Process Automation in Supply Chain Management

Robotic Process Automation (RPA) in the supply chain focuses to automate processes that are generally performed manually. Needless to say, manual processes often involve verification and confirmation of data or business rules with another system or person. Such processes are error-prone and may result in extra costs due to correction of the issues or loss of productivity. Automation through robots (or Bots in this case) will aid in increasing the productivity of your employees greatly while they perform repetitive tasks. For some of our clients, such RPA solutions resulted in 25 to 43% savings in overall costs while their staff performs tasks such as Billing, Order Processing, Inventory Reconciliation, etc. These are tremendous gains for any organization but massively help Supply Chain organizations.  

Our implementation of RPA in the supply chain industry has been increasing in numbers. There are several gains to be made, we are helping companies to automate the procurement and supply of products, process orders, and invoices, and let them gain velocity in business transactions.  But how exactly, can this leading technology can be realized and effectively implemented, what processes on-premise or in the cloud that you already have need to be revisited/selected before you can dive into implementing RPA?  Please see the graphic below for some of the use cases that we implemented for our clients.

KP Soft staff has extensive expertise and helped numerous clients implement the following sampled business-to-business automation processes using Automation Anywhere and Microsoft Power Automate technologies:

• Paper-based document digitalization – Some of our clients are still receiving business process documents (purchase orders, invoices, inventory, etc.) as pdf, or MS Word either in Email or collaboration tools such as MS Teams, Slack, and others. We created process automation solutions in various phases such as pre-processing, document classification, data extraction, domain-specific validation, and human-in-the-loop validation. Once data is extracted we also integrate with their on-premise or cloud SaaS/ERP solutions.
• Billing and Collection – Bots that are built based on our accelerator are used to query MS Dynamics based and other financial systems, intelligently determine billing and collection statuses of each invoice and purchase order generated, and perform follow-up steps and activities. 
• Manual Customer Service – Bots that are built based on our natural language processing algorithms are used to read chat requests, use NLP techniques to interpret questions, 
• Multi-Step-Human-Involved-Workflows – Bidding and procurement processes involve both automation and human interaction where our Bots can be used to retrieve bidding information from partner portals and present them for managerial decisions to place an order and purchase goods. 
• B2B Electronic Data Interchange – Almost all of our B2B clients conduct business with trading partners by exchanging EDI documents and reconciling respective transactions in their CRM/ERP systems. Our automation and integration solutions involve hundreds of trading partners and automation of EDI document exchange, acknowledgment generation and integration with ERP systems.

For any aforementioned or similar support of RPA implementation using Automation Anywhere or MS Power Automate, Please contact us at marketing@thekpsoft.com or book a meeting at https://calendly.com/kpsoft.