What is Hyperautomation?

As previously mentioned, automation has been conducted in siloes that are now starting to converge, and hyperautomation is necessary to keep up with the pace and accelerate digital transformation. Business users want to build and run their own automation while IT needs the ability to monitor and maintain all their organization’s automation in a centralized view. Plus, with a plethora of data involved in today’s modern business, organizations need a more sophisticated approach to extract, move, and manipulate everything coming in and out.  

Hyperautomation is important—and critical—because it provides a strategy that ensures any processes can be automated, by choosing the right tools and the right approach to avoid siloes, bloat and shadow IT. The right strategy will give IT the visibility and management they require, while giving business users the ability to automate the processes they know best. According to Gartner, organizations that embrace hyperautomation technology are seeing 30% lower operational costs. With hyperautomation, organizations can reduce costs, scale, be more agile—and competitive—all while delivering a better experience for employees and customers alike.

Elements of Hyperautomation Technology 

Wondering what pieces of technology make up a hyperautomation strategy? Hyperautomation is about using the right mix of automation tools for your needs, or a best of breed approach, and doesn’t mean you need every tool out there. A thoughtful combination of the following solutions can help you achieve a successful hyperautomation strategy: 

• Robotic Process Automation (RPA) 
  Low code, front-end automation best suited for repetitive, rule-based work to augment human productivity. 

• Workload Automation (WLA) 
  Code driven, back-end automation for centralized orchestration of scripts, batch processes, cross-platform workflows, and more. 

• Machine Learning (ML) 
  Computer algorithms that automatically learn and improve processes through experience and data.  

• Artificial Intelligence (AI) 
  Robots that can perform tasks with intelligence and discernment where human involvement was once needed. 

• Intelligent Document Processing (IDP) 
  ML and AI join with process automation to make both semi-structured and unstructured data more useable across your enterprise. 

• Intelligent Business Process Management Software (iBPMS) 
  Solutions that combine process management tools for added functionality and capabilities 

• Secure File Transfer 
  Securely automate and manage data transfers no matter where the data resides or where it is deployed. 

• Secure Forms
  Electronic fillable forms that automatically and securely capture data directly into your applications and systems and help you further digitally transform document processes.

• Automated Process Discovery and Process Mining
  The automated use of data mining and process management to discover, capture and improve business processes by analyzing logs, usage data, and more to optimize processes.

Examples of Hyperautomation 

Hyperautomation is especially great for data-driven processes—and modern business is all about data. Just think of a current process in your organization that heavily involves data and the many steps, often manual, and time that is taken to complete it. 

“Hyperautomation can be used in a lot of different businesses. The most explosive growth is being seen in the SMB to mid-market sector where traditionally these types of solutions weren’t available at a reasonable cost to pursue them. However, now they’re able to save a significant number of hours in manual work in most parts of their business through hyperautomation,” Jon Spencer, automation expert at Fortra, says.  Here are a few examples to illustrate what’s possible with hyperautomation: 

A company has a large number of daily invoices to process from various suppliers. They receive these invoices via email, but the data is in an unstructured format, making it difficult and time-consuming to extract the relevant information. With hyperautomation, the company can: 

• Use workload automation to monitor the email account where invoices are received.  
• When the email comes in, it triggers an RPA bot that extracts the data from the emails into a common location. 
• From here, IDP steps in to extract, classify, and transform both the structured and unstructured data from the downloaded attachments. 
• Then WLA triggers an SQL job that stores the structured data for downstream process use. 

A financial institution with a large mortgage department needs a faster way to process loan applications. Loan applications feature many different types of information, and the process involves multiple applications and systems for verifying data. With hyperautomation, the loan department can: 

• A new loan application is received via SFT and WLA triggers a workflow to being
• RPA bots, with the assistance of IDP, extracts data from the applications and verifies the information with other financial systems and performs a credit check. 
• The RPA bots then input the information into the financial institutions loan processing system. 
• When complete, WLA triggers a job that loads the information to a database where the other critical systems in the process have access. 
• Once complete, two parallel backend WLA tasks are triggered to handle income source verification and perform compliance checks. 
• As the last step in the workflow, an RPA bot generates a response and its sent via SFT to the customer and interested parties with loan status and next steps. 

A customer service team needs to ensure customer information is up to date in their CRM system. Instead of relying on error-prone manual data entry and verification, they use hyperautomation to: 

• A WLA job is scheduled to find any discrepancies that require updates. to find and update  
• When completed, WLA triggers an RPA bot to perform the customer information updates into the CRM system. 
• When that task is complete, WLA triggers an SSIS package to verify the data against external sources. 
• Finally, WLA initiates a notification for when the workflow is complete. 

Benefits of Hyperautomation 

The way we work has drastically changed in the last several years and businesses are trying to find innovative ways to maximize efficiency and stay competitive. Hyperautomation is a way to better orchestrate the technology and people that keep your business running. In addition to improving scalability, flexibility, and productivity, here are some of the biggest benefits hyperautomation can bring to your organization: 

• Less Restrictions and Reliance on IT 
  No more automation restrictions—using the right tool for the job ensures your business can grow quickly and securely while maintaining best practices long term. 

• Reduction in Human Error 
  Hyperautomation further eliminates mistakes in data entry, ensures better coverage of processes, and helps bridge the knowledge gap so your team is always on the same page. Furthermore, a Deloitte survey found that organizations that embraced intelligent automation had an average cost reduction of 22 percent.  

• Stay Competitive 
  According to Gartner, 70 percent of organizations will have engaged in digital business transformations by 2025. Embracing hyperautomation helps you stay ahead of what other organizations are doing. Plus, get better and quicker access to data to compare against key performance indicators more easily and continually optimize without delay to stay ahead of the competition. 

• Maintain Standards 
  With so much structured and unstructured data coming to and from systems and applications, hyperautomation provides a sophisticated approach to making better use of your data while maintaining a standard level of quality.  

• Democratize Automation 
  Spread innovation beyond the IT department with low-code and no-code automation tools designed to enable citizen developers to directly streamline the processes they know best in their own departments.  

The most important aspect of hyperautomation is the opportunity for organizations to think bigger. By further optimizing resources and solutions, hyperautomation gives you a strategy for success. And if you can take your project and evangelize it throughout your enterprise, you can help your organization provide better business outcomes. 

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Be aware that expanding your automation footprint does come with some important growing pains you should be aware of. As with any type of new technology or strategy, hyperautomation requires key stakeholders and business users to think differently. One of the first hurdles you’ll encounter is getting everyone on board to reframe how they see their work and think of tasks and processes in a new way. 

Establishing a Center of Excellence (CoE) framework can bring together the people, processes, and technology necessary to ensure your hyperautomation strategy has a consistent strategy and vision. With your CoE framework, you’ll develop the correct best practices for strategic, scalable hyperautomation and ensure everyone across your enterprise is working together. 

The other big challenge is finding the right set of tools for your hyperautomation strategy. There are many options available for automating work—some with overlapping capabilities—and you’ll want to ensure you’re not contributing to IT bloat. But with the right strategy, hyperautomation can allow for a best-of-breed approach that will enable you to find the best combination of tools that best fit your needs and goals. 

And with IT budgets being tighter than ever, there isn’t room to waste time and money on expensive, bloated tools. Using an automation ROI calculator can give you a baseline of if the savings outweigh the costs of implementing a new tool.