What's Planergy?

Modern Spend Management and Accounts Payable software.

Helping organizations spend smarter and more efficiently by automating purchasing and invoice processing.

We saved more than $1 million on our spend in the first year and just recently identified an opportunity to save about $10,000 every month on recurring expenses with Planergy.

King Ocean Logo

Cristian Maradiaga

King Ocean

Download a free copy of "Preparing Your AP Department For The Future", to learn:

  • How to transition from paper and excel to eInvoicing.
  • How AP can improve relationships with your key suppliers.
  • How to capture early payment discounts and avoid late payment penalties.
  • How better management in AP can give you better flexibility for cash flow management.

Hyperautomation: What Is It and Why It’s Important

Hyperautomation What Is It and Why It's Important

In business, hyperautomation refers to the use of advanced technology, such as artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning (ML), to automate processes. By automating tasks that were previously performed by humans, businesses can increase efficiency and productivity.

Hyperautomation can also help to improve decision-making by providing employees with more time to focus on higher-level tasks.

Despite the benefits of hyperautomation, there are some risks associated with its implementation.

What Is Hyperautomation?

In the context of automation, hyperautomation is the practice of identifying and automating as many business processes as possible.

While many organizations mistakenly believe that hyperautomation can be achieved with just one technology, it is a combination of technologies, orchestrated in an optimal manner.

Examples of such technologies include artificial intelligence, machine learning, robotic process automation (RPA), and low-code tools.

Automation vs. Hyperautomation

With the increasing importance of customer experience in the insurance industry, businesses must implement technologies that make customers’ lives better.

Hyperautomation has helped the finance and banking sectors transform many of their core processes, enabling them to meet stringent compliance requirements and remain competitive.

The retail industry has seen great improvements with AI-based hyperautomation, including the ability to streamline order processing and customer recognition. Hyperautomation also reduces errors and improves overall processing time.

The key to hyperautomation is to standardize business processes. Without these, automation is only a convenience, and businesses will find themselves limited. A process that runs 30 or 40 ways cannot harmonize with other processes, and enterprises will suffer from significant instability.

For this reason, a well-designed process is critical for the ROI of hyperautomation. Moreover, a well-developed strategy will ensure the effectiveness of automation.

The goal of digital transformation is to automate as much as possible, but if you don’t have the necessary resources to do so, you may end up spending a lot more than you have.

This is why automation is important for digital transformation, but hyperautomation is an additional layer.

It builds upon automation to make processes easier and more effective. Companies that invest in automation should consider investing in software that helps visualize current states and modernize BPA.

How To Get Started with Hyperautomation?

One of the common misconceptions about hyperautomation is that it’s too expensive.

Whether you’re building a new software system or automating an existing process, you must choose the appropriate tools and technologies to maximize your ROI.

For example, while hyperautomation can help you reduce operational costs, it can also create risks, ranging from brand and compliance risks to the cost of errors.

It’s, therefore, crucial to invest in training your team from the very beginning.

RPA is the cornerstone of hyperautomation. This is a method of automating tasks by a bot or software program that mimics human activity.

These programs can replicate the steps that a human user would take to access data and complete a task, including logging into a system, retrieving data, and entering information into a database.

However, a single bot can only do a particular type of task. Using a network of bots can perform several repetitive tasks at the same time.

In addition to combining RPA and AI technologies, hyperautomation is an entire framework that can automate any business process. By combining these tools, it is possible to achieve end-to-end automation.

The process of hyperautomation begins with RPA and continues with a series of tools to scale and augment its automation capabilities. With this kind of advanced automation, you’ll be able to automate even the most complex and difficult processes across business operations.

  • Start with Analysis

    Before you do anything else, use process mining and process discovery to get insight into your current business processes, workflows, and environment. This will help you understand where your gaps and bottlenecks are, to ensure you rebuild better business process management with your automation tools.

    To get the best view of your existing processes, create a digital twin, or a duplicate model of your process. The digital twin will use technology to duplicate the ecosystem for improved process visualization so you can more easily see areas of improvement to create more efficiency moving forward.

  • Identify Structured and Unstructured Data

    Determine the inputs and data you’ll need to accomplish the processes.

  • Predict Outcomes

    Make predictions about outcomes in terms of return on investment (ROI) and efficiencies.

  • Research Automation Platforms

    Determine the platforms and automation technologies that will best serve your digital process automation needs. Leverage as many tools that already exist as possible, such as machine learning, optical character recognition (OCR), and natural language processing (NLP).

  • Implement Automation Initiatives

    Once you know what you’re going to do and the tools you’ll use to do it, it’s time to implement your chosen hyperautomation technology to see it in action. As you see results, you can further scale automation for more process optimization.

  • Use AI Tools

    Employ artificial intelligence tools to handle your chosen tasks, using technology such as low-code or no-code software. This can reduce the challenge of setting up the workflows, requiring lesser technical knowledge and quicker deployment.

“Using RPA and AI, organiztions of all sizes across all sectors can automate the customer journey from end-to-end.”

Benefits of Hyperautomation

With the adoption of this technology, organizations can scale their operations according to customer and employee demand. This translates to improved work quality and increased employee engagement.

The technology also facilitates digital transformation of organizations and increases their return on investment.

The benefits of hyperautomation extend to government agencies, where the lack of automation is causing them to rely on disparate legacy systems and slow decision-making processes.

While RPA enables people to automate tasks, hyperautomation allows bots to perform these tasks. Not only is this technology future-ready, but it also allows machines to read into business processes and improve them.

In addition to reducing human error, hyperautomation also keeps an enterprise’s technology infrastructure up to date, ensuring that business processes continue to be profitable. In fact, hyperautomation is a business necessity.

Another benefit of hyperautomation is that it enables business users to automate long-tail tasks with minimal technical knowledge. Hyperautomation tools democratize bot development and enable non-technical employees to automate simple as well as complex processes.

Not only do they increase productivity, but they also increase consistency, freeing up IT staff. By eliminating human error and reducing the need for human intervention, hyperautomation also increases efficiency, improves quality, and frees up valuable time.

Challenges of Hyperautomation

Organizations should not make the mistake of assuming the latest automation technology is a one-size-fits-all solution. They should be strategic about their automation investments and realistic about the impact of emerging technologies.

To begin, an organization must develop a comprehensive list of business processes. To do so, it should also determine which processes are more important than others.

Hyperautomation relies on a siloed architecture. If the enterprise doesn’t have a digital strategy, hyperautomation will likely be a burden instead of an asset.

For example, a siloed architecture can lead to technical debt, unsustainable IT architectures, and data issues. Ultimately, hyperautomation is a means to break down siloes and improve the quality of services and products provided to users.

Another challenge of hyperautomation is that employees may be wary of being replaced. In addition, organizations may feel ill-equipped to support a hyperautomation strategy, due to limited resources and poor quality data.

To address employee concerns, businesses can offer training programs in the use of hyperautomation and share best practices in the implementation of this technology. Further, organizations can consider hiring additional human resources to help implement hyperautomation throughout the organization.

Common Use Cases of Hyperautomation

  • Healthcare

    Automation can make the healthcare industry more profitable. It can significantly improve the patient experience data collection accuracy.

    Healthcare organizations can hyperautomate cycle times, patient interaction, document collection, and data processing making it easier to gather more precise data for treatment plans.

    It’s also possible to automate:

    • Medical record and data management
    • Operational analytics
    • Patient preauthorization
    • Claims processing
  • Life Sciences

    Life sciences organizations can easily automate:

    • Back-office productivity
    • Regulatory compliance
    • Product safety issue tracking
    • Supply chain management
    • Clinical trial data
    • Lifecycle management
  • Banking and Finance

    Banks can reduce costs and improve efficiency by automating:

    • Customer service
    • Loan origination
    • Customer onboarding
    • Regulatory compliance
    • Data migration
    • Credit decisions
  • Insurance

    Insurance companies can reduce costs while improving the customer experience with real-time automation of things such as:

    • Claims processing and administration
    • Claims prioritization and assignment
    • Audit management
    • Enrollment and eligibility
    • Report Automation
    • User information updates
  • Supply Chain and Manufacturing

    Automate tasks such as:

    • Purchase to pay cycle
    • ERP processes
    • Inventory management
  • Public Sector

    Businesses in the public sector can automate:

    • Mission processes
    • Financial processes
    • Procurement
    • Human resources
  • Retail

    Retail, with ecommerce in particular, is a prime industry for intelligent business process management with plenty of automation opportunities.

    With automated order processing and custom loyalty programs, hyperautomation with AI can help streamline a variety of previously time-consuming tasks, such as targeted email marketing, social media ad placement, customer service, and facial recognition when customers enter a brick-and-mortar store.

    Business owners can also use hyperautomation to track and analyze marketplace data to keep prices competitive and address customer feedback quickly, for faster decision making, better revenue, and more profitability.

The Future of Hyperautomation and Its Impact

The future of hyperautomation is bright, and it will have a profound impact on businesses and workers.

Intelligent process automation will enable businesses to increase efficiency, accuracy, and productivity. It will also enable businesses to reduce costs and compete more effectively in the global marketplace.

Workers will benefit from increased job security and higher wages as businesses compete for their skills.

What’s your goal today?

1. Use Planergy to manage purchasing and accounts payable

We’ve helped save billions of dollars for our clients through better spend management, process automation in purchasing and finance, and reducing financial risks. To discover how we can help grow your business:

2. Download our guide “Preparing Your AP Department For The Future”

Download a free copy of our guide to future proofing your accounts payable department. You’ll also be subscribed to our email newsletter and notified about new articles or if have something interesting to share.

3. Learn best practices for purchasing, finance, and more

Browse hundreds of articles, containing an amazing number of useful tools, techniques, and best practices. Many readers tell us they would have paid consultants for the advice in these articles.

Business is Our Business

Stay up-to-date with news sent straight to your inbox

Sign up with your email to receive updates from our blog

This website uses cookies

We use cookies to personalise content and ads, to provide social media features and to analyse our traffic. We also share information about your use of our site with our social media, advertising and analytics partners who may combine it with other information that you’ve provided to them or that they’ve collected from your use of their services.

Read our privacy statement here.