Currently, most of the big shots of the e-commerce sector use robotic process automation for their day to day business operations. Mostly warehouse management of such giants remains an issue in daily operations.
Amazon, as of now has more than 15,000 robots active for their warehouse management.
The use of mobile robots for order fulfillment is a new trend to meets the logistic expectations of customers. Logistic companies like XPO are addressing warehouse issues through robotics.
The operational efficiency of any organization can be achieved by opting for RPA. It helps by identifying customer needs and stays a step ahead in evaluating their choices as every Individual today expects to be given special attention.
RPA improves customer personalization in the following ways:
- Integrating RPA with chatbots helps in attending to customers more efficiently.
- Through RPA self-service options could be provided for better shopping experiences.
- Automation for order receiving and other processes makes purchasing easier for the customers and can result in an increased rate of footfall.
ERP is the backbone of any business and extends to major business departments like Marketing, Finance, and HR. But even today ERP depends on some manual functions for these departments which may otherwise be prone to human-related errors. RPA delivers the following benefits for ERP:
- Real-time analytics.
- Proper data updates.
- Faster processing of data.
The supply chain is a very complex process, thus making it susceptible to a lot of errors
RPA provides a lot of help for the logistics department as it keeps a track of each and every step in tracking a product and also facilitates the speed of the task. RPA also provides more benefits in logistics as below:
- Invoice generations.
- Email communication to customers.
- Safer and quicker payment processes.
With the help of RPA, the warehouses are becoming more and more automated. By not depending on the human staff warehouses are today completely changing their definitions.
Mobile bots are nowadays being used for the same. These bots pick up the required product (which might be heavy on most of the occasions) from the shelves and place them at their desired location.
A lot of time and physical effort is saved here, which would’ve been lost otherwise if left to manual labor
Space optimization is a very crucial concept in a warehouse. One needs to ensure that all the inventory material is placed in the most optimal locations, which eases the job of their movement as well.
The more an organization grows the more space it requires for its SKU (Stock Keeping Units).
With the concept of RPA being applied in warehouses now, special movable shelves are put in place which is easily handled by the robots and also helps with not having a fixed amount of space required.
RPA helps an e-commerce business to automate its marketing process as well. In today’s cut-throat competition, taking the help of a human to speed up the marketing process might be first time-consuming and secondly, it might be prone to errors.
RPA helps here to automate various marketing processes like sending out emails, executing automated web searches, updation of existing customer data, carrying out other lead nurturing programs.
EVO Group happens to be the largest wholesaler of the UK for business products. The majority of the orders of EVO are electronic.
The staff of EVO Group used to take orders on call and later update them in their database. The company eventually came to realize that it was a time-consuming process.
Robocloud helped them in automating the sales orders by transferring the sales order processing directly from their customer portal to their ERP systems. Thus even a cancellation was now quickly dealt with by the EVO group.
Blue Prism helped Shop Direct Group with its self-service robotic automation technology to improve their back-office processes.
Shop Direct had a requirement and was looking forward to automating their back-office and customer-facing functions more efficiently.
With Blue Prisms self-service robotic automation technology Shop Direct was able to virtualize their workforce. They could easily configure as well as deploy to automate repetitive office work thus, saving themselves a lot of time as well as avoiding errors.
Walmart has been improving its daily process with certain applications of robotic technology as under:
- Bossa Nova (Shelf-Scanning Robots)
The main job of these robots is to go through the shelves of the retailers and capture the snapshots of different inventory positions throughout the day.
- Alphabet (Storage and Retrieval robots)
This automation is focusing on picking online grocery orders for Walmart. This robot after taking online orders delivers the items to Walmart associates who then delivers them. With this technology, Walmart aims to improve its online shopping service.
- Auto-C (Floor Cleaning Robots)
Handling the hygiene of floors of Walmart by its employee’s takes an average of two hours a day.
To counter this problem Walmart plans to introduce Autonomous-Cleaning Robots which would help the staff in cleaning the floors thus maintaining the floors of the e-commerce giant.
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