As the world becomes increasingly digitized, businesses are facing unprecedented pressure to innovate and transform their operations to stay competitive. Automation has emerged as a powerful tool to help organizations streamline their processes and increase efficiency. However, with customers’ growing expectations for fast and personalized service in our 24/7 society, businesses need to expand beyond automating simple administrative tasks and tackle more complex cross-enterprise work. In their paper “Automation and the Future of Work”, IBM Institute of Business Value predict that “ In just three years, the nature of machine work will change. The percentage of tasks overall—administrative, departmental, and cross-enterprise and expert—will continue to grow substantially, with the largest percentage increase in cross-enterprise and expert work.”
In other words, businesses are turning to hyperautomation – also known as enterprise-wide intelligent automation or extreme automation. Hyperautomation goes beyond traditional automation solutions by integrating multiple technologies. It involves applying intelligent automation to every aspect of an organization’s operations, from repetitive tasks to complex cross-enterprise work, in order to achieve the best possible outcomes. By combining different technologies, hyperautomation can help transform how businesses operate, driving efficiency, reducing errors, and increasing agility throughout the organization.
In this blog, we will delve into the concept of hyperautomation and why it is essential for organizations to adopt it. Furthermore, we will introduce IBM Cloud Pak for Business Automation as an enterprise-wide intelligent automation solution that can empower businesses to leverage the full potential of hyperautomation and transform how work gets done throughout their organization.
What is Hyperautomation?
Hyperautomation is the latest stage in the evolution of enterprise intelligent automation. It builds upon earlier stages, including foundational automation, advanced automation, and intelligent automation, and takes automation to a new level of capability and impact. To understand what hyperautomation is, it’s helpful to review these earlier stages and see how they have led up to this new frontier in automation. In this section, we’ll explore each stage of the evolution of enterprise intelligent automation and see how they have paved the way for hyperautomation.
The first stage along the evolution of automation is foundational automation. This stage focuses on automating repetitive and simple tasks that use structured data. For example, it might include the use of basic workflow and robotic process automation (RPA). The goal of foundational automation is to improve efficiency by removing manual work and the errors associated with it. While foundational automation can be a significant improvement over manual processes, it is limited by its reliance on structured data – especially in today’s world where it is estimated that only 20% of data resides in structured formats.
The next stage in the evolution of automation is advanced automation, which goes beyond repetitive tasks and structured data. This stage aims to bring humans and machines together, leveraging the strengths of both to handle unstructured data and complex workflows. Advanced automation incorporates technologies such as natural language processing and analysis to enable more than just routine automation. This stage also allows for more expertise to be involved in the automation process, enabling businesses to tackle more complex tasks and improve decision-making. Advanced automation is a critical step towards achieving true digital transformation, but it is not the final stage in the evolution of automation.
Intelligent automation represents the penultimate stage in the evolution of automation, bringing in the power of artificial intelligence (AI) to enable actions to be completed with little human intervention. With the ability to handle large volumes of unstructured data, recognize patterns, and make decisions based on machine learning and reasoning, intelligent automation far surpasses the capabilities of foundational and advanced automation. Moreover, intelligent automation can operate independently of human operators, thanks to the use of machine learning models that enable the system to continuously improve its decision-making processes over time. As a result, businesses can achieve greater accuracy and efficiency while reducing costs associated with manual processes.
The final stage in the evolution of automation is enterprise-wide intelligent automation, which involves the application of a range of technologies to transform how work gets done throughout an organization. This stage extends beyond the scope of intelligent automation and encompasses cross-enterprise work that involves multiple departments, as well as expert work that requires human judgment, such as personalized consultations. By leveraging the full potential of enterprise-wide intelligent automation, businesses can create a seamless, agile, and intelligent digital workplace that drives innovation and growth. Enterprise-wide intelligent automation is about bringing together intelligent automation, analytics, machine learning, and other technologies to every corner of an enterprise, empowering every individual to drive outcomes across the spectrum of work. The goal is to deliver start-to-finish customer journeys with straight-through processing, where processes are automated end-to-end with little to no manual intervention. This type of automation results in increased efficiency and improved customer experience. As IBM puts it, enterprise-wide intelligent automation is “the act of bringing intelligent automation to every relevant corner of your business—to every individual—to drive the right outcomes across the spectrum of work, from repetitive to cross-enterprise”.
Benefits of Hyperautomation
Although benefits can be achieved throughout each stage of the automation evolution, it is this final stage the “hyperautomation”, that really enables transformation at a new level. Enterprise-wide intelligent automation provides numerous benefits for businesses, particularly in terms of agility and scale. By adopting new operating models that were previously unattainable, businesses can increase their agility, flexibility, and innovation, which helps them stay competitive in a rapidly changing environment.
In addition, automating expert work through intelligent automation can increase the productivity of experts by providing them with deeper insights and recommendations for action. Machine learning algorithms and natural language processing can analyze large amounts of data, identify patterns and trends, and provide experts with insights that they may not have been able to see otherwise. This helps experts make more informed decisions and take actions that are more likely to lead to successful outcomes, ultimately increasing their productivity and effectiveness.
Automating cross-enterprise work through enterprise-wide intelligent automation can deliver significant benefits, including delivering start-to-finish customer experiences with straight-through processing and enabling the integration of individual business operations across the enterprise into one customized, simplified process. By streamlining processes and providing a seamless customer experience, automation can help reduce the time and resources required to complete cross-enterprise work, resulting in increased efficiency and cost savings.
In conclusion automating expert and cross-enterprise work can deliver significant benefits including streamlining processes and providing a seamless customer experience. But above all it provides the agility and scale needed to meet today’s business demands and provide your organization with a competitive edge.
IBM Cloud Pak for Business Automation
IBM Cloud Pak for Business Automation is a modular set of integrated software components designed to automate work and accelerate business growth. This solution offers a wide range of AI-powered automation capabilities for simplifying complex multi-step workflows, manual tasks, decision-making, data extraction, record management, document governance and compliance, and more. Its flexible model allows you to start small and scale up as your needs evolve.
At its core are the core automation capabilities of document processing, workflow, content services and decision management.
Document Processing
Document processing refers to the automation of the extraction and application of valuable information from various types of unstructured documents. This process can be carried out quickly and accurately using intelligent automation tools.
Workflow
You can streamline your business operations by implementing workflow automation, which can help automate case and process workflows. This can help reduce time-consuming tasks and improve overall productivity in your organization.
Content Services
Content services refer to the process of collecting, enriching, managing and governing enterprise content, with the aim of deploying it efficiently to empower employees and enhance their ability to deliver superior customer experiences.
Decision Management
In Decision Management, businesses can manage and monitor their business logic independently from applications and processes. By automating repeatable business decisions across the enterprise, with intelligence to adapt to changing demands, businesses can ensure that their operations run smoothly and efficiently.
Additional, IBM Cloud Pak for Business Automation provides automation accelerators that enhance the core capabilities. These include process mining, robotic process automation and operational intelligence.
Process Mining
With process mining, businesses can gain visibility into their end-to-end processes and use data-driven insights to identify inefficiencies and optimize their processes. This results in greater efficiency, cost savings, and improved outcomes.
Robotic Process Automation
By utilizing Robotic Process Automation (RPA), businesses can automate repetitive tasks using bots, making information-centric jobs more productive. Additionally, RPA can provide self-service automation for non-technical professionals, further increasing productivity and efficiency.
Operational Intelligence
Operational intelligence enables businesses to gain valuable insights into their operations by capturing events generated by operational systems. This data is then presented in dashboards and made available for analysis by data scientists using AI and machine learning techniques.
At DataSkill, we believe that IBM Cloud Pak for Business Automation is an excellent choice for businesses looking to improve efficiency and accuracy. With this solution, you can enable customer-focused, agile, and efficient business processes and systems to help your organization stay ahead of the competition. Contact DataSkill to discuss your particular business needs.