Before the robotic process automation, automation was a synonym for industrial automation. Manufacturing organizations has adapted physical robots was back to optimize their assembly line, production process and reduce costs with improved efficiency. This has revolutionized the output capacity in manufacturing but other functions still remains inefficient and slow which impacts the overall performance of the business.
Robotic process automation (RPA)provides the opportunity to improve speed and efficiency of process in functions such as IT, finance, procurement, human resources, etc. RPA can help in automating mundane and repetitive tasks like invoice processing and data entry to reduce execution time and errors.
Automation Candidates
Purchase Order Creation
Manufacturing companies has to deal with 1000s of vendors, creating 1000s of POs on a regular basis. Creating a Purchase Order manually is a tedious and time taking task. Manual process also has possibility of obvious human errors. With automation, PO creation process can be completely automated without errors. It is a rule-based process starting from extracting data from systems, requesting approvals and processing the request.
Inventory Management
The center of success for any manufacturing business lies in a well maintained inventory. With RPA, real-time level of the inventory can be tracked. RPA bots can predict the ups and down in the demand from the past data and can help in getting prepared for the change in market demand. RPA almost helps in real-time reports and audit trails. These insights help in taking more accurate decision making and saves time on manual reporting.
Customer/Vendor Support
Support executives at manufacturing companies deal with lot of requests related to shipment status, delivery date and invoice details. With the help of RPA, most of the support queries can be automated. RPA can read a request from email or Chatbot, check system/ERP for the details and reply back thus reducing the response time significantly. RPA can eliminate lot of manual work, freeing executives to work on more support tickets.
Automated ERP
ERP is an important system for any manufacturing unit. RPA once integrated with ERP can enhance the power of ERP. RPA can automatically process and verify invoices in different systems, sends it to accounts for payment, check the payment status and notify the team as per the SLA. Automating such processes reduce the execution time, improving the business efficiency.
Integrated Systems
Manufacturing companies use different system at multiple locations as per the requirement. This creates silos of data as these systems cannot integrate and data has to be handled manually slowing down the entire process. RPA can read and write data in any system without actually integrating making it possible for incompatible systems to integrate each other. This helps in reporting and dashboard for decision making.
