Large scale adoption of Robotic Process Automation (RPA) is associated with the manufacturing industry. RPA implementation was mostly realized in the form of physical robots to perform assembly, test, and packaging tasks. Besides manufacturing, RPA has many automation uses cases in back-office operations, inventory management, supply chain management, customer service operations, and so on. As per industry research, the losses due to these manual efforts are somewhere close to 30 percent. So, besides the manufacturing process, its time for the manufacturing industry to adopt RPA across all operations.
Top Use Cases of RPA in Manufacturing
Automate Administrative Tasks
Administrative tasks in the manufacturing industry are laborious. Reducing the need to complete these allows employees to concentrate on other critical tasks. Like any industry, manufacturing has many administrative functions that can benefit from office automation.
Tasks that can be easily automated:
- Recording action items and meeting minutes
- Recording attendance
- Responding to FAQ emails
- Scheduling meetings
- Ordering supplies
- Predicting computer problems
- Creating and filing invoices
Inventory Management
The manufacturing industry has a lot of paperwork in inventory management. To effectively automate inventory management, Robotic Process Automation can automate emails, file invoices, dispatch processes, and digitize paperwork.
RPA in manufacturing provides inventory managers with real-time data about the inventory levels so that they can monitor these levels and make better decisions based on historical data. Thereby improving operational efficiency, reducing costs, and enhancing communication.
Invoice Processing
With manual processes in place, companies waste time obtaining, assigning, and approving invoices. Invoice processing starts with receiving an invoice and ends when the payment is completed and recorded. From there, the invoice should be entered for the correct records. Then the invoice must be sent to be approved. This is a tedious process and has more scope for human errors.
The use of RPA in manufacturing is a more efficient way to process invoices. The above challenge of invoice processing can be solved by automating the entire process with UiPath. All data will be updated accordingly to the respective systems without any human involvement. With UiPath automation, the process of collecting data from the vendor invoice data and sending it to the target system is running at configured intervals.
To read more about how to automate your Invoice Processing, click here.
Customer Support and Service Desk
Unreliable Customer Service Management (CSM) with manual customers' request handling leads to errors in tracking information and delayed response/resolution times leave customers unsatisfied. Resolving customer issues requires navigating through multiple business systems which is time-consuming and requires a lot of effort.
In the era of experience-as-a-economy, customer experience is one of the most important parts of the business. By automating customer service with RPA, the manufacturing industry can have a CSM solution that easily integrates with various business systems and based on the customer request extracts the data and presents a unified solution. The customer can interact with the CSM either through a self-help portal or an integrated chatbot application.
Strategic Management of IT Operations
Managing IT infrastructure and operations is a challenge. By using RPA in manufacturing, IT teams can have better visibility into the IT infrastructure and operations, thereby enabling IT teams to strategically manage IT resources without requiring a manual process.
Proactive Risk Management
RPA in manufacturing can provide manufacturers with proactive and fully automated audits for business processes. Automated workflows can predict risk and alert stakeholders of problems that may arise.
