Hyper Automation: Reshaping Businesses

With a major shift in perception towards technology across businesses and consumers globally, there is a significant need to streamline the ways of working along with interoperability of technological innovations. Technology today is not only aiding platform integration and communications, but also providing a new level of intelligence. 

The year 2025 marks a new wave of hyper automation. Unlike traditional automation, which usually focuses on scripting repetitive tasks, hyper-automation takes it to the next level by blending it all in. It is an all-in-one amalgamation of leading technologies such as artificial intelligence, machine learning, advanced analytics, and robotic process automation (RPA). Hyper automation starts with RPA at its core and expands the automation horizon with AI, process mining, analytics, and other advanced tools. This integration helps with end-to-end process redesign, monitoring, automation, and delivering greater impact and value. It also allows to harness the best of the virtual workforce, which is both immune and intelligent.

Advantages of Hyper-automation 

Automation is expected to increase workforce capacity by 27% or equivalent to 2.4 million extra full-time employees. Among these, RPA is one of the most highly discussed and adopted automation technologies across industries. Some of its major advantages are:

• Flexibility and scalability
• Improved accuracy
• Effective utilization of resources, and 
• Decreased cycle times and improved throughput.
• Hyper automation also allows employees to automate mundane and manual tasks enabling them to focus on more higher level work such as planning and strategy. 
• With hyper automation, companies can communicate seamlessly and upgrade their clunky technology. 
• Using key analytics that hyper automation offers, businesses can track exact ROI and improve operationality and efficiency in the workplace.

What Companies Should Do

Although hyper-automation offers multiple benefits and has become a must-have for organizations, there are few challenges that prevent its proper implementation. Strategic decisions by companies can help overcome these challenges. 

• The high ROI expectation linked to workforce release makes hyper-automation an attractive proposition for organizations. In such haste, they often forget to consider all the possibilities and criticalities. With this mindset, the majority of automated processes lead to failure as they were not amenable for automation but were still automated. Instead, businesses should work on detailed usability to determine the business case for implementation of hyperautomation. This will help them drive ROI and carry value in automation. 
• While some businesses have started with the automation initiatives, they have not been able to scale the strategy adoption. This is due to lack of foresight and no proper center of excellence to manage the program resulting in non-uniform information flow. Hence, establishing an automation center of excellence is critical in every organization to help with deployment of the technology throughout the value chain. 
• A key challenge that enables organizations to benefit and fully explore the potential of automation and RPA efforts is its governance and monitoring. Isolated teams and functions often take ownership of separate business operations that are supposed to be automated, which leads to no uniform technology stack. This creates significant dependencies and bottlenecks, leading to limited effectiveness and agility. Hence, effective governance and monitoring automation systems should be set up across the board for all teams, so that uniformity, sharing of resources, and an innovative environment can flourish.
• Straightforward automation of business processes without fully optimizing them renders the whole process inefficient, hence companies must work on process mapping, analysing, and redesigning business processes before an effective RPA implementation. This not only helps with removing complexities, but increasing the impact of automation and greater ROI.

Way Forward 

The potential for hyper-automation is huge. Even with the current technological capabilities, organizations can transform their core business operations, experiment with hyper-automation, and be a part of Industrial Revolution 4.0. Considering the dynamic nature of the business ecosystem, adopting automation has become critical. Hyper-automation allows companies to not only strengthen their resources, but also build a digital twin of the organization that runs parallelly to their physical workforce. This disruptive technology offers organizations to digitally transform the ways of working and lay a strong foundation of innovation.