The last few years have thrown businesses around the world a multitude of challenges and created ever so many changes. While we know change is the one constant factor in life, many enterprises don’t adequately plan for it because it’s often difficult to stay ahead of the game.
The rising trend of hyperautomation—which Gartner includes in its Top Strategic Technology Trends for 2022—can help simplify businesses’ constant struggle to keep up with change and ease the burden of repetitive workflows and processes.
A major driver for hyperautomation opportunities are digital transformation and IT automation needs. Forecasts see the worldwide market for technology that enables hyperautomation reaching $596.6 billion in 2022, up from around $532.4 billion in 2021. Fabrizio Biscotti, Research Vice President at Gartner, says hyperautomation has “shifted from an option to a condition of survival” for businesses.
To help you better understand hyperautomation and why it’s so valuable, we’ll break down its definition, walk through its benefits, and share an example.
What is hyperautomation?
Hyperautomation is an expansion of traditional automation, and it entails automating every process that can be streamlined within a business or organization. This involves AI, machine learning, and different kinds of integration and automation software, such as robotic process automation (RPA) and an integration platform as a service (iPaaS).
The benefits of hyperautomation
With the definition of hyperautomation in mind, let’s dive into its benefits for your business.
- Makes it easier for your team to collaborate
As Biscotti said, businesses are likely to accelerate digital transformation plans in a post-COVID-19 world. Hyperautomation plays a huge part in that digital transformation, connecting all the different aspects and departments in your business with each other. The combination of intelligent tools interacting with users across all core processes makes it easier for your teams to collaborate.
- Increases productivity and employee satisfaction
Hyperautomation optimizes processes and workflows across the business, which reduces the amount of time employees spend on manual tasks. This in turn makes your team more productive and driven, as they don’t have to spend a large number of their work hours on unpleasant and time-consuming admin work; instead, they can focus on the strategic and business-critical projects they value and are best equipped to handle.
- Delivers better analytics and insights
If you want better insights into your business processes, you need to have a finger in all the different pies, so to speak. Hyperautomation can help with that because its automation efforts affect various aspects of your business, gathering data on multiple different points automatically. You can use that data and those insights to make changes to your processes or predictions for the future.
- Increases business agility
The world has seen massive change over the past few years, across different industries, markets, and countries due to the global pandemic, and the inadvertent disruption to business that came with it. Agility—the ability to pivot, grow, or ride the waves based on external and internal dynamics—is key to the survival of a business, as it ensures you’re able to be pliable in changing markets and environments. Hyperautomation makes it easier to adapt quickly and scale your business through layering intelligent automation tools.
- Augments ROI
Hyperautomation provides your business with even more intelligent and complex automations that drive better results—whether that’s time and/or cost savings, higher customer retention, increased sales, etc.
Related: The benefits of process orchestration
Breaking down an example of hyperautomation
To make hyperautomation more tangible, as well as illustrate the benefits it can provide, let’s break down an example in the form of purchase order processing.
The orchestration layer—powered by Workato, the leader in enterprise automation—will:
- Retrieve the sender information and download the purchase order from Gmail.
- Locate the sender’s account info in Salesforce and find a sales rep.
- Trigger a UiPath RPA bot to access a third-party website and obtain SIC codes to enrich account information in Salesforce.
- Call OCR and RPA technology to parse the purchase order details and line items. This detail can trigger products or services to be added to the opportunity. Workato can also upload the original PO to Salesforce so it’s available for future reference.
- Workbot, Workato’s platform bot, notifies a sales rep once the PO is loaded into Salesforce, and the bot allows the sales rep to approve (or reject) the PO by simply pressing a button in Slack.
- The opportunity is moved to “closed-won” by Salesforce once the rep approves the PO. An acknowledgment email is sent to the customer that the PO has been received and processed.
Embrace hyperautomation by leveraging Workato
As the example above shows, Workato can help you adopt powerful hyperautomations—but there’s much more to the platform. Workato offers:
- A low-code/no-code UX, enabling both business and IT teams to use the platform
- Automations that won’t break when there are changes in the UI—as Workato leverages the apps’ application programming interfaces (APIs) instead of performing screen scraping
- Customizable bots that allow your employees to access data from and perform actions in their apps without leaving your business communications platform, whether that’s Slack or Microsoft Teams
