Automation vs hyperautomation: Which is right for your business?

Automation and hyperautomation are cut from the same cloth. Each solution delivers exactly what businesses need: technology that’s faster and more financially responsible processes that are error-free.

That said, hyperautomation takes automation one step further. There will come layers of more advanced technologies that develop end-to-end automated processes, streamline workflows, and allow teams to eliminate some of the tedious daily tasks.

See: Artificial Intelligence Ethics Policy (TechRepublic Premium)

Still, the debate isn’t always about automation versus hyper-automation. Their unique components allow them to build on each other, and each in its own right can be the right call for business process improvement efforts. It’s up to you to decide what your organization needs.

Where automation and hyper-automation can promote business process optimization

At their core, automation and hyper-automation are advanced 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 essential to any digital transformation, but companies have long known that enterprise automation RPA tools have limitations, chief among them the inability to automate business processes with unstructured data.

Hyperautomation was created to solve this problem and tackle the most complex business processes. Using it, organizations can automate manual tasks, increasing employee retention and productivity, as well as improving customer experience.

With advanced technologies, hyper-automation is very effective in the most complex business processes, including those where you may have multiple offices or locations. Some of these include:

Accounts Payable and Order Management

Hyper automation eliminates the risks that normally rely on manual labor and human expertise. When focusing on receiving, accepting and paying invoices, accounts payable creates a significant risk for inefficiencies, errors and out-of-control costs. Order management (ie, retrieving and extracting customer data) can pose some of the same challenges, so both are ripe for hyper-automation.

Mining process

If you want to know the current status of your organization, you may use or consider evaluating mining software. With hyper-automation, you should have an accurate view of how your processes are currently performing. Using process mining, you get a comprehensive view of everything, which allows you to automate to the full potential.

Instead of a live agent

You can eliminate the manual work of live agents and introduce bots with hyper-automation. The implementation finds your business processes and creates bots to automate them. These bots will be the first points of contact for some customers, helping users browse support articles and knowledge bases, order products or services, and manage accounts.

Of course, you may have areas in your organization that fall squarely on the line where you need automation and hyper-automation, and it can be challenging to figure out which is best. But finding the best approach for your business will allow you to tailor each to your company’s automation needs.

Your organization’s automation vs. How to resolve the hyperautomation debate

Nowadays, some level of automation is key to successful digital transformation. The biggest risks of a transformation project are going over budget and falling behind schedule, so your company may choose software that visualizes your current “states of being” but provides modern business process automation technology to automate these processes.

Hyper automation builds automatically. Although it doesn’t exist independently, it can improve and accelerate your digital transformation by making already automated processes more automated and complex and efficient.

So, is automation, hyper-automation or both right for you? Here’s how to say it:

Identify your business goals

Hyper-automation improves your work processes by speeding up and optimizing your work. But first, it’s important to identify automation opportunities in your business that can benefit from hyper-automation.

Before implementing any kind of automation, you need to understand where you need it most and how to get the most out of it. Align preferred outcomes with what automation or hyper-automation brings to the table, then use those findings to inform your decisions. The closer you are to your business goals, the better and more impactful the investment will be.

Learn more about automation tools

Explore the automation tools available to meet your goals. There’s no point in using hyper-automation where it’s not needed or doesn’t work for your business, so one of your tasks is to find the right tools for you and your organization.

See Low-code development tools. These solutions will help you define hyper-automation and connect it to workflows, and then learn how it differs from other traditional automation approaches.

Choose sustainability

Once you’ve done your research and chosen the best automation platform for you, make sure it’s scalable. Choose sustainable and forward-thinking tools that drive automation through digital transformation today, but continue to grow with your business tomorrow.

Choosing a tool that the company does not have the ability to grow is equivalent to pouring your time and money down the drain. Although a device may not have all the bells and whistles, if it shows the ability to work for a long time, you should invest in it.

For your business process transformation, you need to learn the difference between automation and hyper-automation, both of which can play critical roles. For more complex processes, hyperautomation is a must, as automation builds on what can already be done. To determine which is right for you, you now need to decide which tasks are mission-critical for your business process automation strategy. Then, choose wisely for a cost-effective, efficient and successful transformation.

Caroline Broome is Global Content Marketing Manager at Mavim. She is responsible for creating and managing product marketing content initiatives and business process management, DTO and technology-enabled, cost-based, compliance-driven transformations. She is based out of Mavim’s Boston office.