The baselines of automation
You start your day by having an alarm which wakes you up, which is usually based on something you programmed on your personal phone for the workdays to the weekends.
That’s the first step of automation: you identified a pattern in your behavior, and you came up with a solution. You have programmed the technology to work in your favor.
It can work the same way professionally.
Most employees have a lot of tasks to do: emails, to-do lists, meetings, applications, appointments, tasks, etc.
What if you could take some of the minute task work — lower-level, or repetitive — and automate it to be more productive and focus more on the things that really matter to your team and the business?
How does this all work, especially in a logistics context?
Many businesses spend years building their management systems and platforms. The value of using automation in supply chain processes is often overlooked due to the nature of “traditional” maneuvers within the supply chain. Robots can deliver changes to shipping schedules efficiently, decreasing the chance of delays. Robots can also handle customer needs or automate and consolidate data entry and enable faster shipping. Additional benefits include streamlining order management needs and identifying weaknesses within the supply chain.
How can automation and robotics help logistics and a supply chain, though?
The first step is that your partner on a project goes into a deep dive analysis of existing processes. The goal of the deep dive is to see where repetition occurs.
Here’s an example from one client we engaged with. They had a B2B portal which contained centralized information, and they needed to introduce new clients and partners to that portal; in essence they needed to on-board new partnerships. But for that onboarding to happen, multiple employees had to enter items manually every day to reflect the newest changes to partnership dynamics and the overall business. You’re basically looking at a 10-headcount or more (10 FTE) to manually update things in a portal so that new business can be onboarded. When something went wrong, the executive level was obviously frustrated, because creating distress in partners can lose you revenue. But when something went wrong, there were so many manual points of entry that it was hard to figure out where the error occurred. So much time was being wasted.
On this client, we came in with a shared inbox idea, where all the emails regarding new customers or partners could send their information. Now everything was in the same place.
Next step was a bot. That bot was taught beforehand how to properly read the emails and extract only the relevant information from a pre-defined table provided by the company.
Third step: the bot takes the information that it pulled, and it moves that information to an Excel file. The Excel file is placed into a shared path, so anyone can look at it, regardless of position within the department.
At the same time, the bot would log into two systems at once. The first system was a CRM-style list of existing customers. The bot goes in and scans all the contact information to make sure it’s accurate. If not, the bot updates it. If the customer is not present, likely meaning that it’s a new customer, the bot takes the info from the shared inbox and puts it into this CRM-style application.
In the second system, a true CRM, orders for existing customers were tracked. When you combine the bot’s work in System 1 and System 2, now all the logistics and customer information is accurate, and no human manual entry was needed. Someone needed to code the bot and instruct it what to do, yes. But you didn’t need 10 human beings manually entering things throughout the morning every day.
Plus: now when an employee starts a shift, all the information is updated in the systems of record, which means the employees can focus on building customer relationships, I.e., up-sell, cross-sell, customer returns, offers, deals, and the like. So much customer experience gets wasted because employees need to spend a ton of time dealing with manual, repetitive tasks. The bot takes that work away, so now employees can focus on delighting customers — and that’s where recurring revenue exists.
So, what is RPA, exactly?
RPA stands for Robotic Process Automation. It’s one of the biggest waves of business in the world today. UiPath, who we work with on back-end processes, is one of the most valuable companies to emerge from Europe in decades.
Think of RPA bots as a Digital Workforce that can interact with any system or application. For example, bots are able to copy-paste, scrape web data, make calculations, open and move files, parse emails, log into programs, connect to APIs, and extract unstructured data. And because bots can adapt to any interface or workflow, there’s no need to change business systems, applications, or existing processes in order to automate.
RPA bots are a really safe, non-invasive technology that provides perfect consistency when performing activities across multiple systems each and every time.
It also generates accurate data regarding the automated processes, based on the reports that it generates at the end of each of the runs it is scheduled to do, giving the business an overall visibility on what & how the task is performed.
Think on it this way: How would you like to have a 24/7 digital operator which takes no vacation and never tires from performing multiple repetitive activities at near 100% accuracy every time?
Or how about the fact that it always grants full visibility — transparent data, in other words?
In the past, we’ve written two papers about RPA, if you’d like to see them: one is about RPA overall, and one is about how much money you can save with RPA. Check those out as starting places.
We’d love to talk more about how we can help you automate the repetitive, mundane tasks of your business and get down to the revenue-add position of delighting customers.
