What Is Hyper-Automation? How Does It Help?
RPA and AI will create new job opportunities.
Preamble
In the last quarter of 2019, I did a course in health informatics. It was an onsite 8-week course somewhere in Toronto. It was an introductory course and basically, if you liked it, you would then pursue a degree in it at a technical college or university and do internships.
One module taught was robotic process automation. I did not quite grasp it. However, I liked the overall idea; get robots to do repetitive tasks for you while you free up your time and brain to do complex tasks.
Hyper-automation is part of the Robotic Process Automation (RPA) Technology meta trend. According to Gartner, 80% of finance executives have made plans to implement RPA within their organization. An example of hyper-automation is the usage of Optical Character Recognition (OCR) to understand documents.
Defining hyper-automation
Hyper-automation is integrating automation and machine learning with people and processes to enable faster, more accurate, and more efficient outcomes. This is the goal of digital transformation — to create a business that is both fast and efficient, with the ability to scale and deliver great customer experiences. It’s also one of the primary challenges for many businesses as they attempt to bring automation to their operations.
In Business
End-users expect their businesses to be as digitally nimble as their fast-paced competitors. They expect operations to be as lean as their own digital operations. To achieve this, businesses are investing in digital transformation, and hyper-automation is one of the key enablers of this transformation.
Hyper-automation is the use of automated tools and processes to make work faster, more efficient, and more accurate. It involves using the power of technology in tandem with human workers to achieve greater efficiency and productivity. There are several use cases for hyper-automation, including reducing costs, increasing employee output, or speeding up processes.
Why is Hyper-automation Important?
Digital transformation is a key driver of growth for most businesses. However, many organizations find they are not yet at the pace they need to be. This is because transformation is capital intensive and often results in high costs.
Hyper-automation is one of the most cost-effective means of achieving transformation. This is because it leverages the strength of digital technology with the strength of human expertise to improve outcomes and drive greater value for all stakeholders. Hyper-automation helps drive digital transformation by reducing costs through better planning, better decision-making, better execution, and better outcomes.
Steps to Hyper-automation
The crucial steps to hyper-automation are:
Discovery — In the discovery phase, you identify your workflow and standardize processes. This allows you to identify areas that could benefit from automation, enabling you to prioritize these areas and identify suitable tools.
Planning — In the planning phase, you create a plan that maps out the workflow, including the processes that will be automated. You also identify tasks that should be handled manually to ensure that tasks that could benefit from automation are not done manually.
Implementation — In the implementation phase, you implement the automated workflow and processes. This includes testing the workflow, fine-tuning the processes, and setting up triggers. These automatically trigger the workflow.
Operation — In the operation phase, you monitor the workflow to see how it performs, identify any issues and fix them. You also look at the business outcomes to see how they’re changing and evaluate how these could be improved.
Benefits of Hyper-automation
There are several benefits that come from implementing hyper-automation. These include:
Better planning — Hyper-automation helps streamline business processes by standardizing the workflow. This allows everyone to work in the same way, making it easier to plan and allocate resources for work.
It also leads to a better understanding of the customer journey across the business — giving you an in-depth understanding of your customers, which enables you to provide them with better experiences.
Better decision-making — Hyper-automation can help improve decision-making by removing ambiguity around what processes cost and where the savings can be made. This can give decision-makers the confidence they need to make the right decisions and commit resources.
Better execution — Hyper-automation can help reduce the time to complete work. This can have a large impact on the bottom line, as it can help to eliminate the difference between revenue and cost.
Better outcomes — Hyper-automation can help to improve business outcomes, such as customer satisfaction, retention, loyalty, and overall revenue growth. It can also help to increase operational efficiency and reduce costs, which can have a significant impact on the bottom line.
Key takeaways
Planning — Hyper-automation is only effective as long as it’s managed properly. The success of the implementation depends on the level of understanding of the business and the level of commitment from the stakeholders.
Implementation — Hyper-automation is a key enabler of transformation. It uses automation and machine learning to combine the strengths of technology with the strengths of people to create a solution that is scalable, agile, and adaptive.
Operation — Hyper-automation is not a silver bullet for transformation. It is a key enabler that can help businesses drive transformation, but it cannot be the sole solution. Transformation requires a combination of solutions, including technology, process, and organization.
RPA and AI will create new job opportunities. They already are. That is not to say that the transition should not be managed carefully…-Vargha Moayed