Across the globe in many industries, RPA offers cost savings of up to 60%. Because of this, the RPA market has been estimated at $2 Billion by the end of 2021.
For supply chain and logistics businesses, RPA offers unique value: helping businesses deliver and execute processes 5x to 10x times faster with 38% less resources.
So, how does it transform your core functions? It achieves this by using software bots to perform redundant and manual intensive tasks, so humans/your employees don’t have to. The benefits are that it reduces costs, errors, and inefficiencies, such as late payments and line rejections.
It’s no wonder RPA is the next step in creating/developing an end-to-end digital supply chain. RPA is transforming the way businesses operate and enabling organisations to outperform their competitors, if this is something your business wants to do, here are a number of areas where RPA can help.
Inventory Management
Managing inventory to ensure optimal volumes while tracking data along the way can be extremely complex.
RPA can help continuously monitor inventory, notifying you when levels are low. And when new shipments need to be ordered, RPA can perform the job function of an employee by ordering new shipments at the right time.
RPA also helps with tracking inventory as it flows throughout the warehouse. Manually tracking thousands of items as they move across service areas is time-consuming and prone to error. RPA can automate this process, deploying software robots to track inventory as it flows from receiving to shelves to production to shipping. RPA makes inventory management easier by tracking inventory from the time it enters and exits the warehouse.
Supply and Demand Planning
The efficiency of a supply chain depends on the ability of managers and analysts to forecast inventory needs. But supply and demand planning traditionally involve examining complex records and data sets, such as historical sales data, market indicators, and custom orders, to name just a few. And you have to track down and ingest this data from vendors, customers, and internal teams.
RPA provides a more efficient way to ingest and analyse this data through automation. It does this by gathering and merging information, preparing data for manual analysis, and sharing it with planners. According to a specific set of predefined rules, RPA is then able to analyse nuances and trends in large sets of data and customer purchasing activity that are easy to miss. The findings are then delivered in a detailed report.
This enables managers to efficiently develop more accurate forecasts with less time and resources.
Purchase Order Management
The backbone of purchase order management is a thorough review process but having to manually review every order can be labour-intensive and lead to bottlenecks.
With RPA in supply chain, you can run purchase orders through automated criteria such as pricing, quantity, and regularity of purchase.
When an approval matches optimization criteria, it gets sent through. When it doesn’t, the software bot uses notifications to run the remaining purchase orders through procurement managers for a formal review. By utilizing automated approval workflows, RPA allows you to closely review a smaller number of more important orders.
Freight Management
Freight management is driven by time-critical, manual tasks. RPA brings efficiency to these tasks while saving time and reducing errors. Software bots work 24/7, providing an efficient and scalable freight management workflow.
It does this by handling tasks such as transferring information during load matching, making it easier for brokers to match a load with a carrier to transport it. RPA in supply chain can enhance other aspects of freight management, such as route optimization, freight accounting, and freight claim management.
Returns and Refunds Processing
Processing returns and refunds are both a high-volume and high-value business. But businesses that rely wholly on human intervention in their processing workflows can quickly be overwhelmed.
Fortunately, refunds and returns are the perfect application for RPA in supply chain. By using rules-based task automation, RPA can reduce the need for human intervention in most cases, freeing up labour to focus on processing that relies solely on human decisions. By reducing human intervention and automating processing, RPA accelerates resolution and reduces the risk of errors.
Invoice Management
Managing invoices is vital to the success of every logistics and supply chain business. But without a dedicated system in place to manage all the documents and information this entails; invoices can slip through the cracks.
Manually tracking and entering invoice data is a labour-intensive yet mission-critical process, making it perfect for automation.
RPA in supply chain can make it easier to process invoice documents from vendors and suppliers with less chance of error. RPA speeds up tasks such as extracting information from invoices and validating and verifying information, so you can free up labour while ensuring invoices are accurately handled.
Price Lookup and Comparison
The fastest way to cut expenses in supply chain and logistics is to optimize pricing of sourced materials. But manually conducting price lookups on multiple options for hundreds of products can prove unwieldy.
This is why price lookup is a prime candidate for automation. RPA in supply chain can routinely search for pricing data on specified materials and ingest this data in a way that makes conducting comparisons easier. This translates to getting better prices more efficiently.
ERP Integration
Handling data entry and migration can become cumbersome, repetitive, and prone to error.
With RPA in supply chain, these processes can be handled automatically and at lightning speed, from invoice data entry to data validation and monitoring. RPA can enhance ERP utilities by increasing information accuracy and reducing costs related to manual data entry
RPA has emerged as a cost-efficient way for supply chain and logistics companies to optimise their operations whilst cutting costs.
Looking to implement RPA for your logistics and supply chain operations? Get in touch with Edge Tech and we can help you start your RPA journey.
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