IA in Supply Chain Management | Processes Suitable for Automation

What can Automated Assistants do? 

Now let’s look at processes suitable for automation in supply chain. Purchase Order Placement and processing typically consists of three phases. Products selection, processing and order confirmation. However, to date, there are still businesses that rely on manual paperwork to process transactions which can be digitised.

Now RPA has the capability to assist in this process. Order Processing and payments can be automated by importing the relevant information inio a company database. Where payment gateways can process the desired amount and email confirmations triggered upon the placement of an order.

Automated Processing Robots in action

Hi, I’m Annie. Today I’m going to show you how I process purchase order based invoices in SAP. This accounts payable process takes the average employees approximately five to 10 minutes to complete. It involves capturing data from PDF invoices, and processing this data in SAP which can be a very repetitive and boring process. With me at the helm, this process is done within an average of 75 seconds. That’s up to eight times faster. 

I start by scanning unread emails for supplier domain. Once I’ve identified that they’ve saved to the invoice I save that into a predefined location. From here, I scan the invoice for all the data I need using OCR technology, then I log into SAP either locally or via VPN and navigate to the display purchase order page. I extract the company code that relates to the purchase order from here and navigate to the Insert incoming invoice page and enter the company code that I just extracted. Now, I can populate the invoice data that I extracted before. Next I enter the purchase order number relating to the invoice to display the purchase order for this invoice. Thereafter, I can check what type of VAT was applied to the purchase order and adjust the tax type on the invoice to match it. After all this, I simulate the document in the documents currency. And check that the debit versus credit balance iszero and post the invoice. This generates a document number that I extract and store it in memory. 

Lastly, to upload the PDF, I go to the display invoice Document tab and enter the extracted document number along with the year of the invoice. I then go to the store business document page by clicking services and create. Finally, I choose POB invoice and upload the PDF. And done, I do this for a multitude of invoices pretty repetitive, right? I don’t take a coffee break, I dont sleep in and I can work 24 hours, seven days a week with no erros, leaving more time for employees to focus on more important and non repetitive work. Invoice processing just became a whole lot easier.

Email communication done with RPA

Now let’s look at email automation, a large section of any supply chain is maintaining proper communication with suppliers, manufacturers, transport service agencies and customers. However, even though concise and effective communication plays an important role, there is often a major need for improvement. RPA improves communication and collaboration. To ensure proper collaboration between staff in different departments RPA can be used to automate this communication process by triggering emails and text messages when a specific event occurs.

Let’s look at another video that incorporates various office tasks that can be done via RPA.

Booking flights RPA

Hi, my name is Orwil. I am an automated officer systems developed by Tangent Solutions and their newest member of staff. My capabilities ranged from making bookings, extracting and processing documents and data, sending emails and a whole host of other cool things that save both valuable time and money. 

Today, I will walk you through one of the many tasks I do for my company, namely gathering information about available flights on the internet. Planning and booking flights used to involve having someone manually looked them up. This was not only time consuming, but often resulted in higher than necessary travelling costs, as not all possible options were considered. Now I do the research for them and provide a comprehensive list of travel options, including travel times, prices and a link to every deal.

Let me show you how I do it. I regularly check my emails. And if I find one request in flight travel options, I can first check to see if all the information is correct. If something is missing I can email the sender and requested more information. This request form looks complete. Taking this information I open various websites to start my search. I fill in all the required fields like one way or return from end to where we are flying the dates etc. 

Now I’ll begin scraping the web page for the required information like departure and arrival times, price and finally the link to deals. I do this for a few websites to make sure I have all the available flights. I sort the data and compile it into a document. I then email it to the person that made the request. 

And just like that all the information required to book a flight is provided. This is just one of the many things I do to help my company. I can also gather news articles and feeds, help in multiple HR and recruitment processes like on and off boarding employees, invoice processing and reports extraction, data analysis and analytics and many more tasks that does not require too much human thinking. When it comes to robotic process automation, the possibilities are quite endless.

Human invoicing vs RPA

Let me give you an example. Let’s see how I match up against Sarah as we process invoices. It takes Sara around seven and a half minutes to process an invoice while I only take 75 seconds. This means that while I work Sara can process a total of 64 invoices while I do 384.

But the real benefit comes in when you take the whole day into account. Sarah still only processes 64 invoices, but I can do over 1000 because I don’t tire easily. That’s 18 times more than what Sara can do, allowing her to spend more of her time on other value-adding activities.

Contact Tangent Solutions and enter the Fourth Industrial Revolution by automating your workplace.

Inventory Management with RPA

Now we’re going to look at two more supply chain processes, one of which is RPA for inventory management. Suppliers and manufacturers need to be aware of inventory levels to ensure that products are available to meet demands. This is how RPA can manage inventory. 

RPA can be implemented inventory management in the following way: 

• Monitoring inventory levels
• Sending notifications to managers when product stock levels are low
• Automatically reorder products below the predefined threshold level
• And additionally RPA can assist in the prediction of optimal in inventory levels by considering the historical data and mapping out demand patterns. 

Supply & demand planning with RPA

Now let’s look at the second supply chain process. Supply and demand planning. Before automation supply and demand betting has typically been a challenging task that requires data collection, data formatting, exception analysis and communication of established plan. This is where RPA can help. RPA including machine learning and artificial intelligence can assist organisations in demand predictions and preparation against unexpected spikes in demand. Using automation many of these tasks, organisations can eliminate the possibility of manual errors and make operations efficient, self driven and intelligent. 

In conclusion, how can we make automation a priority? Supply chain which has been burdened by manual process and tedious tasks for years you can now turn the majority of the grunt work over to a digital workforce. 

With RPA supply chains can attain enhanced cycle times and agility, increase capacity and assets efficiency, improved receivables and higher levels of supplier customer and employee satisfaction. But in addition to recognising these benefits, it’s also important to acknowledge the foresight that is needed in order to leverage automation successfully at scale. 

Contact Tangent Solutions and enter the Fourth Industrial Revolution by automating your workplace. Watch the full video below.