Hyper-Automation vs. Robotics Process Automation (RPA)
Automation has taken much of the business world by storm. For a good reason, it presents the digital transformation journey transition continuum that transforms process-focus to data-focus.
Human workers also need assistance to move from repetitive, rule-based tasks to activities requiring higher-value insight. As a result, automation has become a requirement.
But, most people still do not have a complete idea about RPA and how it differs from Hyperautomation.
So let’s find out in this blog post RPA vs. hyper-automation.
What is Hyper-automation?
Hyperautomation uses technologies such as artificial intelligence, machine learning, and RPA to automate business processes that are usually done by humans.
A Few Examples of Hyper-automation:
- Understanding documents using OCR (Optical Character Recognition)
- Understanding emails using NLP (Natural Language Processing)
- Forecast stocks and automate restocking
- Enhancing automation flows using AI/ML (Artificial Intelligence/Machine Learning)
What is Robotic Process Automation (RPA)?
Robotic Process Automation (RPA) is the process of using robots that are trained to automate routine, repetitive, and predictable business tasks through interactions that are designed to emulate human actions.
There are Two Types Of RPA Bots:
- Assisted RPA bots: This bot is deployed on a desktop PC, with the worker offering minimal interactions and the bot executing the more complex and repetitive processes.
- Unassisted RPA bots: This type of bot hand-less scheduled bot for designated workflows.
A Few Examples of Robotic Process Automation:
- RPA can organize queries and send them to the right department, such as billing, technical sales, etc.
- Chatbots are another great example, even at the intersection of RPA and AI.
A Few More Real-world RPA Use Cases are Mentioned below:
Use case 1: Finance
The key areas in finance to automate include:
- Procure to pay
- Record to report
- Quote to cash
Use case 2: Human Resources
The key areas in human resources to automate include:
- Unifying employee datasets across disparate HR computer systems.
- Tracking and updating employee records with greater accuracy
- Streamlining the onboarding process for new hires
Use case 3: Payrolls
RPA can help with Payroll functions such as:
- Time Entry Validations
- Attendance Management
- Resignation Handling
- Changes in Payroll Records
- Payroll Deductions
Use case 4: Retail (Inventory Management)
RPA can solve these issues through a variety of automation:
- Assessing sales numbers internationally and internationally
- Optimizing inventory levels to maximize working capital without failing to meet demand
- Automating notifications of low inventory (or even automated ordering)
- Reducing inventory errors — inventory records are inaccurate over 60% of the time.
Related Read: RPA Use Cases In The Real World [Updated 2022]
What’s the difference between RPA and Hyperautomation?
The main difference between RPA and hyper-automation is that while RPA focuses primarily on automating rule-based processes, hyper-automation is a larger modification of how a business works that takes RPA to another level.
Hyperautomation involves added tech like machine learning to utilize data to recognize patterns, learn, and add another layer of depth while following simple rule-based processes to accomplish low-level tasks.
Benefits of Robotic Process Automation:
Let’s have a quick overview of the RPA benefits:
1. Reliable Consistency
What if human errors were no longer an aspect of some of the most crucial workflows within your business? Errors in accounts payable that leads to unplanned costs for a business are expected. Your business may encounter duplicity of payments caused by invoices your team incorrectly repeated because of a transposed digit in a PO number. Reaching 100% error-free data accuracy is possible when you automate.
2. Improve Business Data Security
The principal concern business leaders face with using RPA tools is their impact on operational risk. Security vulnerabilities, data leaks, and breaches are already familiar, and management may worry about such systems’ security.
However, when your team critically manages and rigorously puts RPA parameters, the risk of leaks between platforms is relatively reduced. Choosing a well-developed and maintained solution will ensure software security to a great extent.
3. Compliance Regulations and Governance
Developing RPA solutions and implementing them in the enterprise will make it imperative that other organizations consider a more mature approach to automation governance. This is because RPA possesses some risk factors that can impact business operations.
Further, a lack of control and authority over using more standard tools for shared services across the organization can lead to breaches of security and data leaks.
Benefits of Hyperautomation
Let’s have a quick overview of the benefits of hyper-automation:
1. Digital Transformation with Automation
In most cases, for businesses, automation is the first phase toward adopting a complete digital transformation strategy that streamlines, optimizes, and significantly increases efficiency.
Hyperautomation is just a continuance of that transformation that takes everything to another level.
2. Cost-cutting
Automating business processes reduces significant costs by eliminating unnecessary expenditures within business operations by releasing workers from tasks that don’t require human intervention to accomplish the task.
Hyperautomation takes one step further by making automation the user guide for all business operations.
This implies it takes over every possible task that can be met with automation and substantially reduces costs in many different parts of a business.
3. Expand Data Usage
Employing hyper-automation enables you to leverage your existing business data and gather additional data that you have not before.
With hyper-automation, integrating your data, AI, machine learning, and automation allows you to achieve more efficient data usage that is accurate and error-free.
It implies that using more data (including data you’ve not used earlier) and even having AI use data offers you additional insights.
What’s Next?
If your enterprise already utilizes RPA, then hyper-automation is the next step in the automation journey. Evaluating whether a hyper-automation platform can support all the components you want for driving complete automation is critical.
Hyper-automation takes RPA out of the back office and into a front-facing environment. No need to mention that the COVID-19 pandemic has accelerated the demand for a digital society.
Eventually, adopting digital transformation has accelerated the need to adopt IA automation technologies.
