Top 8 Use Cases of RPA in Retail

Retail has been one of the most fast-paced and high-remunerating industries across the world. However, as technology has evolved and evolved, the complexity and sophistication of the industry as a whole have increased as well. This, as a result, has led to the rise of new technologies and processes that not only help the retailers to streamline and improve their daily workflows but also help them achieve new levels of success and expansion.

Robotic process automation in retail is one of the best solutions to complement the growth of the retail sector and effectively navigate the challenges that come with it. RPA in the retail industry offers the luxury of automating mundane day-to-day tasks, reducing human errors, accelerating workflows, and optimizing overall costs.

In this post, we explore how RPA in the retail sector helps with the help of the top 8 use cases.

1. ERP Management

RPA based Enterprise Resource Planning is gaining a lot of traction in retail. From keeping track of price variations, employee vacancies, billing to generating daily reports such as accounts payable and receivables, an ERP managed with RPA automates almost everything and helps minimize human efforts.

2. Returns Processing

Product returns are a common practice in various retail processes. Managing it manually can be a very time-consuming task and can add cost to the company. RPA can be a great tool to effectively manage the returns in retail by performing all the changes required in altering the customer billing details and inventory database.

3. Workflow Management

Retail is essentially a human-driven industry where customer interaction is mainly done online. However, RPA in retail allows the players to manage and facilitate the workflow and other HR processes much more productively. Automation in retail makes everything from measuring time and attendance, assigning shifts, payroll/ leave management, or assessing employee performance much more accessible.

4. Customer Support Management

RPA in retail plays an instrumental role in customer support management. Whether offering 24×7 customer support or sending real-time updates to customers, RPA automation helps retail companies make their customer support much more quick and convenient.

Right from when an order is placed to delivery, an efficient customer support system based on RPA facilitates saving a great deal of time, money, and effort for retail players.

5. Account and Finance

RPA in retail streamlines the account and finance function in multiple ways. Whether it is order and invoice processing, accounts payable/accounts receivable management, account reconciliation, order to cash, record to report cycles, procure to pay, or consolidating statements, everything can be effortlessly managed using RPA.

6. Demand and Supply Planning

Demand and supply planning, in general, is quite a cumbersome task that involves seeking and gathering volumes of data, running simulations, finding out exceptions in them, followed by confirming and communicating the plan.

RPA technology can automate all these tasks and help retailers increase their capacity and improve customer, supplier, and employee satisfaction.

7. New Product Introductions

New product or product line launches in the retail industry involve a significant upfront investment and transparency across multiple manufacturing, marketing, and R&D.

Apart from this, detailed analytics is another crucial aspect when it comes to new product introductions. RPA automation makes the process simpler and allows the retailers to modify production, pricing, and stocks according to the specific customers’ preferences.

8. Sales Analytics

One of the best automation ideas in the retail industry is sales analytics. There is a constant need to conduct a comprehensive analysis of massive sales data and consumer behavior in the retail sector. Creating and analyzing such reports manually can be an overwhelmingly time-consuming task.

Robotic process automation in retail can be an invaluable tool to analyze these exhaustive reports with absolute accuracy and fluency efficiently.

To Conclude

We have listed here some of the everyday use cases of RPA in retail. However, there are several other tasks in the retail industry where automation can reduce human efforts, minimize errors, and optimize valuable resources.

The use of RPA in retail eliminates the need to perform various manual tasks and helps improve the overall efficiency significantly.

If you wish to fully unlock the potential of your retail workforce, leverage RPA, and enjoy the benefits in the form of better productivity and lower costs, we would love to help you. Contact us today.