Tackle Talent Shortage with Hyperautomation

Enable smarter operations and better decision-making

The emigration wave is getting real in Hong Kong this summer. The Immigration Department data shows more than 110,000 Hong Kong residents left in June 2022. With people leaving the city, businesses are also losing valuable talent, experiences, and know-how.

Businesses that are looking to tackle this pressing issue need a strategy that brings multiple edges. On top of offering attractive packages for new talents and better support to retain existing ones, business leaders also need to help them to work smarter and make better decisions to stay competitive.

From Automation to Hyperautomation

When businesses cannot hire more humans, many are turning to machines. Automation technologies like robotic process automation (RPA), low-code platform and AI decision engines are replacing many manual and repetitive tasks. It brings tremendous help to offload tedious tasks, increase efficiency and reduce errors.

But with the speed of talents leaving faster than the adoption of automation tools, traditional automation is no longer enough. Therefore, the momentum is building around hyperautomation—an expansion of automation in both breadth and depth.

Different from automation which simply optimizes individual tasks, hyperautomation broadens the mix of automation and AI tools to automate a series of tasks into an automated process. Instead of different silo automated tasks, hyperautomation creates a single platform to orchestrate these processes as an integrated ecosystem.

By integrating different automated processes within and between business departments, hyperautomation deepens the use of automation, making the entire business operations not only faster, but smarter.

From faster processes to smarter operations

Hyperautomation adds an extra layer of intelligence to improve decision-making between different automated tasks. This extra layer of intelligence can include AI technologies in various forms. For example, integrating AI-enabled optical character recognition (OCR) and computer vision, an AI-driven interpretation of digital images or videos, with RPA to convert images into readable text, then mapping with business rules and compliance policies to automate decision-making, like invoice approval, medical claims and credit approval. By standardizing and automating decision-making, hyperautomation brings more consistent decisions and less skewed judgment.

Machine learning (ML) can also integrate with the business process management (BPM) platform to understand patterns and process insights for continuously identifying new automation opportunities. This continuous discovery of process automation empowers businesses to optimize their operations to meet the challenges of now and tomorrow.

In addition to automating decisions and allowing talents to focus on high-value jobs, hyperautomation also enables better synchronization of processes across different departments in an organization. This overview of automation across departments is the essence of creating a collaborative working environment.

The time to hyper-automate is now

Hyperautomation is a great example of using technologies to elevate human decisions. But making decisions on the adoption of hyperautomation requires complex human judgment.

We advise assessing three key dimensions when making these decisions:

Data – How much structured and unstructured data is required to automate a specific process?

Degree of Automation—Are you automating routine tasks and dynamic processes?

Scope – How many and broad of processes are involved? A broad end-to-end scope means more integration is needed. 

With the right implementation assessment, the impact of hyperautomation can be profound and transformational. Thus, Gartner has listed it as one of the top strategic technology trends in 2022. The market for hyperautomation is also expected to reach US$46.4 billion by 2031.

The success of hyperautomation requires the right selection of tools and technologies with seamless integration between them. With the rising maturity of automation technologies and implementation partners in Hong Kong, there is no better time than now to turn into hyperautomation.