Tedious, repetitive tasks can put quite a drain on your time, especially when you would rather spend it on more meaningful activities. Take emails, for instance, you cannot do without them, you cannot ignore them, and there will be quite a few that will require you to prioritize and take action.
Sifting through the entire information to take only the necessary data to the operating system for crafting a response can be overwhelming especially when you would want to focus on important activities such as building relationships with customers or planning for business growth. Thankfully, after a successful run across industries including financial services, healthcare, and hospitality, Robotics Process Automation (RPA) has now made its debut in transportation and logistics.
RPA bots are easy to use and you can integrate them with your existing technology infrastructure even if the systems they work with do not integrate with one another. The fact that the global robotic process automation market size is expected to touch $13.74 billion by 2028 at a CAGR of 32.8% over the forecast period only makes it evident how eager enterprises are to adopt RPA.
Enterprises have always been on the lookout for ways and means to monitor costs and resources. RPA offers them just that, making its way across business departments and processes reducing human error, and amplifying throughput.
Some organizations have been hesitant to adopt RPA because they weren’t sure if their scale could support this technology. The capabilities that RPA brings along are however helping them realize its value and potential. No matter which industry we speak about, transportation and logistics form an integral part of their supply chain. Any improvement in business processes thus has a positive impact on all others.
It’s time we delved deeper into the benefits and use cases that make RPA the smartest solution out there for streamlining processes in transportation and logistics.
The RPA benefits
RPA offers several benefits when you put RPA at the helm of business processes. Jaguar Freight recently announced its decision of choosing RPA Labs for the documentation of its document processes.
Speaking about its decision, Simon Kaye, President, and CEO of Jaguar Freight elaborated, “We recently partnered with RPA Labs, who does a tremendous job automating a lot of the heavy lifting within our organization. They helped us in two areas – one is taking a lot of raw data from client documentation, commercial invoices, and packing lists, and populating that automatically in our system, where previously there was a fair amount of data entry, which caused a lot of errors and delays.”
Not just big enterprises, but even startups are now eagerly embracing the power of RPA to streamline their operations.
Some of the top benefits of leveraging RPA solutions include:
- Time – Automation has always saved enterprises a lot of time, but RPA tools streamline tasks helping them further bring down the process cycle time significantly.
- Accuracy – Due to the absence of manual intervention, RPA ensures high accuracy. Tasks performed are usually error-free and in the rare event that an error occurs, it can be found and fixed easily. This is possible because RPA-driven processes are recorded and easily retrieved.
- Productivity – Higher accuracy ensures better work management. It helps enterprises align processes with their business goals ensuring productivity is at an all-time high.
- Revenue – With reduced process cycle times and increased accuracy and productivity, enterprises are able to devote their time to grow their business and increase revenue.
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To take a closer look at the different processes that benefit from RPA and understand how RPA plays a role in enhancing organizational efficiencies, let’s look at its applications.
Order processing and tracking
The one area that involves endless manual data entries and can improve significantly is order processing and tracking. It’s not just tedious and time-consuming but also very resource-intensive. Manual errors can prove to be extremely costly at this stage. RPA enables organizations to process orders efficiently. PRO numbers of shipments are picked up from a carrier’s website automatically via bots and loads are closed out in no time.
Tracking continues with the help of IoT sensors even after orders are processed and shipped. IoT sensors also ensure that products can be traced based on their last known location in case they get misplaced during transit. The rationale is to keep both employees and customers in the loop so that the status of shipments is known to all concerned at all times.
The RPA tool also sends out updates in the form of emails at regular intervals. This feature comes in handy when the transit period is too long. Customers also get plenty of time to schedule pick-up times based on the location of the product.
Inventory management
Another important task that comes under the domain of RPA in supply chain and logistics is that of inventory monitoring. After all, supply needs to be aligned with the demand for products and the expectations can be met only when you know exactly how many products are left and when new shipments are going to be needed.
RPA tools look into this aspect and send a notification to concerned employees about the number of products remaining and even order new products as required. Supply and demand planning is possible only when you are able to analyze diverse data from suppliers, customers, distributors, and your workforce. RPA can gather, store, and analyze data to help you tide over these challenges and maintain a steady supply.
Invoice management
Like order processing, invoice management also involves entering and processing a huge amount of data. With RPA tools, you can substantially reduce the stress of going through invoice documents and ensure error-free processing. In a typical business scenario in transport and logistics, orders are received, processed, and shipped in large numbers every day.
While it took days in the pre-RPA era to process invoices, RPA ensures that invoices are processed quickly and accurately, extracting only pertinent information to enable automatic payments. This helps businesses reduce the average handling time by 89% with 100% accuracy and achieve a resource utilization of 36%.
Report generation
You need reports for just about everything; be it for processing payments, gathering customer feedback, or managing shipments. When it comes to transportation, report generation assumes a whole new level especially when you are tracking movements from city to city, port to port. Often, it can get tiresome and challenging.
RPA helps you manage all your report-related chores with ease thanks to its ability to screen information. Minus the human intervention, RPA-generated reports are highly accurate. Modern enterprises combine the capabilities of RPA with Artificial Intelligence to generate precise reports and even make sense of them to offer actionable insights.
Communication and customer satisfaction
In a sector as busy and extensive as transportation, communication is the key to better relations and customer satisfaction. Customers need timely updates and the fact that multiple vendors and partners are divided by distance and time zones can sometimes pose challenges in communication. This is where RPA tools such as chatbots and auto-responders come into play.
They communicate, interact, and answer customer queries. They also push notifications as often as required to inform concerned authorities about order status or shipment delays or other related matters. This in turn ensures a high level of customer satisfaction. Given the stiff competition, it is the only way customers are going to keep coming back for more.
While old customers are happy to hang around, new customers will look forward to a long association thanks to RPA-enabled services. The best part about RPA tools is that they allow you to link information across stages and processes to have the right information necessary for providing efficient customer service and 24X7 support.
Take your business to new heights with Trigent
Trigent with its highly experienced team of technology experts is helping enterprises improve process cycle times and create new opportunities for increasing revenue. They can help you too with the right RPA tools and solutions to enhance process efficiencies and create better customer experiences.
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