Look Beyond Robotic Process Automation to Hyper Intelligent Automation

Gururaj Parvati, Sales Director, Product Engineering Services, Bristlecone

To achieve efficiency and business continuity, organizations are increasingly turning to ‘automation first’ – the notion that any process that can be automated should be automated. Hyper Intelligent Automation (HIA) embodies the concept of ‘automation first,’ and it’s now seeing widespread interest and adoption.

Robotic Process Automation (RPA) has primarily focused on automation of isolated, repetitive processes running on structured data. HIA is the next-level evolution of RPA due to its ability to help organizations discover all use cases that have a potential for automation across the business value chain. All processes and workflows, even those running on unstructured or semi-structured data, are good candidates for HIA.

As a model for automation, HIA is evolving continuously with the integration of new capabilities, making it a robust tool for the implementation of companies’ digital and business operations strategies. As of now, those capabilities generally fall into five categories:

  1. Digital Twins of Organizations – Enabling organizations to develop digital replicas of themselves in an operational context.
  2. Analytics and Dashboards to Monitor Bots – Use of dashboards to monitor bot performance and estimate ROI.
  3. Integration with Third-Party Applications – Integrating HIA tools with proprietary enterprise or third-party applications.
  4. Security – Integrating measures to secure HIA implementations.
  5. Natural Language Processing (NLP) – Use of NLP to automate text-focused workflows and enhance conversational intelligence.

Companies across the industrial spectrum are adopting HIA in the vertical and horizontal functions in their value chains because it has extended the scope of automation beyond just mainframe challenges. Banking, Financial Services and Insurance are currently leading in HIA adoption, with over 15%, while Healthcare, Retail, Telecom, Travel and Hospitality are catching up.

Bristlecone has used various tools and solutions effectively to connect different IT and Operations Technology applications. In one case, we worked on extracting data from IoT sensors and processing the data using Machine Learning. This involved detecting anomalies for time complexity and threshold data. The resulting solution was able to connect to SAP using Business API to raise a service ticket.

Just like any technology, the success and ROI realization from HIA depends on how clearly you define the desired outcome and design a roadmap to rolling out and scaling the HIA solution.

Following are some key hurdles to HIA adoption:

  • Silos existing within the organization
  • Geographically or functionally widespread processes that are difficult to map
  • Lack of patience with long deployment cycles
  • Shortage of HIA proficiency in the market as well as in the organization

Bristlecone worked with a leading Electronic Data Interchange (EDI) integration platform vendor to streamline the customer onboarding process. The automation involved checking for accuracy of the EDI file and processing of invoices. In the event of errors during invoice processing, HIA learns from the previous errors and proposed resolutions.

To successfully implement and scale HIA implementation, it is essential to have a framework that is adhered to by the entire organization. The framework can be broadly divided into three stages:

  1. Prepare. It’s critical to onboard key stakeholders across the organization early in the process, eliminate opaque silos, and conduct pilot programs for the most straightforward processes to gain stakeholder buy-in and demonstrate ROI.
  2. Execute. The focus in this stage is to make sure that the operational part of the implementation goes smoothly. It involves laying operational guidelines, determining performance metrics and realigning them as necessary, and defining and putting the security measures in place.
  3. Scale. This involves seeking out all the potential application areas for HIA and extending the HIA initiative across adjacencies. A HIA CoE can also be established to ensure adherence to the implementation roadmap and incubate the talent needed for a successful rollout.

As automation increasingly becomes a mainstream strategic initiative across industries, HIA will see significant adoption because it offers several advantages over traditional automation.

  • HIA bots are less likely to break down in the face of inconsistencies caused by changes in business processes.
  • The human-in-the-loop feedback runs across the entire process to take care of a specific issue.
  • It allows companies to scale up their automation deployments much quicker through HIA’s use case discovery capability.
  • HIA has enabled the automation of complicated processes with a continuous reduction in the need for manual intervention and oversight.

HIA is the first step in preparing a business function for intelligent business process management.

Interested in taking a deeper dive? Check out this white paper: Hyper Intelligent Automation: The Next Frontier for RPA and reach out to us at info@bcone.com to book a demo.