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Solution Overview
Manufacturing companies have always invested heavily in industrial engineering to achieve production process improvements and minimize waste. More recently, to be “greener” and operate more sustainably, they started squeezing inefficiencies out of material and byproducts waste at record levels. Manufacturers are dealing with major disruptions and, in many cases, have been forced to suspend or alter operations. In order to efficiently ramp up production and ensure business continuity, manufacturers must optimize supply chain management. Robotic Process Automation (RPA) can help by replacing manual tasks with automated workflows, reducing errors and freeing uppersonnel to focus on higher value assignments.Aspects of supply chain operations that can benefit from RPA. With Robotic Process Automation (RPA), manufacturers can apply the same principles and squeeze inefficiencies and waste from business processes—from finance to supply chain to customer service operations.RPA also addresses the problem of human errors in the manufacturing process.
Customer Challenges
Demand variability: It’s increasingly difficult to predict demand and plan for downstream inbound and outbound supply chain activities.
Inventory proliferation: Although just-in-time (JIT) inventory replenishment is now standard, the fact that products are now stored in distributed warehouses closer to the customer creates challenges.
Increasing risks of disruption: Extreme weather and other effects of climate change impact supply-chain operations.
Intense global competition: It’s a truism, but every market is now a global market, competing for the same suppliers and customers.
Increasing customer expectations: Today’s customers have many choices, and not meeting their expectations could mean a loss of business.
Talent shortage: It’s difficult to find and retain supply chain experts.
Features and Benefits
Purchase order processing: Intelligent bots can take in POs from any source—fax, email, website, or even old-fashioned paper forms—and “read” them to extract data. This data is then sent to the relevant databases to fulfill the PO.
Supplier quality management: Digital Workers can monitor returns for quality reasons, track the types of defects per SKU, and issue reports on specific suppliers. Bots can also automate compliance and SLA reporting based on inbound quality data.
Receiving: Bots can take bills of lading and reconcile them with raw goods inventory to ensure all materials have been received and payment is accurate.
JIT delivery management: Bots can automate JIT delivery schedule creation and management. They can help eliminate errors in scheduling and reduce the risk of delivering the wrong inventory to plants.