RPA in Retail

By incorporating RPA in retail operations, tasks like invoice processing take less time and have fewer errors. Instead of delegating mountains of paperwork to people to manually parse and distribute data into appropriate programs for processing, this task can be performed by RPA bots, which can use optical character recognition (OCR) and other machine learning algorithms to scan documents 24/7 and automatically route data where they need to go.

Enterprise resource planning (ERP) programs help retailers stay organized across billing, accounts payable and receivable, price changes, seasonal sales, and so much more, using specialized technology to simplify management of these business-critical activities. To further enhance workflow with ERP, retailers can automate many of these tasks, leaving the inputting and exchanges of data to bots that can run 24/7 with excellent accuracy. For even deeper efficiencies, connect this data back to internal inventory systems, providing real-time data that helps you always know what’s on-hand—allowing you to make smarter, data-backed decisions about purchasing, scheduling and more. Even better, with EZFlow, you can accomplish all of this from a single pane view, giving you one place to manage all ERP and automation efforts.

Managing inventory, purchasing, and sales in retail often hinges on proper categorization of products and SKUs. With process automation from EZFlow, retailers can outsource these tasks to automation. When new product SKUS come in, vendor and product data can be automatically extracted using optical character recognition and other machine learning algorithms to organize, parse and distribute the appropriate product data to various internal systems and teams, giving you constant access to real-time product data across the entire retail operation.

From boutique standalone operations that rely on outsourced accounting, to medium sized retailers with multiple storefronts, to corporate stores with official headquarters, retailers need to send a variety of information and data at any given time. Manually completing this process is a waste of employee time. Instead, retailers can use RPA bots to regularly query systems for the right information, and send it the data on its way. Perhaps it’s compiling daily sales data and sending it to a home office for analysis. Another example might be to automatically extract quarterly earnings and package up and send to an accounting team for tax preparation. When information needs to be exchanged or delivered, RPA and process automation can easily do this go-between work on an automated 24/7 basis.

With a manual demand planning process, most retailers gather sales data, analyze the data, make some educated guesswork and make decisions for the next fiscal period. With RPA in retail, bots can be programmed to automatically complete the majority of this process. Additionally, automation offers the added benefit of providing hard data—leaving less up to guesswork. This improves asset management and capacity management, as well as the customer experience.