How Hyperautomation Can Pave the Way to Sustained Business Agility & Operational Excellence
As part of Solutions Review’s Expert Insights Series—a collection of contributed articles written by industry experts in enterprise software categories—Rick Rider, the Vice President of Product Management at Infor, outlines how hyperautomation can help companies pave the way toward better and most sustainable business agility, operational excellence, and more.
With the continuous pressure on cost efficiency and business growth, there is a conflicting need for new business models and differentiation while also being cost conscious. Organizations need to prove ROI faster while also focusing on the areas of their business where the highest cost and risk occur. More often than not, this tends to center around operations and people.
Simply automating one given task is not enough. This will merely begin the journey rather than provide a solution. Realizing hyperautomation across the enterprise represents a significant innovation and solution to address today’s cost efficiency and business growth challenges.
Unpacking Hyperautomation
Hyperautomation continuously improves the automation of any process in an organization without significant human intervention. If one thinks about a business process to achieve an outcome, the process can involve many steps—from simple rule-based steps to more complex ones such as analysis and decision-making. Given the complexity of enterprise environments, hyperautomation uses advanced technologies to automate these processes and tasks to help organizations improve efficiency and accuracy, speed up processes, and free up employees to focus on more strategic work. It’s not a one-time activity but a step-by-step improvement framework that enables you to reassess and evaluate continuously.
According to Gartner, hyperautomation “involves the orchestrated use of multiple technologies, tools, or platforms, including 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 Platform as a Service (iPaaS), low-code/no-code tools, packaged software, and other types of decision, process, and task automation tools.”
With many of today’s C-suite and board of directors demanding accelerated growth and operational excellence, hyper-automation represents a critical path toward achieving both goals.
An Industry-Specific Solution
Hyperautomation is forecasted to benefit various industries today, including healthcare, manufacturing, distribution, food & beverage, and numerous others.
In healthcare, for example, hyperautomation approaches can speed the process of Office of Inspector General (OIG) vendor checks. For background, health systems are required to screen vendors and contractors in addition to screening employees and providers. Suppose a health system works with a vendor on the OIG exclusion list. In that case, the OIG states that no payment will be made by any Federal healthcare program for items or services furnished, ordered, or prescribed by the excluded individual or organization.
To ensure health systems remain compliant with the OIG, hyperautomation, in combination with leveraging AI and machine learning insights, can be implemented to analyze a health systems’ vendor database and compare it against the OIG’s exclusion database regularly. This approach can help organizations ensure, in real-time, that both existing and new vendors have not become part of the OIG exclusion—turning a process that could take hours into a process of only a couple of minutes. In addition, hyperautomation utilizing RPA can help food and beverage producers deal with time-sensitive issues such as product recalls and maintain business agility.
Traditionally, connected wholesalers and resellers must be found, filtered by delivery destinations, and contacted in manual, time-consuming, and costly ways. Now, technologies such as RPA, notification services, and workflow management systems can automate this entire process, drastically reducing time-to-awareness and overall cost-to-resolutions. Numerous other connected use cases will follow.
Looking Ahead
Hyperautomation can pave the way to sustained business agility and operational excellence. The hyperautomation journey will be one of continuous improvement, even if a sense of automation exists. The desire to make business processes faster, more accurate, proactive, and more intelligent will continue to drive organizations to leverage hyperautomation.