Hyperautomation: a necessity for modern organisations – IDG Connect 

This is a contributed article by Sivashankari Krishnamoorthy, Delivery Manager at Vuram.

Hyperautomation is a revolutionary approach to maximise the benefit of digital transformation to enterprises. Simply put, hyperautomation is the application of advanced technologies such as Robotic process automation (RPA), Artificial Intelligence, Machine Learning (ML), intelligent business management software (iBPMS), and Process Mining to augment and automate processes in ways more impactful than traditional automation.

Organisational leaders have to keep in mind that hyperautomation is not just bringing several technologies; it is strategically redesigning the entire process. It is a continuous effort in automating end-to-end business processes across enterprises.

Why should organisations switch to hyperautomation?

Hyperautomation empowers teams to reimagine their processes without relying upon or working with the limitations of a single technology. With a thorough process redesign, teams are empowered, satisfied, and contribute more to customer-facing and cognitive tasks. Since low-code platforms are key when it comes to hyperautomation, organisations can be fluid as they will be capable of rapidly adapting to change. Combined with digital workers or software bots, leaders can see their teams freed from mundane, mind-numbing tasks that occupy a major chunk of their workday. The processes get an overhaul with cognitive technologies like AI and ML.

Here are some signs that indicate the need for change from traditional automation. To reiterate, adopting hyperautomation means continually improving the processes through advanced technologies.

Depending on legacy systems

When multiple systems are involved in the business process with legacy business data, there is no single tool that can solve it. It requires multiple complementary technologies to bring systems together.

Heavy human-dependent tasks

If your processes are replete with tedious, repetitive tasks, it takes more time and potentially impacts employee productivity. Besides, routine and low-cognitive tasks will bring down the morale of your teams, not to mention the inevitable errors that can mislead the work. RPA bots can overcome and handle all of these flaws.

Consider a labour-intensive process in the insurance sector. When a software bot is deployed for the document generation process, it can work round the clock, increase the output and speed up the process by multiple times, that too without errors.

Greater risks of compliance

Regardless of the business type, adherence to laws and regulations for the respective industry and geography is critical. With the hyperautomation tools, regulations, rules, and risk factors can be automated or can be included as part of the process orchestration.   

Lack of transparency

Managing business processes old school—manually and email-based—can make tracing key information difficult. Attaining visibility into business processes requires a lot of time and effort. If your teams are manually handling compliance with spreadsheets and shared files, siloed functions, disconnected systems, and poor data quality, it’s high time to make the technological shift.

What would you achieve?

Increased ROI

Adding automation to the right processes eliminates inefficiencies, lowers lead times, and reduces process times.  As hyperautomation combines process automation and RPA with AI and machine learning, it intensifies the benefits and improves ROI.

For example, consider a health insurance company that handles nearly 200,000 claims per year. To close a claim, a team member has to spend 30 minutes on average per day by extracting data from CRM, pasting them in a document, printing, and signing. Instead, by leveraging hyperautomation, the process of data extraction could be automated using OCR and information can be validated using Business Process automation tools, and finally, the representatives can close them with e-signatures. The whole process could cut down hours significantly, thus improving the ROI tremendously.

Process automation

An automated environment saves workers’ time and allows them to focus on more value-adding activities. Some examples include order management which involves retrieving emails/attachments, and updating internal systems; document processing like data extraction; collect data and validate customer profiles to detect fraudulent cases; assess risk models for loan underwriting. The opportunities are endless.

Improved customer experience

According to a study by Zendesk, nearly 80% of consumers say they would rather do business with a competitor after more than one bad experience. To turn customers into loyal brand ambassadors, designing a customer-centric workflow could add in personalisation.

For instance, hyperautomation technologies can be used to monitor call center interactions. NLP analyses the interaction, the customer’s sentiment, assigns a sentiment score, calculates the lag time, which could be the key metrics for the customer experience team members to uncover insights and take critical business decisions.

Better operational efficiency & productivity

According to experts, hyperautomation will reduce nearly 70-75% of the manager’s workload by 2024. As hyperautomation could automate and expedite routine processes like data entry, data extraction, invoicing, supplier management, claims processing, and more, your teams can get freed from such mundane tasks. End-to-end automation enables better productivity and making strategic business decisions.

Faster time to market

In the increasingly competitive world, scaling up and delivering the products faster to market by accelerating production is important. How to achieve this even smarter? The answer lies in low-code. Low-code platforms are great at enabling application development 10 to 20 times faster than traditional development. Low-code is a visual approach to software development that empowers anybody with minimal coding experience to design applications. Low-code platforms let users create applications easily with ready-to-use components, templates, and widgets.

Low-code is central to hyperautomation. While hyperautomation optimises the business processes for a smooth digital transformation journey, low-code accelerates this journey, making the switch faster, and further helping in maintaining and upgrading the implemented technologies. The pandemic was conducive for businesses around the world to understand the agility and speed achieved through low-code.

Sivashankari Krishnamoorthy is the Delivery Manager at Vuram. She holds more than 9 years of experience in automating business processes for various organisations. Having designed over 100 business processes with the help of hyperautomation tools, her prime focus is to ensure customer success throughout the digital transformation journey. She has expertise in running programs with multiple global delivery teams and establishing center of excellence.