5 Ways Hyperautomation Unleashes Business Potential Across the Enterprise

By Kunal Mehta, Director, Product Marketing

As digital transformation strategies continue to mature, hyperautomation is the key to a futureproofed enterprise – and integration sits at its core.

Two major issues are making it harder for today’s organizations to integrate systems and automate critical business processes:

• Issue #1: Extreme application proliferation
• Issue #2: Tech talent challenges

Both issues have grown in intensity following the post-pandemic SaaS explosion – and have recently become more complex following a wave of tech layoffs and the increasingly rigorous pace of digital transformation.

As a result, non-technical business users have been independently seeking, purchasing, and deploying their own tools and applications – both a blessing and a curse to IT leaders. On one hand, it relieves pressure on IT and liberates core personnel to concentrate on the most critical initiatives. But it also introduces management, security, governance, and integration obstacles that IT personnel are forced to deal with.

Initiatives to automate IT systems and business processes have a major role to play in overcoming both of these impediments, and for good reason. Connecting systems, automating processes, and unifying data during a time of staffing and financial unpredictability is critical for stability, growth, and agility.

This is fueling the need for a more modern and scalable approach to growth and innovation: hyperautomation.

What is hyperautomation?

Hyperautomation is a methodical and business-centric strategy employed by organizations to efficiently identify, evaluate, and automate a wide range of their business and IT operations. It demands a shift in mindset, from one concentrated on integration and endpoints towards one that aspires to holistic automation of far-reaching business processes. Hyperautomation technologies include (but are not limited to):

• Integration Platform as a Service (iPaaS)
• Robotic Process Automation (RPA)
• Low-code/no-code application platform (LCAP)
• Process and task automation tools
• Artificial intelligence (AI)/machine learning (ML)
• Event-driven architecture (EDA)
• Business Process Management (BPM)

It may seem overwhelming at first glance, but here’s the key thing to note here when getting started: integration sits at the core of hyperautomation. All of these tools and technologies need to be seamlessly connected to enable any automation initiative.

How does this look in action? Let’s take a look.

5 ways hyperautomation unleashes business potential

Here are five scenarios where hyperautomation can deliver significant strategic benefits.

1. Unleash new growth opportunitiesSaving money via productivity gains and other efficiencies is important, but leveraging those cost savings can be limited when using solely as a catalyst for boosting capacity. For example, consider a manual customer onboarding process. If you eliminate manual processes by automating workflows with point-to-point integrations, for example, the best you can do is to save what it costs to run the program. With a hyperautomation mindset, you can unleash unlimited growth opportunities.

   For example, by thinking beyond a mere point-to-point integration and instead uniting several previously disjointed processes with a scalable solution, you can liberate greater amounts of funds and free up overburdened internal talent for more strategic responsibilities, opening new opportunities for innovation.

2. Extract more value from M&A activitiesAlthough many enterprises use mergers and acquisitions to fuel their growth, these activities almost always create new challenges. Effectively integrating an expanded application portfolio is an inevitable by-product of these activities, which can be quite challenging under time and resource constraints.

   Adopting a hyperautomation mindset can play a major role in helping make more informed decisions that may uncover new opportunities for holistic, long-term value. For example, several groups within the newly combined business may interact with the same vendor. A dashboard that provides visibility into these exchanges can spur conversations that lead to a more favorable relationship with the supplier. This approach is effective for realizing cost savings, uncovering new ways to deliver customer value, and ultimately futureproofing your newly blended business.

3. Create a single source of truth for accurate, real-time insightsThe right convergence of technology can power an objective, consolidated, cross-process dashboard to serve as a single source of truth – and free up your staff from mundane, error-prone tasks. With more transparency, senior leaders can uncover previously hidden insights to make more informed conclusions. And the benefits are not limited just to the executive suite; it can immensely benefit your employees and customers as well.

   But it’s not only humans that benefit from increased visibility – an integrated picture across multiple systems and processes can supply AI-driven chatbots with the information they need to intelligently answer questions. However, attempting to implement new technologies in siloed barriers, cut off from key information, guarantees failure and frustrates customers.

4. Fill in the integration gaps to get better visibility into processes and dataEnterprises with advanced automation practices still experience gaps between the business procedures managed by the different systems. Low-code application platform (LCAP) technologies are designed to solve this by slashing the amount of time and effort necessary for even non technically-oriented users to build applications to fill in the cross-process divides, opening new opportunities for insights.

   The most comprehensive integration technologies go beyond mere API integration to communicate with applications and data sources via electronic data interchange (EDI) and message queuing (MQ), enabling hyperautomation across even more applications and processes and delivering more tangible operational results.

5. Raise the bar on your systems portfolioOrganizations are moving to “best-of-breed” solutions instead of large monolithic applications. An iPaaS system that can easily integrate these varied applications, combined with LCAP tools that non-technical ‘citizen developers’ can utilize to build applications to fill gaps in the integrated business process and extend knowledge sharing, can be hugely beneficial.

   The beauty of combining LCAP tools and iPaaS products is that once you set up the initial iPaaS cross-system integration, you can rapidly leverage those building blocks to scale up the number of applications in your portfolio. This is a catalyst for innovation and illustrates how well the enabling technologies for hyperautomation can work together.

Activate your hyperautomation journey with integration

These scenarios are just a starting point. Enterprises that forge ahead and embark on a hyperautomation journey can expect to increase their overall agility thanks to cost savings, augmented efficiencies, and, most notably, remarkable business process improvements – with integration setting the groundwork for it all.