TechRadar 2023 Hot Topic – Business Automation
This article is a selection of the 2023 Devoteam TechRadar, it’s designed to introduce the context of the chapter by covering a hot topic in the industry.
This year’s focus is on the Cloud Native era – a new era where technology and business are more interconnected than ever. Companies must prepare for disruptive models built with, in, and for the cloud. The technologies in TechRadar 2023 are mostly all participating in this movement.
Hyperautomation can help you change the way you work
All companies have repetitive and laborious processes with little or no added value for employees. Thanks to digitalisation, many of these processes are now computerised and can easily be automated. Robotic Process Automation (RPA) allows you to automate processes by creating computer-based robots. By integrating them with other technologies, we can handle more advanced processes. We call this Hyperautomation.
For instance, Process Mining will allow us to discover which processes are the most fitted and how to improve them before automation. Then, Intelligent Document Processing (IDP) will classify and digitise data from scanned documents to exploit them. Another example is Chatbot which can provide an interface for users. All these technologies (and others) put together can provide very powerful automation.
Hyperautomation can be used in any sector. The only constraint is to have highly repetitive processes that are worth automating. The benefits of automation depend on the company’s automation strategy. The main benefits of automation are obviously gains of time and money. But automating also results in a direct increase in operational efficiency since processes are executed faster and better leading to increased client satisfaction rates and employee productivity.
Devoteam’s Recommendation to get started on Hyperautomation
There is a growing trend towards Hyperautomation in the banking and insurance industries. Nevertheless, any industry can benefit from it. Regardless of how advanced a company is in its journey, RPA is generally the first step in its Hyperautomation journey without being a prerequisite. When companies have mastered RPA, other technologies can be integrated to go even further in automation. Today, many RPA vendors are expanding their activities to include Hyperautomation, which makes it easier than ever to integrate RPA with technologies such as Process Mining, AI, and IDP.
The role of Hyperautomation becomes clearer when you have large amounts of executions of the same process. Companies easily find value and a better ROI in such cases.
Note that automation does not come with a one size fits all strategy hence, it is important that you analyse the processes in depth and optimise it according to your needs (gain of time/money, customer satisfaction, errors reduction…).
Some examples of areas where Automation can be deployed for increased efficiency are:
- Account Payable to receive, classify, process, and pay out invoices (RPA + IDP).
- Customer Service to answer customer questions and deal with claims (chatbot/callbot + RPA).
- Customer onboarding to help with screening, compliance, processing documents and creation of accounts (RPA + IDP + Chatbot)
- IT migration for transfer of data and backup (RPA)
While starting out your automation journey, it is best to choose ‘quick wins’. The best processes are the simplest ones with the strongest ROI. Upon developing these ‘quick wins’, you will be able to step up and combine technologies to work on multiple and more complex use cases.