Hyperautomation: what is it and how can it be implemented?

By EloInsights, in collaboration with Luis Huber

Hyperautomation is currently one of the essential tech capabilities for organizations that want to objectively carry out their digital transformation.
It brings together a set of automation technologies to extend their benefits and scope of action.
Implementation goes hand in hand with the need to acculturate leadership and integrate the business and IT areas.

Since it was presented to the business world in a Gartner article at the end of 2019 as a way for organizations to move beyond RPA (robot process automation), broaden their automation journey and capture its benefits, hyperautomation has gone from buzzword to reality in companies of different categories and, now, is part of the fundamental kit of tech capabilities for organizations that want to solidly implement a digital transformation process.

What is hyperautomation?

Derived from the process automation, hyperautomation is presented as an expanded and evolved approach to the concept. Its focus is on automation carried out on screens, in digital media, rather than physical, as is the case with industrial automation, which is more linked to robotics, mechatronics and the IoT (Internet of Things). Although modern technologies such as digital twins, artificial intelligence and Industry 4.0 are bringing these two universes closer together.

“In the case of hyperautomation, we are talking about the digital environment, in other words, automation within systems, applications that will make people’s day-to-day lives easier in the departments of a company”, explains Luis Huber, director of EloGroup. “This is an important distinction. Hyperautomation is a way of combining different automation technologies to extend the benefits, broaden the scope of action and the results”.

The importance of finding the drivers of hyperautomation

Within a hyperautomation discussion, the first step is to identify the drivers that move the company in this direction.

That is because this will not be a one-off action that will focus on just one process or another. It must be seen as a journey that is related to the company’s larger strategy; otherwise, the high investment cost will be in vain.

“Hyperautomation makes sense at scale, not in isolation”, says Huber. “You need a whole infrastructure that can be reused. That is why there needs to be a bigger discussion about what is important for business. It is essential to have corporate alignment so that this unfolding can happen as a journey”.

A first step can come in the form of a POC (proof of concept) or a pilot that has the effect, as a convincing strategy, of pulling the organization out of a state of inertia.

What is the importance of hyperautomation?

Although hyperautomation is now recognized as a key tech capability for companies that want to advance in their digital transformation processes, the specific drivers that move each organization along this journey can be multiple. Among the common denominators, we can highlight the search for:

Greater efficiency

This is about increasing the organization’s productivity and efficiency in carrying out an activity it already does, through the application of technology.

“At EloGroup, the hyperautomation discussion appears within the umbrella of the efficiency treadmill or hub, which seeks to exploit something that the organization already does, but to do it with more excellence, in a more productive and efficient way, and at less cost”, states Huber.

Risk mitigation

Another possible driver is to mitigate the risks involved in having a certain critical task performed by human operators alone. In this case, automation comes in as a kind of “backup” capable of correcting an error or triggering an emergency notification in case of a failure.

Leveraging digital transformation

“Hyperautomation contributes by creating and enabling the release of resources for a wider transformation. It enables the creation of ‘room for maneuvers’”, points out the director. “If, for example, the company needs to carry out a core business transformation but does not have enough people to take part in this project, it can hyperautomate, free up that routine time they had and, thus, be able to allocate them to the larger digital transformation project”.

There are also positive side effects, such as:

Leadership acculturation

Hyperautomation also uses processes to educate top management about the specificities that arise when dealing with these types of more advanced technologies, and their effects within organizations, preparing them for bigger leaps.

One example is the need to learn to live with “digital workers”, such as automation systems that become part of an organization’s routine. If a change is made within a system connected to the RPA, even a subtle one, it can bring down automation at once. These factors are new to most companies and need to be gradually incorporated into the culture.

What are the key elements of hyperautomation?

Some of the technologies that make up the scope of hyperautomation are:

Digital Process Automation (DPA)

Process orchestration tools, considered to be an evolution of Business Process Management (BPM) disciplines, use low-code software (requiring less programming knowledge) to automate and streamline an organization’s business processes. The idea is to gain scalability, minimize costs and optimize the use of resources by applying technology capable of automating manual and repetitive tasks that would otherwise need to be carried out entirely by human employees, thus, burdening the organization. Another benefit is the reduction in the occurrence of errors.

Robotic Process Automation (RPA)

Also considered an evolution of DPA tools, it adds a key component to the process automation discipline: artificial intelligence technologies that mimic human activities, repeating them more consistently and less prone to failure. In RPA, robot software comes into play to broaden the scope of process automation possibilities, reproducing activities that would previously have had to be carried out by human employees, such as filling in forms, recording information, among others.

CRPA, or Cognitive RPA

A specific type of Robotic Process Automation related to the introduction of the ability to interpret text and handle the information obtained during its processing. This data can then influence the business rules applied in each scenario. Automation interprets a context and chooses different paths within that identified context.

OCR (Optical Character Recognition) solutions

Another technology that promotes the sophistication of automation processes. They are capable of image recognition, which enables them to perform tasks such as reading PDFs that do not have structured metadata, for example. So, it is possible to open a file, extract the text from it, interpret it and use the product of that interpreted text in some other function. This is an example of a combination of technologies that make up the broader scope of hyperautomation.

Chatbots

Digital interfaces for automatic interaction that can work on a simpler question and answer logic based on a decision tree or, in more advanced cases, from interpreting conversations and keeping data for more intelligent interactions.

Artificial Intelligence (AI)

Appears in this context as a technology capable of broadening the use cases and applicability of hyperautomation. It expands the scope of action, both from the point of view of structuring data and from the point of view of dynamic business rules, which can be changed by the system itself as needs arise.

How does Hyperautomation work?

Once the company has identified the drivers to begin its journey of implementing hyperautomation technologies, considering the importance of a holistic and non-compartmentalized approach, another key point is to understand that this implementation does not happen without impacts on many areas of the organization, which will need to be understood and governed so that there are no problems.

This is where the need to establish governance comes in, defining the model, from a more centralized to a more decentralized one.

This stage usually involves setting up a CoE (Centre of Excellence), dedicated to automation. This is important so that the organization can develop a competence that it does not yet have and, from there, begin a gradual process of decentralizing it to the rest of the company.

Often, the starting point will be a more centralized logic, responsible for developing a foundation. Then, there is a shift to a hybrid logic that is often structured as a hub-spoke and, finally, to a decentralized logic.

“This beginning is important because everything starts with looking at the business, being able to identify these opportunities”, claims Huber. “So, we need to have the people with the right lenses to be able to see these opportunities, accumulate them, put together a portfolio that works as a backlog, and from this backlog start a discussion about which technologies can be implemented”.

Even if at this point the vision is still at an elevated level, it is possible to have more solidity to understand whether the problems faced are, for example, CRM problems, for communicating with customers or problems with receiving invoices. It is possible to understand which business domain is affected, which consequently increases the chance of getting the choice of technology right.

The subject of governance is also related to the issue of organizational design, and in this sense it is important to have an approach that favors looking at the “film” rather than the “photo”, as it is possible for a governance structure to be established initially in a more “lean” and specific way, and for it to change over time. Nothing is written in stone, and everything must evolve gradually.

Where can hyperautomation have an impact?

Opportunities for improvement from the implementation of hyperautomation solutions include:

Processes at risk of failure

Hyperautomation can be used to minimize the occurrence of failures in critical or error-prone processes. The combination of automation technologies makes the execution of such processes more homogeneous, predictable and reliable. For example, it can be used to trigger alerts if human error is detected.

Many employees in the operation

One of the strengths of hyperautomation lies in the optimization of processes, reducing the number of human resources needed to carry out tasks and thus making it possible to reallocate this capacity to tasks with greater added value for the organization.

Governance difficulty

Process automation translates into greater reliability in recording activities and rationalizing data storage. This characteristic makes it especially useful in areas of an organization that suffer from difficulties in the governance of this information.

Examples of hyperautomation

Within organizations, we can highlight some areas that are candidates for receiving support from these technologies, especially shared service centers, which tend to receive high demand from different areas of the company:

In Finance, there is the aspect of financial, fiscal processing, which includes issuing invoices, receipts, tax processing, conferences, audits and analyses, among many others. Processes that are carried out mechanically, which overload the team, can be transformed by automation to free up the employees involved for other activities that add more value within the organization.

Another example is customer service processes, such as within an HR department, where an automated interface can be set up to answer questions about benefits, holidays and so on. In this case, requests can be filtered and directed to reduce the human workload.

Large volumes of data and information that need to be processed are also strong candidates for working in the context of hyperautomation, as is customer service, in the case of registering information and analyzing documents, for example.

How to implement hyperautomation?

In EloGroup’s view, one point to emphasize when implementing hyperautomation systems is the importance of monitoring results right from the start.

“You have to do this right from the start”, explains Huber. “When you find an automation opportunity, you already need to determine the baseline, the floor. It is important to start with this mentality, because if you do not monitor the results, just like any other project, it is difficult to move forward”.

Another key point is to involve the business area, so that this relationship does not become distant, like a customer-supplier relationship. A logic of co-creation must be established. Because even though automation is an enabler, capturing the result will also depend on organizational design, on structural changes that go beyond automation itself and which are the responsibility of the business area. It is therefore important to involve these other domains both to ensure that the daily running of the project runs smoothly and to implement and utilize a contingency plan if necessary.

The IT department also needs to be nearby, as it is responsible for all the “plumbing” that supports a hyperautomation project, such as the need for virtual machines, servers, access and security control, firewalls, and a series of other elements in which IT support is essential. “It is very important that these solutions are corporate, institutionalized solutions, because they operate in layers that are very sensitive, and are impacted by other systems”, states Huber. “If this is not well orchestrated, they will not work well”.

Lastly, it is also important to mature the support and maintenance of these automated parks once they have been installed. One approach is to establish a monitoring and control center responsible for executions, as well as creating architectural guidelines so that maintenance takes place, and the operation remains efficient over time.

Conclusion

According to MarketWatch, the global Hyperautomation market is expected to reach US$ 319.9 billion by 2027, a forecast that points to organizations’ appetite for adopting increasingly advanced technologies to automate processes, optimize their resource allocation, mitigate risks and improve their data governance.

With the advance of innovations in the field of artificial intelligence, this type of tool will naturally become increasingly powerful, capable of acting with an autonomy that would have been impossible just a few years ago, further expanding its scope of action and ability to generate value for companies. As such, expect to continue to see the discussions around hyperautomation mature, with an emphasis on governance issues and the need for organizational adaptation within this new reality, such as accommodating digital workers.

Is the hyperautomation discussion important now for your organization? Huber cites some of the possible steps for companies that want to take their first steps in developing this important tech capability.

“In cases where this debate has not yet taken place in the company, the main recommendation is to carry out a POC (proof of concept), or a pilot”, points out the EloGroup director. “But if this is already being debated, it is possible to move on to upstream, discovery, so that the first portfolio can be put together”.

LUÍS HUBER works as director at EloGroup.