RPA for Retail — Profit not just off the shelves but the desks as well!

Robotic Process Automation (RPA) has been around long enough now that industry-specific flavours have become mature, scalable models. Unlike in the earlier years of RPA, when implementations could fail because of poor or limited compatibility between different systems, RPA technology solutions these days are capable not only of working seamlessly with every system that’s already in place but also of adapting to changes in environments caused by operational, legal, regulatory and other factors. In fact, it is expected that over 40% of the world’s biggest corporations will implement RPA solutions by 2021.

In complex industries that deal with as many processes as there are ‘moving parts’, such as retail, banking, insurance, healthcare and manufacturing, RPA is proving to be a major game-changer with its impact on key parameters. Automation drives up efficiency and productivity; it also results in lower operational expenditure can that offset the higher initial costs within as low as 2 years. In fact, with JiffyRPA, you might start seeing returns on investment as quickly as within the first 18 months of implementation.

Robotic Process Automation for Retail

The retail industry has seen a lot of consolidation and cross-linking in recent years, resulting in massive organizations where their pre-merger systems and processes continue to be in operation. That’s in addition to the range of business and delivery models, vertical and horizontal integrations, vendors and supply partners, channel and promotion partners and facility management partners that have sprung up either as part of the parent organization or as independent contractors to keep the retail engine moving. The sheer scale — length, width and depth — of retail companies is staggering indeed, and at times, the size itself becomes the company’s biggest risk.

Making sense of this size is where RPA comes in. Just as the human body has an autonomous nervous system that frees up the brain for actions that require conscious thought, robotic process automation can help free up valuable human resources and use their services more effectively and efficiently. Without RPA, these employees would see a lot of their time being wasted in the execution of repetitive tasks that insult their intelligence instead of employing it. Such a situation normally leads to resentment, dissatisfaction, lower morale and finally attrition. For the company, the headache doesn’t end there — it now has to search for replacements to fill vacancies, and then, having found them, go to the trouble and expense of training them.

Let’s look at the different ways in which using RPA for retail helps the business:

Data Management

Different parts of the retail value chain use different systems. For instance, even as the retail chain’s core system may run on SAP, major supply vendors might be working on Oracle’s ERP solutions. Connecting these two systems with an API is risky since the integrity of the system is now only as good as the weakest link in this chain.

Instead, it might simply be easier to use bots to extract data from one system, transform or process it for entry into the next and then pass it on. This means that you don’t have to spend time adding patches (and weakening the security) for one system or the other. Additionally, if data should get corrupted during transmission — which is the risky phase anyway — the core systems are still protected from being fed wrong/corrupt data.

Format Standardisation

Formats vary widely between different parts of the retail value chain. Vendors, for instance, might have their own proprietorial invoice formats. Third-party logistics partners would have their own dispatch and chain-of-custody documents. Without RPA, the task of processing each invoice would have fallen to an employee. This employee would have to spend hours going over every invoice, transcribing the values to a standard on-screen form and then checking these for accuracy.

With RPA, however, the bots can be trained to understand different formats and field mapping for each. They can then scrape each document, whether these are physical or digital, and then feed the data into the appropriate fields. With cognitive facilities such as those present in JiffyRPA, the bots can even handle exceptions — such as formats they have never encountered before — and continue the process without needing to slow down for a manual intervention.

Order and Returns Processing

In the retail sector, orders and returns processing are two of the most cumbersome, yet time-critical, activities. Every delay in processing an order or return can result in the loss of actual income (such as order cancellations, shipping and reverse shipping, etc.) and future income (loss of customers’ confidence). By employing bots to scan documents pertaining to orders and returns, the retailer can achieve a faster turnaround of all on-process tasks at the very least, resulting in the freeing up of greater bandwidth to handle exceptions.

IT Services

System-wide changes, such as taxes, pricing, campaigns, etc. might sometimes need a user to make these changes manually on their POS terminals. This is a time-consuming, inefficient process that also begs the question — how can the retailer ensure that such modifications are completed without error and on time? RPA can act as a credentials manager, logging in on behalf of administrators into each terminal and making the necessary changes without exposing confidential information to human eyes. The whole process can be scheduled to run overnight or out of business hours, which means that switching becomes seamless and will not impact billing at the front-end.

Collation and Analysis

To analyse data, one must first pull it from different sources, correlate them using specific indices and then extract insights from them. Until robotic process automation is implemented in an office, this remains an inefficient manual task. Imagine the personnel hours lost every day in your organization because of the time your people have to spend on collating the data instead of analysing the collated data.

With RPA, there are bots who can not only collate data at specific intervals but also process them to come up with business insights that can be further developed upon by human minds. A win-win situation on both counts, indeed! These insights can then be used to power planning, strategic, tactical and financial decisions.

Contract Management, Reconciliation and Settlement

Managing boilerplate contracts can be easily built into an automation software helping companies generate, validate and operate contracts based on key parameters. Contract management also helps in digitizing existing contracts for future reference or for claiming damages, automatic renewal or automated disbursal.

Recon and settlement reports can also be automated, as we’ve already seen. In fact, it is even possible to configure your JiffyRPA implementation to execute settlement transactions as and when needed and with appropriate safeguards in place to prevent unauthorized or wrong transfers.

At the end of the day, a retailer with mature processes can use an RPA tool to derive far greater value from employees and operations than in any other way. RPA for retail isn’t just going to be an added advantage by 2020 — we expect it to be a part of the core structure of every organization!

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