How do you know when a process needs help? Is it slow, bloated, or, worst of all, truly broken? It’s a crucial question for all leaders and teams pursuing speed and growth, to meet digital transformation goals like faster customer onboarding or faster time to market. Often, even seemingly simple business processes are more complex than we realize. Teams and individuals may develop clever workarounds to get past large and small process problems.

There’s a lot of hype about hyperautomation. But it’s clear that as new automation technologies emerge, organizations that take a strategic, holistic approach to embedding them into business processes will come out ahead. So, what exactly is hyperautomation? It’s an approach to process automation that uses a combination of technologies to optimize complex business processes and augment human capabilities.

Insurers have been slammed by inflation, with loss costs surging by $30 billion in 2021 alone. Almost every line of insurance has been hit with rising claims expenses, while replacement costs have risen by 16.3%—nearly twice the consumer price index rise. To combat inflation, insurers need to find better ways to increase efficiency and reduce claims leakage. In addition to economic pressures, insurers are also facing rising customer expectations for a faster and more transparent claims process.

As technology continues to advance, the insurance industry is seeing a shift toward automated underwriting approval processes. This trend has been gaining momentum over the past few years and is expected to grow as insurers seek to streamline their operations and reduce costs without losing the human touch.

When you have a problem with speed in a business process, but you don’t know exactly where the slowdown is happening, frustration builds for both teams and leaders. And it’s a widespread issue for enterprises trying to accelerate their pace and increase their capacity for work in the pursuit of digital transformation goals like improved customer onboarding or faster time to market.

With record-high inflation, climate change, and an economic downturn on the horizon, the insurance industry is in a pressure cooker of unpredictable change. Sometimes this change happens over time. Sometimes it seems to happen all at once. To come out on top, insurance companies need new workflow and operations strategies that leverage process automation to streamline processes, reduce errors, and improve the customer experience.

Leading insurers are prioritizing claims process automation. Why? Because expenses related to preparing, processing, paying, and adjusting claims represent the most significant share of an insurer's operating costs. Even more than that, 87% of policyholders say the claims experience directly impacts their decision to stay with an insurance provider. But for many insurers, complex workflows, siloed data, and disparate systems have turned the claims process into a painful customer experience.

If you asked anyone at your organization, there’s no question they could name at least one business process that needs streamlining—probably they could name several. That’s the hard truth for leaders looking to gain digital transformation speed in pursuit of critical business goals, like faster customer onboarding and faster time to market.

The pain points that drive IT and business leaders to implement process automation are clear: broken or slow business processes, automation wins that don’t scale, and data silos. All three create problems that can stop critical digital transformation work from reaching its goals. These problems not only cost time and money but also open companies up to risk and compliance trouble and employee engagement woes.

Businesses today know that operational efficiency, effectiveness, and productivity are keys to competitive advantage. And process automation tools are being adopted more and more because they help IT and business leaders turn those goals into reality. If you’ve spent time researching ways to boost efficiency by taking advantage of automation opportunities, you’ve likely come across the related terms hyperautomation (which is synonymous with process automation) and intelligent automation.