Top 10 Most Promising Use Cases For RPA Enabled Automation In Retail

July 1, 2019

RPA is spreading its wings far and wide and has set its foot in almost all industries including Retail. These days, Retail enterprises have started recognizing the magical benefits of Robotic Process Automation (RPA) that extends way beyond simple cost reduction and increased productivity. It is entirely changing the way mundane administrative tasks were done before.

With RPA, a larger amount of work can be implemented at a much faster rate. These smart tools minimize human efforts to a huge extent and are being applied to many other areas in retail.

Investments In RPA Has Reaped Phenomenal Benefits

Recently, the merging together of the retail and Consumer Processed Goods has brought phenomenal opportunities to leverage RPA. In the past few years, we noticed that RPA investments in logistics, data analytics, and supply chain management systems have reaped unbelievable benefits. There still exist significant areas that remain untouched by RPA and require to be dependant on heavy systems and manual effort.

RPA Transforming Workplaces

As per Mckinsey & Company (2019), automation in the retail market is expected to grow from USD 8.79 billion (in 2017) to USD 14.3 billion (in 2022), thereby showing an automation potential of about 60% in the retail processes.

Based on the ongoing trends, you’ll realize that RPA has the capability to transform workplaces beyond the boundaries of work efficiency and resource management.

Want to know how? Keep Reading.

Do you have any idea regarding the Accenture stats for Automation Report in consumer goods? 

  • 43% of Retail/CPG executives have already automated tasks by deploying RPA
  • 86% of Retail/CPG workers are ready to engage in the digital transformation that involves RPA
  1. Improved Sales Analytics

Well, sales analytics is not rocket science. A complete analysis of massive amounts of sales data is vital for consumer and marketing behavior analysis. To be precise, automated analytics provides actual insights into customer behavior and corresponding consumer preferences.

It’s an essential tool for making out the parameters that influence clients’. This helps in the timely deployment of actions to retain them. More than that, future-oriented analysis enables sales forecasting, which is a supporting pillar of stock optimization.

  1. Easy Demand and Supply Planning

You must know that it’s the interactive capacity of RPA technology that enables you to streamline data gathering, formatting, plan simulations, handle exception finding, and standardization. These are just the basic steps towards efficient and realistic business plans. This results in highly improved capacity and asset management.

  1. Easy Store Planning

RPA can completely transform the store planning process. Want to learn more about it? Retailers try to record and match the specific choices of consumers who continuously shop from specific stores, based on demographic details like age, ethnicity, social status, etc.

Manual layout store segmenting is capable of only taking a few high-level facts into accounts. It’s beyond human ability to handle complex segmenting modalities. Robotics Process Automation in retail possesses the ability to make use of fine-grained data to create store-specific merchandise disposal.

  1. Cheaper Marketing Plans

In the marketing sphere, trade promotions are a typical illustration of business processes. Performing trade promotions manually is normally the most time-taking and expensive in the retail industry.

RPA can perform this more accurately and much faster than human employees entering data in spreadsheets could. A very concrete example is rebate management in the food industry, a type of sales promotion that food retailers primarily use to boost sales.

  1. Launching New Products Will Be Easier

There are two main preconditions while introducing a new product. RPA is absolutely accurate in the case of sales analytics. The more streamlined the communication between R&D, marketing, and manufacturing departments, the more to-the-point and effective the introduction of new products will be. RPA allows retailers to modify production and stocks, pricing in close agreement with the customers’ preferences.

  1.   Product Categorisation

Achieving an essential degree of correspondence between local and global stock-keeping units (SKUs), a number assigned to a product by a retail store to identify the price, product options and manufacturer of the merchandise. An SKU is used to track inventory in your retail store. They are very valuable in helping you maintain a profitable retail business.

Product categorization is a crucial task in multinational companies. The products across different markets have different constituents and definitions, and thus they need different marketing strategies.

Thinking how RPA can facilitate process data from vendors and retailers? Vendor Data Management process is basically how an organization commences a new business relationship with a supplier/vendor. 

RPA can facilitate this data incoming in several data formats such as images, texts, etc., to match the local datasets to global standards. A recent study depicts, automation can lead to 98.5% accuracy in product categorization.

  1.   Better  Customer Support Management

Some of the recent customer support management processes are crucial in the context of the new, customer-centric retailing. The provision of 24×7 customer support is a mandatory ingredient of competitive retailing to boost online commerce.

RPA in retail is a technological development that you can absolutely rely on, as by synchronizing the CRM information, customer records can be easily managed across several systems. This also enables convenient customer onboarding from websites, preparing data for timely complaint management, as well as for subscription.

  1. Simplified  Delivery Tracking

RPA has not left any space undiscovered. It can easily take care of delivery tracking. With its use, the orders can be tracked, and real-time shipment updates can be delivered to customers. It saves time to visit the customer portal, as bots can collect order-related information from external partners and then deliver it right there.

Once that is done, they can also gather the customers’ feedback, which is a wonderful resource for additional retailing decisions, to be dealt with appropriate analytics.

  1.   Order and Invoicing Made Easy

The usage of optical character recognition, and the capacity of dealing with several data formats, e.g., word, email, and excel enables automated import of orders and invoices into the company’s enterprise resource planning (ERP). Both customers and suppliers can then be benefitted from it’s prompt delivery.

  1. Automated Checkout

Just think of the times you’d have wanted to drink a bottle of water, but then decided to wait until later because the store from where you were about to purchase the water, seemed extremely crowded and you just couldn’t stand all that waiting. Implementing RPA in your retail company can help your customers escape this problem by automating the checkout.

RPA use cases in retail provide a very useful learning environment and are based on real examples. These are meant to show which processes of the retail industry are best suited for automation. As a result, your RPA journey in retail will unfold on more solid grounds, improving efficiency for mission-critical tasks.

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