Automation and hyperautomation are cut from the same cloth. Each solution gives businesses exactly what they crave: technology that delivers faster, more financially sound, and error-free processes.
That said, hyperautomation goes one step further. Added to this are additional layers of advanced technologies that cultivate end-to-end automation processes, streamline workflows and enable teams to remove some of the tedious day-to-day tasks.
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Still, the debate isn’t always about automation versus hyper-automation. Their unique components allow them to build on each other, and each on its own could be the right call for your efforts to optimize your business processes. It is up to you to determine what your organization needs.
Where automation and hyperautomation can drive business process optimization
At their respective cores, automation and hyperautomation are more advanced offshoots of robotic process automation technology. They are equipped with technologies such as artificial intelligence, machine learning, process mining, digital twins and business process management.
Automation is vital for every digital transformationbut companies have long known that RPA business automation tools have limitations, the most important of which is the inability to automate business processes through unstructured data.
Hyperautomation was developed to solve this problem and aims to tackle the most complicated business processes. By using it, organizations can automate tasks that were previously manual, increasing employee retention and productivity and improving the customer experience.
With its advanced technologies, hyperautomation is most effective in the most complex business processes, including those where you may have multiple offices or locations. Some of these are:
Creditors and order management
Hyperautomation can eliminate risks in areas that would normally rely on manual labor and human knowledge. With the focus on receiving, answering and paying invoices, creditors pose a great risk of inefficiency, errors and out of control costs. Order management (i.e. retrieving and extracting customer information) can present some of the same challenges, so both are ripe for hyper-automation.
Process mining
If you want to know the current state of your organization, you are using or thinking about using process mining software to assess it. With hyper-automation, you need to have an accurate picture of how your processes currently work. By using process mining you get a comprehensive overview of everything, so that you can get the most out of yourself.
Live Agent Replacement
You can eliminate the manual work of live agents and introduce bots with hyper automation. The implementation process discovers your business processes and creates bots to automate them. These bots then become the first point of communication for some customers, allowing users to navigate support articles and knowledge bases, order products or services, and manage accounts.
Of course, you may have areas in your organization that are right on the border between automation and hyper-automation, and it can be challenging to figure out which one is best. But by finding the optimal approach for your business, you can tailor them all to your company’s individual automation needs.
How to resolve your company’s automation vs. hyper-automation debate?
Today, a degree of automation is key to a successful digital transformation. The biggest risks of a transformation project are budget overruns and schedule delays, so your company may choose to consider software that not only visualizes your current “to-be” states, but also provides modernized business process automation technology to mine those processes.
Hyperautomation builds on automation. While it doesn’t exist independently, it can enhance and accelerate your digital transformation by further automating already automated processes and making them less complicated and more efficient.
So, is automation, hyperautomation, or both right for you? Here’s how to tell:
Identify your business goals
Hyperautomation improves your business processes by accelerating and improving your operations. But first, it’s important to identify automation opportunities in your business that can also benefit from hyper-automation.
Before implementing automation of any kind, understand where you need it most and how to get the most out of it. Align the desired results with what automation or hyper-automation delivers, then use those findings to inform your decision. The closer you get to your business goals, the better and more effective the investment will be.
Learn more about automation tools
Research the available automation tools that meet your goals. There’s no point in using hyper-automation where it isn’t necessary or doesn’t work for your business, so one of your tasks will be to find relevant tools for you and your organization.
Look at low-code development tools. These solutions can help define the hyper automation and connect to workflows, then learn how they differ from other more traditional automation approaches.
Choose sustainable
Once you’ve researched and selected the best automation platform for you, make sure it’s scalable. Choose sustainable, future-proof tools that introduce automation to digital transformation today, but can continue to grow with your business tomorrow.
Choosing a tool without the ability to grow as the business does is tantamount to wasting your time and money down the drain. While a tool may not have all the bells and whistles, you should invest in it if it shows the ability to work for the long haul.
Transforming your business processes requires you to learn the difference between automation and hyper-automation, both of which can play a vital role. For the most complex processes, hyperautomation is a must-have because it builds on what automation can already do. However, to determine which one is right for you, you need to determine which tasks are currently critical to your business process automation strategy. Then choose wisely for a cost-effective, efficient and successful transformation.
Caroline Brakes is the global content marketing manager at We have. She is responsible for creating and managing content initiatives and product marketing campaigns, specializing in business process management, DTO and technology-driven, cost-driven, compliance-driven transformations. She works out of Mavim’s Boston office.
