Any digital transformation needs automation, but businesses have long been aware of the limitations of business automation RPA tools: the inability to use unstructured data to automate corporate processes is foremost among them. This issue led to the creation of hyperautomation, which strives to handle even the most challenging business processes. It enables businesses to automate formerly manual operations, boosting employee productivity and retention while also enhancing customer satisfaction.  

The global market for technologies that will drive the next wave in the IT space - hyperautomation is projected to be nearly $600 billion in 2022, as per the Garner report. 

Hyperautomation and automation are a bit relatable. Both of these provide businesses with exactly what they want: technology that produces more efficient, error-free, and fiscally responsible processes. Hyperautomation, however, goes a step further than automation. It brings with it more layers of cutting-edge technology that foster end-to-end automated processes, optimising workflows and allowing teams to do away with repetitive and time-consuming tasks. 

Benefits  

Put simply, hyperautomation is the rapid automation of workplace processes by applying several technologies, including business process management, machine learning, natural language processing, robotic process automation, and more. Hyperautomation, as opposed to conventional automation, concentrates on the company as a whole. Instead of focusing on a single area of an organisation, the change occurs concurrently across different segments. 

First, hyperautomation provides a quick way to engage everyone in transforming the business, supported by automating more and more complex tasks that rely on knowledge input from people. Second, the integration of data across business lines, systems, and applications is made simpler by hyperautomation, which also assures faster and more effective data access. Linking data from hiring, onboarding, and salary payments, for instance, can help an HR department get a complete picture of how the entire department operates. 

Third, with hyperautomation, employees are able to spend more time on operations that bring value instead of manually entering data, printing, and scanning customer information. To promote a better overall employee experience, for instance, it stops manual email communication between HR and IT departments. To enable end-to-end automation procedures like procure-to-pay, hyperautomation digitises activities across departments. Moreover, the process makes it possible for organisations to see what has been asked, who has been allocated which task, who made a mistake, and how to fix it in cross-enterprise projects. 

Steps to start the journey 

Numerous sectors, including banking, insurance, healthcare, and life science, can benefit from hyperautomation. The steps to start the journey require an understanding of the current infrastructure, and one has to,  

• Obtain information on the environment, processes, and workflows. Process mining can be used to investigate how current processes function, spot gaps, delays, and bottlenecks, and spot potential for digital process automation. 
• Determine the structured and unstructured data and additional inputs required to carry out the defined processes. 
• Predict outcomes of the processes and return on investment (RoI). 
• Select the automation platform and technologies that will best meet the goals of an organisation by utilising existing tools and algorithms. Design purpose-built bots that will carry out the automated tasks; this may involve combining optical character recognition (OCR), RPA, AI, and machine learning with other strategic technological tools. 
• Make the automation process simpler by including low-code or no-code technologies for better efficiency and speedier deployment. 

Many businesses may not feel prepared to take on automation projects because of inaccurate or poor-quality data and a lack of resources with the necessary technical expertise to deploy and solve issues. However, there are retraining programmes that can assist firms in addressing these demands and creating a strategy that will help them reach their objectives. Despite all the odds, hyperautomation will turn the new favourite for tech firms to fasten their digitisation processes.