"The Hyperautomation"

(Area: Technology, Collaboration, Management, Entrepreneurship, Innovation, Strategy, & More)

(Reading Material "Introduction to Emerging Technologies Course in the New Age"; "Advanced Emerging Technologies Course for New Age Organizations", Hugo Céspedes A.)

Artificial Intelligence (AI), Machine Learning, Event Driven Software Architecture, Robotic Process Automation (RPA), Business Process Management (BPM) and Intelligent Business Process Management Suites (iBPMS), Integration Platforms as a Service (iPaaS ), Low/No Code Tools, Packaged Software, Other Types of Decision Automation Tools, Processes and Tasks What do they have in common? When used in an orchestrated manner (both tool and cross-platform), in a disciplined, business-driven approach that organizations use to rapidly identify, examine, and automate as many business and IT processes as possible, it is what It is known as HYPERAUTOMATION.

Thus, Hyperautomation could be said to refer to the comprehensive automation of harnessing the power of multiple technologies.

What is Hyperautomation?

According to Gartner, Hyperautomation is a disciplined, business-driven approach that organizations use to rapidly identify, examine, and automate as many business and IT processes as possible. Hyperautomation involves the orchestrated use of multiple technologies, tools, or platforms, including: Artificial Intelligence (AI); Machine Learning (ML); Software architecture based on events; Robotic Process Automation (RPA); Business Process Management (BMP) and Intelligent Business Process Management Suites (iBMPS); Integration Platforms as a Service (iPaaS); Low Code/No Code Tools; Packaged Software; other types of decision automation tools, processes and tasks.

It refers to "the extension of legacy business process automation beyond the boundaries of individual processes". By combining Artificial Intelligence (AI) tools with RPA, hyperautomation "enables automation for almost every repetitive task that business users execute".

It even goes further and automates automation by dynamically discovering business processes and creating bots to automate them. Gartner identified hyperautomation as "one of the top 11 strategic technology trends of the year".

Hyperautomation is a means for true Digital Transformation, based on a range of tools such as Robotic Process Automation (RPA), Machine Learning (ML) and Artificial Intelligence (AI), which work in harmony to automate business processes. complex (including sectors where subject matter experts were previously needed).

For Gartner, RPA (Robotic Processes Automation) enriched by Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning (ML) becomes the core that makes hyperautomation technology possible. The combination of automation, robotics, process and artificial intelligence technologies offer the power and flexibility to “automate what has never been possible before”: undocumented processes that rely on unstructured data inputs.

Something to keep in mind about the dynamics of tasks and people:

Accelerating Complex Tasks: Hyperautomation provides a fast path to engage all parties in organizational transformation supported by automating increasingly complex jobs that rely on People Insights.

Implementation of Digital Workers: The development of RPA (Robotic Process Automation) skills with intelligence creates an intelligent digital workforce that performs repetitive tasks in order to increase employee performance. These digital workers are the change agents of hyperautomation, who can connect diverse business applications, operate with structured and unstructured data, analyze data and make decisions, and discover processes and new automation opportunities.

Watch the following video on YouTube that explains the phenomenon of Hyperautomation:

The Power of Artificial Intelligence.

Artificial Intelligence is what differentiates digital workers from standard automation approaches, so RPA + AI (Artificial Intelligence) is a fundamental part of hyperautomation.

By discovering and automating data and processes that were previously inaccessible, hyperautomation offers another unique advantage: "the creation of a Digital Twin of the Organization (DTO)" What does this contribute? A DTO makes previously overlooked interactions between processes, functions, and key performance indicators visible. Imagine visualizing Business Value Creation as it happens (or doesn't happen) and deploy Intelligence to quickly respond and identify new opportunities.

Where can Hyperautomation have an Impact?

Insurance: Helps reduce costs and improve the customer experience by automating reports, adjudication processes, updating user reports, blame management, enrollment and eligibility determination, claims management and processing.

Banking: Help defines a new era in financial services by automating credit decision making, data migration, regulatory compliance, loan and mortgage origination, new application processing, customer onboarding, new application processing, customer service customer.

Healthcare: Helps improve the patient experience and increase compliance by automating operational analytics, patient pre-authorization, medical records and data management, claims processing, claims processing.

Manufacturing: Helps address the most difficult processes by automating support management, invoice verification, transportation management, receipt confirmation, inventory management, ERP processes, regulatory compliance, purchase order processing, payment of freight costs .

Public Sector: Helps drive connectivity and performance by automating financial processes, human resources, mission processes, purchasing.

Science: Helps drive innovation and operational agility by automating product safety issue tracking, pharmacovigilance and complaint handling, regulatory compliance, clinical data trial handling, lifecycle management, supply chain, management productivity.

How I Implement Automation.

Automation must offer RPA solutions (hopefully intuitive) that anyone could easily use. Enterprise-grade technology with the intuitive experience of a consumer app: RPA + AI product platform that offers automated business products for organizations.

Today there are cloud-native, AI-powered, web-based platforms in the world designed for seamless automation.

There are cloud-native end-to-end intelligent automation specialist platforms used by the world's leading organizations to double the number of automated processes at a fraction of the infrastructure of legacy RPA systems and scale even three times faster.

The present and the future is in automation in the cloud. This goes beyond siled components of front-end and back-end technologies to automate business processes across systems and applications, including SaaS and legacy applications.

Hyperautomation should cover all angles in the virtuous cycle of hyperautomation: Discover, Digitize, Optimize, Automate.

a) Discover: Discover and document the highest ROI automation opportunities using Bots. Through distributed open collaboration, you can get the best ideas and best practices about bots from your organization with Private Bot Stores for example. There are process discovery solutions (task mining) that are natively integrated into the leading intelligent automation platform - capturing user interactions with any application, even with the use of the user's computer mouse. Accelerates and scales automation across the organization by recording user activities, documenting business process discovery, assisting in the analysis of process variations to identify automation opportunities with the greatest business impact, and generating bot designs to automate them. All this in a single business platform.

b) Digitize: Duplicate your automatable processes by converting all the structured and unstructured data of any document into a consumable digital asset through Artificial Intelligence and ML with IQ Bots for example. There are applications designed for, say, the 80% of business processes that currently rely heavily on people who must locate and organize unstructured data before the process can even begin. Artificial Intelligence can be used to process documents by extracting complex data from a wide variety of formats, as can Intelligent Comprehensive Automation, achieving seamless integration with RPA to design and automate workflow across the organization. You can, today, lead the charge with Artificial Intelligence (AI)-based document processing platforms using bots for the 80% of business processes that currently rely heavily on people to locate and organize unstructured data first. that the process can even start (expedite implementation -configuring 10 times faster for the business user-; maximize results -achieve 80% end-to-end automation, say in 4 weeks- get started immediately -hundreds of cases of factory pre-trained usage proves it- location agnostic -deployment model that fits your needs on premises or in the cloud). How does intelligent document processing work? With bots, the power of RPA is combined with Artificial Intelligence technologies, such as computer vision, natural language processing (NLP), partial logic and machine learning (ML) to automatically classify, extract and validate information from emails and business documents (Processing, Classifying, Extracting, Processing again).

c) Optimization: You can get the pulse of all bots and critical insights on every process in real time to enable app-driven decisions and improvements for it. You can discover the power of cloud-native RPA analytics to measure and scale your automation initiatives. With bots you can optimize the return on investment in automation. There are tools to optimize your automation ROI built into a single cloud-native intelligent automation software, helping to optimize the automation value cycle by automatically turning data into actionable insights for us. Turn your RPA data into shareable and actionable insights, right now. Bots can give you easy access to insights about your intelligent automation program in a single intuitive, interactive visual dashboard. You can share information directly from the control panel to increase visibility and trust of the organization. You can manipulate data with infinite flexibility in any analytic of your choice using native connectors or APIs. You can Generate Simple Operational Analysis, instant Business Intelligence, Insights anytime, anywhere. Raw data in and better decisions out (Integrated tools provide a holistic approach to RPAs to deliver performance metrics and business intelligence, in real time and at scale. Through bots, transform all volumes of raw data into Digital organization insights (from cost savings to profit growth and productivity improvements to drive better business decisions): Know how your bots are performing Maximize ROI Predict Business results Increase automation visibility Calculate business impact Access RPA insights anywhere.

d) Automation: At the heart of the platform, safely automate your repetitive processes with RPA workspace. Being in the cloud means you can democratize the power of automation with AARI digital assistants in a single deployment at scale instantly. You can get triple growth and efficiency. Scale faster than ever. At the heart of the cloud-native platform, all repetitive digital tasks and processes can be automated faster than any other solution. With such simple automation, whether in the latest web-based applications or legacy systems, one type of RPA can bring siled technology together and transform disconnected processes into connected and unified/aligned digital operations. There are 100% web-based and cloud-native RPA workspaces, offering maximum automation flexibility. Automation-specific RPAs are designed specifically for business users, common developers, and professional programmers.

Gartner Forecasts.

Gartner forecasts the global market for hyperautomation-enabling software to reach $600 billion by 2022. Digital transformation and IT automation needs drive hyperautomation opportunities.

The global market for technology enabling hyperautomation will reach $596.6 billion by 2022, according to a new forecast from Gartner Inc. This represents a new forecast from $481.6 billion in 2020 and $532.4 billion projected for this year.

"Hyperatomization has gone from being an option to a condition of survival," said Fabrizio Biscotti, research vice president at Gartner. "Organizations will require more IT and business process automation as they are forced to accelerate digital transformation plans in a post-Covid-19 digital-first world".

Hyperautomation is an approach that enables organizations to quickly identify, examine, and automate as many processes as possible using technology such as RPA, Low Code Application Platforms (LCAP), Artificial Intelligence (AI), and Virtual Assistants.

Tools like RPA, LCAP, and AI are considered process agnostic software, meaning they can be used by any organization across multiple IT and business use cases. Process-agnostic software will be in greater demand as a key enabler of the hyper-automation trend. The market is expected to see double-digit growth until 2022. Other software used to automate more specific tasks such as ERP, Supply Chain and CRM Systems will also contribute to market growth.

Gartner predicts that by 2024, the drive toward hyperautomation will see organizations adopt at least three of the 20 types of process-driven software that enable hyperautomation.

"Organizations are moving from a loosely coupled set of automation technologies to a more connected automation strategy", said Cathy Tornbohm, research vice president at Gartner. "In response, vendors are developing integrated offerings that combine technologies like RPA, LCAP and Business Process Management into a single packaged tool".

The fastest Growing Hyperautomation Enablement Software category includes tools that provide visibility to map business activities, automate and manage content management, orchestrate and manage content ingestion, orchestrate work across multiple systems, and provide complex rule engines.

Technologies to Automate Content Ingestion, such as Signature Verification Tools, Optical Character Recognition, Document Ingestion, Conversational Artificial Intelligence and Natural Language Technology (NLT) will be in high demand. Organizations will need such tools to automate the digitization and structuring of data and content; for example, "automate the process of digitizing and sorting paper records".

Gartner expects that by 2024, organizations will reduce operational costs by 30% by combining Hyperautomation Technologies with Redesigned Operational Processes.

"The shift to hyperautomation will be a key enabler for companies to achieve operational excellence, and subsequently cost savings, in a digital-first world," Tombohm said.

Benefits and Challenges of Hyperautomation.

Benefits: Hyperautomatization extends core automation and RPA with advanced technologies like AI and Machine Learning. Thus, hyperautomation helps organizations to:

• Gain efficiency by automating many processes in your business.
• Optimize workflow allocation by ensuring repetitive tasks are completed consistently and efficiently.
• Reduce costs by using digital technologies to automate tasks that would otherwise replace tasks that require manual intervention.
• Increase agility by providing richer and faster information for more accurate decision making.
• Produce higher quality products with faster time to market by leveraging more intelligence, improving consistency and reducing human error.
• Make better business decisions, identify areas for improvement, and improve the customer experience by capturing more data and providing insights on that data.
• Reduce the technical expertise required to configure and manage automation tools and automation solutions.

Hyperautomation is especially advantageous for organizations with legacy operations or low levels of automation. These organizations can see real results through digital process automation and infrastructure automation to increase connectivity, agility or efficiency of business operations.

Challenges: Before embarking on a hyperautomation journey, it's important to pay close attention to details "up front" to help ensure a smooth implementation. Some of the more common challenges include the following:

• Learn to measure success.
• Develop and adhere to a realistic project schedule.
• Make sure you have end-to-end leadership for the entire project.
• Be able to calculate tangible and intangible ROI (Return on Investment) in advance, as accurately as possible.
• Choosing the right solution from the ever-growing and evolving product market.
• Gain stakeholder and management support for a new and unfamiliar approach.

How to Solve the Challenges of Hyperautomation.

The following actions can help ensure that your implementation project is successful:

1.Rely on Internal Expertise: Identify process experts as they exist today from the business side and the technical side. Who better understands the inputs, the mechanics and the results? Do you have in-house experts who are familiar with new technologies and solutions? Make sure these people are involved in the project from the beginning.

2. Proactively Manage Change:

• Take a "top-down approach" to gain enthusiasm and support. Involve management, stakeholders, and customers within the organization to ensure buy-in. This effort will provide exponential returns as positive insights reverberate throughout the organization.
• Any time a process is automated, particularly with hyperautomation, you should expect to encounter fears of employee replacement and concerns about the value and competition of the technology. Take the time to calm your fears.
• Retrain employees whenever possible. This not only provides a more knowledgeable user base, but also alleviates concerns about security and longevity of work, gaining greater support. Also, not only does it increase the knowledge of team members, but it can increase the number of people with that knowledge. This translates into faster resolution of any issues that may arise.

3. Identify Barriers and Risks to Your Effort: What limitations might present a challenge as you begin to move forward? If you can mitigate or remedy any risks or restrictions in advance, your process will run smoothly.

4. Determine Which Processes Must Be Addressed Early, Versus Which Processes Can Wait: Use Process Mining to assess your existing processes and develop process maps to determine where high value exists. Create a digital twin to assess the effectiveness of the process and determine where improvements can be made.

5. Provide Opportunity to Practice in Sandboxes: Offer employees a safe way to explore. The resulting level of familiarity and comfort will ease implementation and also determine where training is needed or where problems may arise.

Final Words.

IBM contends that any industry can use hyperautomation, and in some cases, the technology is customizable or already customized to the needs of that particular business or industry.

In fact, according to a study by Gartner, "by 20024, 80% of hyperautomation offerings will have limited depth. Industry specific", which will make implementation easier and more efficient immediately. In other words, by 2024, we should expect to see industry-specific hyperautomation solutions, such as the Automotive Manufacturing industry, with industry-specific hooks and functionality designed to make the process easier.

Here are some industry-specific examples that show the benefits of hyperautomation:

i) Health Care: The Health Care industry, with so many repetitive processes, contractual obligations and regulations to comply with, is in a unique position to use hyper-automation with technologies such as natural language processing (NLP) to provide automated services, speed up processes reduce costs and provide higher quality.

ii) Industry: Hyperautomation is similar to a second industrial revolution. Production facilities can use hyper-automation technologies in conjunction with business process management (BMP) to produce higher quality products at scale. Many industrial environments also use legacy systems and processes that could benefit from optimization.

iii) Financial Services: The financial services industry involves many calculations, transactions and communications with clients, buyers, fund managers and other entities. Hyper-automation, coupled with technologies like optical character recognition (OCR), can reduce manual intervention while ensuring high-quality results across front-end and back-end processes. Hyperautomation can also help economic recovery from the pandemic.

Hyperautomation is becoming a priority for many companies affected by Covid-19. Industries around the world have faced productivity challenges due to a reduced workforce, imposed capacity constraints, and unforeseen fluctuations in demand. Hyperautomation is being adopted to address many of the resulting challenges by automating and accelerating repetitive processes. Companies are also using intelligent automation to increase consistency and quality, while often lowering costs.

And what are you doing in terms of Automation and Hyperautomation?

PS: For those students of the course, go back to the course and follow the instructions to assimilate the knowledge delivered.

Source: "La Hiperautomatización", AutomationAnywhere; "Hyperautomation", Gartner Glossary; "Gartner Forecasts Worldwide Hyperautomation -Enabling Software marker to Reach Nearly $600 Billion by 2022", Gartner (2021); "Hyperautomation: The Benefits and Challenges", IBM.