
- …then emails a PDF to Finance with the account number, amount, and customer details to effect the refund.
- The Finance officer opens the email and the PDF within…
- …then opens their payments software
- …then copies the account number from the PDF into the payments system
- They repeat that step for the refund amount
The above process involves multiple clicks, lots of time, and different software apps.
Multiplied over several customers in a day, organizations can waste several hours weekly on each mundane, repetitive task.
Hyperautomation calls for a different approach through intelligent process automation.
Instead of asking the customer to fill in forms and re-enter that data into a CRM, an organization can add a refund request form to its website.
As customers submit those refund forms online, the structured data is sent to the CRM automatically.
An RPA bot then reads that data, feeds it into the payments system, calculates outstanding balances, and initiates refunds automatically through EFT.
It then sends a confirmation email to both the Finance department and the customer for their records.
This removes human intervention from the process and frees the finance and customer support teams to focus on more important tasks.
How to implement hyperautomation in your business
Implementing automation technology for its own sake is a great way to burn time and money with little to show for it.
Before undertaking any hyperautomation journey, organizations must first determine their desired end-states. This could be:
- Increased customer satisfaction
- Higher customer retention
- More product usage
- Lower processing costs
- Faster time to market
Once you understand the end goal, you can work backward to achieve the desired results.
The next steps then involve uncovering the hidden automation champions within your organization and using the right tools and approaches.
Uncover the hidden automation champions within your organization
More often than not, there are people within your organization who are already experimenting with digital process automation in some form.
These people might work in the finance, marketing, sales, logistics, production, or IT departments.
For example, the legal department might be using Optical Character Recognition (OCR) as part of the intelligent document processing of contracts.
The finance department might be using machine learning or artificial intelligence to uncover financial fraud.
Meanwhile, the development team might be incorporating Natural Language Processing in their app to process voice commands faster.
Each automated process above uses an intelligent automation tool to streamline an existing business process.
Any hyperautomation initiative should seek to:
- Uncover these hidden champions
- Understand their use-cases and historical results through advanced analytics
- Incorporate their current methods into your hyperautomation strategy at scale
Use the right tools and approaches
Hyperautomation isn’t about choosing one technology over another, but about using multiple technologies at the same time for maximum results.
Savvy businesses execute a hyperautomation strategy using different tools, technologies, and platforms such as:
- Machine learning
- Artificial intelligence
- Event-driven architecture
- Robotic process automation (RPA)
- Intelligent business process management
Data powers each of the above methods. To implement hyperautomation successfully, you need clean, consistent, and accurate data to feed your models and scripts and generate advanced analytics.
Good data helps you track the right metrics, determine the success of your hyperautomation journey, and calculate your return on investment.
Your hyperautomation solutions also need to be interoperable to preserve business continuity and help you expand.
And while each method is powerful on its own, combining one or more hyperautomation methods results in stronger business processes, fewer errors, and happier employees and customers.
We’re going to focus specifically on robotic process automation in this article, as it’s one of the most cost-effective ways to automate business processes today.
What is Robotic Process Automation (RPA) and how does it work?
Robotic process automation involves creating software scripts to automate routine, repetitive, and predictable tasks. These scripts are called ‘robots,’ or ‘bots’ for short.
The bots overlay on one or more software applications and mimic keystrokes to get work done.
Some RPA bots need to be coded, while others are no-code RPA solutions that don’t require coding knowledge.
RPA robots can help you to:
- Reconcile data such as billing information to internal accounts
- Open emails and attachments and read the data within
- Follow if-then rules to process different types of input
- Collect statistics from systems and generate reports
- Move files and folders from one location to another
- Fill out forms for internal and external submission
- Recognize and extract data from documents
- Make calculations based on given numbers
- Scrape data from specific databases
- Copy and paste data between files
What are the benefits of robotic process automation?
RPA helps businesses in several ways:
- Data: RPA bots can scrape data and provide analytics for various applications
- Customer service: RPA bots can handle inquiries without involving human staff
- Cost reduction: Automating mundane tasks reduces the need for extra hires
- Flexibility: You can configure and amend RPA bots to suit your needs
- Bandwidth: Automation frees up your staff to focus on bigger tasks
- Scalability: With automation, you can scale your business faster
- Accuracy: Automate processes to reduce human error and variability
- Consistency: RPA robots deliver predictable results every time
- Speed: RPA means you can work and deliver results faster
RPA by itself doesn’t solve all business challenges – it merely speeds them up. This means that a poorly optimized process only gets executed faster through RPA.
It’s thus important for businesses to thoroughly assess their processes and automation capability before implementing RPA.
RPA platforms are not all created equal, either. Between coded, non-coded, self-learning, and recorded bots, you have several RPA options to pick from.
Add Hyperautomation to your growth strategy today
Hyperautomation is about using multiple tech solutions to streamline your business processes.
Robotic process automation is one of those solutions – and it’s a cost-effective start to business automation. However, RPA is simply one important component of the overall hyperautomation strategy. At Thrive Automation, we can assist your business with the entire development and implementation of hyperautomation.
Contact us today for a free, no-commitment consultation to understand how Thrive Automation can help your business drive change through digital transformation.
