By now, it should be obvious that digitalization has the capacity to re-make manufacturing industries and to create new supply chain management ecosystems. The simple capability of being able to quickly search and check the rates you agreed with a carrier against the invoices received, without plowing through piles of paper contracts, for example, can save considerable sums, not to mention maintaining a healthy manufacturer-carrier relationship. Or a timely electronic red flag raised by your order management system that a supplier is late delivering an order can stave off a stock-out down the line.

Robotics, too, offers a future in which human labor is chiefly reserved for work requiring intelligence and judgment rather than brawn alone. Repetitive tasks, such as hauling heavy carts from one picking station to another, or attaching labels to boxes, are obvious candidates for non-human intervention. 

But one of the chief benefits of digitization is where it meets robotics in the form of robotic process automation. RPA, also known as software robotics, has the potential to transform daily and ongoing business processes by using automation technologies to mimic several tasks of human workers. These include activities such as extracting data, filling in forms, moving files and marrying together disparate pieces of information for reporting and decision-making. In other words, the robots are pieces of software code that allow you to replicate everyday data management tasks and beyond. 

RPA combines application programming interfaces (APIs) and user interface (UI) interactions to streamline processes, uncover efficiencies and provide insights, making the path to digital transformation fast and cost-effective. Even better, unlike many transformative information technology propositions, it doesn’t necessarily mean a huge IT project that shuts everything down for days or weeks, because it leverages existing systems to minimize disruption. And sophisticated RPA vendors are now providing on-demand SaaS RPA robots you can access through a browser, as and when you need them.  

The idea is that software robots take some of your most tedious work off your plate, while opening up entirely new possibilities. Let’s take an in-depth look at the many ways RPA can build on what you’ve already achieved with your supply chain. These include the ability to better leverage data for planning and forecasting; to simplify how, where, and when you procure goods; to follow the movement of inventory in, out, and across your warehouse; and to ensure your logistics are in fact logical — not to mention streamlined and trackable.

Like Any Other Process, Just Better

“It’s just like any process that’s going on in your enterprise, but one that you want to work on its own,” explains Bhavesh Joshi, Americas Manufacturing Lead at UIPath, which specializes in RPA services. “You design it, you put in some rules that tell it: This is what you should do.” Like a physical robot, you can give if-then instruction that includes the RPA pausing after completing a first set of tasks to seek further guidance from a human, or to pause and consult when it encounters a problem or something unexpected. “It can come and ask me as a human to tell it to continue or fine-tune something. When robots are doing things on their own, that’s unattended, but this is attended automation, with a human in the loop,” Joshi explains.  One of the most common initial deployments of RPAs is to pull together different sources of data such as emails and spreadsheets, for the purpose of generating reports. “I have it as my personal assistant for doing that,” says Joshi. “Rather than robots doing this in physical space, this is done in process space. It essentially helps you to be more methodical and efficient. And, more importantly, it is always working!”

To Joshi, the greatest benefits of RPA are potentially in the supply chain management space. He sees typical elements in supply chain operations that lend themselves particularly well to this kind of automation. The first is that there’s usually a high level of cross-functionality. Supply chain managers do not work in a vacuum; they need to know what’s going on in sales, order management and other enterprise divisions, and vice versa. This also touches on two other pressing needs in supply chain visibility and speed. “Visibility across those processes is very important. And speed is equally important. RPAs essentially help you to have the right visibility and alignment of data,” says Joshi. He points out that, while the individual functions may have some form of automation in the form of warehouse, inventory or order management systems, the process of getting data from one system into another often tends to be manual, laborious and prone to error. 

A Wide Range of Benefits

When you add in machine learning and artificial intelligence, RPAs can learn what to look for and when to alert humans. For example, an RPA can learn to read freight contracts even when they’re on paper and then match details against a packing slip, invoice or purchase order, all while keeping a human in the loop. “If it all matches perfectly, that’s fine. But, if not, the RPA can get a human to check it,” says Joshi. 

Another example is getting an RPA to review contracts from a legal point of view   it can identify and pull out elements that are not standard, and refer them to the legal team. It can also learn to actively compare all the commodity prices in your system against an index you subscribe to, so you can identify if what a supplier is charging you has departed significantly from current market measures. Similarly, with procurement agreements, it can automatically apply baseline rules. Or, if a supplier is late in providing an order, you can set the robot to ping them, while generating a red flag to prompt action.

Joshi says that a majority of Fortune 1000 companies are using some form of RPA in a variety of ways. “It’s often organic, where they come up with their own ideas, as part of a kaizen process and so on,” he explains. “Successes from procure to pay are common. And they’re not only impacting cash flow, but also the company’s reputation with suppliers. They’re paying on time, and that impacts the open-to-buy (OTB) strategy, because otherwise, your suppliers might not ship you something.” 

Joshi also identifies order management benefits, including gathering and sorting the most salient point-of-sale (POS) data. “Then they can automate advance shipping notification coming back into ERP, so you can maintain the accuracy of forecasting. And then there are a lot of applications in warehouse management and transportation management. For example, with transportation, you can apply those machine-learning models so you can make the right choices about your transportation carriers,” Joshi says. 

Naturally, like many innovative business technologies, RPA allows not only the speeding and streamlining of existing processes; it can prompt new ones. Joshi points to the ability to redesign engineering processes, for example, once there’s truly prompt and efficient communication between manufacturing and product management or suppliers. “We’ve seen people immediately save hundreds of thousands of dollars,” he says. “Once these things are automated, people see the benefits, and they want to go further.”

Handling the Coming Flood of Data

In the future, Joshi says, companies are going to be using more and more sensors and other Internet of Things (IoT) devices, particularly in so-called smart manufacturing. That means a flood of available data that’s often overwhelming right now, and the volume is only going to increase. RPA is a perfectly suited method to keep a watchful eye on what’s going on, instead of just wasting all that good information by letting it wash over you. “When you couple smart manufacturing with process automation, you can arrange it so the sensors are collecting that data, and now you can actually do something with it,” he says. “You can make it completely automated, or you can have a machine learning model which can define and select exactly which actions and automation should be done.”

The human angle is not just about relieving staff of repetitive, dull tasks, or even giving them more empowered, decision-making roles. It also helps relationships between departments, and with external business partners, Joshi says. “We’ve seen customers push more and more into using automation in terms of how they internally work, but they’re also helping their own customers to use RPA as a service. This really improves how you engage with customers and what you do for them. You can also make life easier for suppliers. It works both upstream and downstream in the supply chain,” says Joshi. “Then you can grow your commercial model. 

How much has RPA been embraced by the supply chain management industry? Joshi says RPA has been popular in the order management and freight areas. Lately, he’s seen more RPA deployment in the overall product lifecycle management process, including marketing and POS data analysis. “There are a lot of different forms and systems, and RPA gives you the ability to automate timely and accurate data in order to drive more accurate demand planning, while avoiding wasting human resources.” 

Barriers to adoption include a generalized fear of new IT projects. “It’s classic change management. People think this will be complicated and cost a lot of time and money. But solutions can be developed in weeks rather than months,” Joshi says. He adds the key is to gain some understanding of what RPA is and what it can do, then prioritize where you want to deploy it first. “When you get the right alignment, the speed is amazing.”