Benefits and impact of RPA in supply chain management

According to a report presented by ISG says more than 70% companies will implement Robotic Process Automation by 2019 to automate support tasks, RPA benefits in Supply chain management can be easily witnessed by organizations in logistics domain. There are several impact of RPA in Supply Chain to increase the productivity, improving efficiency, and reducing errors on the business processes for logistics and retail industry.

Robotic Process Automation in Supply Chain helps to automate processes that are done manually, which reduces the chances for errors. RPA tools depends on software solutions relying on virtual servers that can be easily started and shut down at any time. Robotic automation help organizations to recruit and train employees for advanced works and challenges, instead of repetitive robotic tasks.

RPA benefits in Supply Chain Management

• Order Processing and Payments



 
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The order placement and processing part of a supply chain essentially consists of three phases-

• Selecting a particular product


• Maintaining and processing payments


• Confirming the order



 
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There are still businesses within a set of industries today that rely on old manual paperwork to process transactions which can be entirely digitized. Order processing and payments is one of the major impact of RPA in supply chain, information or data can be directly ingested into the company database, various payment gateways can process the required amount, and an efficient solution can send out auto generated email and text message confirmations for the confirmation of order.

• Email Automation



 
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Proper structured and efficient supply chains processes take care of one aspect dearly. Communication. For a proper and efficient supply chain management a transparent and improved communication channel is very essential, in this era of digital transformation communication is an important part of supply chains. RPA can be used to automate this entire process by triggering emails and text messages when a specific event occurs.

• Inventory Management Automation



 
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It can be rightly said the fundamental of supply chain lies on efficient inventory management. Suppliers and manufacturers required to be aware of their inventory levels and confident enough to have adequate amount of products and spares to meet demands. Implementing RPA in supply chain management can make inventory management much convenient by maintaining accurate data on inventory levels, pushing automatic notifications to managers when product stock levels are low, and automatically reordering products that go below a given level.

Moreover, an RPA system enables in determining the required inventory levels by accumulating the historical data and designing out patterns in demand. It is one of the major RPA benefits in Supply Chain that would make the inventory management process much stable and always updated to meet challenges in demand.

• Supply & Demand Planning



 
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Before automation, supply and demand planning wasn’t that easy to maintain for the employees in any organization. They had to find and collect the required data, integrate the data and manage it in presentable formats, analyze exceptions to the data, and then communicate the plan.

RPA in Supply Chain, with the aid of Machine Learning and AI, can help companies and business processes to determine the future demands and be ready to face the unexpected challenges in demand. By automating most of tasks in the supply chain, organizations can now stop the possibility of manual errors and make operations efficient, self-driven, and smart.

Impact of RPA on Supply Chain Management

Due to the major impact of RPA in supply chain management now the entire process has improved cycle time and agility, increased capacity and asset efficiency, improved receivables, as well as high levels of supplier, customer, and employee satisfaction. With recognizing these benefits, it’s also required to acknowledge the planning procedures needed in order to implement automation successfully at scale. Businesses should build their own RPA governance team and committee, to retain the process of selection, and ignite discussions around the redeployment of employees.