Manufacturing Meets RPA
The Manufacturing industry has been for long the early adopters of robotics as they used robots to perform daily activities in the manufacturing plant. Recently, the industry took to adopting Robotic Process Automation (RPA) in their back office processes too.
RPA is a software integrated with business processes to automate certain activities that minimize human errors and maximize productivity.
Benefits of using RPA in the Manufacturing industry
- Helps in optimizing time-centric and routine processes
- Increases the go-to-market speed by maximizing productivity
- Reduces cost by minimizing human errors
- Increases agility in operations
Use of RPA in the Manufacturing industry
Manufacturing industries are experiencing continuous pressure to stay competitive in the global market and to achieve this; they must reduce costs while enhancing overall effectiveness like customer responsiveness, honing business, transparency for both regulatory & commercial reasons and business agility. Achieving these objectives not only depends on the core manufacturing activities but also on the proper supporting processes. Therefore, manufacturers should adopt new technologies like RPA to optimize the effectiveness and efficiency of their non-core actions, which influence gating constraints. Discovering additional productivity improvements and cost saving becomes more persuasive with the raising difficulty of finding skilled technical resources to support system enhancement and system maintenance. Here are some of the challenges that manufacturing industries facing today and how RPA solutions fix them:
-
BoM (Bill of Materials)
BoM lists the items needed to manufacture the products including sub-assemblies, raw materials, sub-components, intermediate assemblies and many more. The manual process of BoM includes the chance of human errors that can cost the business a plenty of money, time, and effort.
RPA Solution: RPA bots can handle the Bill of Materials in real time, which ensures that the products will be manufactured without any defects and shipped on time.
-
Compliance
Manufacturers who sell their products globally are confronting a time-consuming issue when it comes to handling compliance problems for each product and each country.
RPA Solutions – Implementations of RPA software can simplify this process. In addition to the assurance of accurate data processing in accordance with compliance requirements, RPA tools maintain a track of its updated activities at any given time.
-
Communication
As similar to compliance, communication with existing clients and prospective clients is also a time-consuming process. Enterprises might face challenges in manipulating data when they are handling multiple factories and offices. A leading company might be managing multiple branches of offices and factories.
RPA solution: RPA bots can automate these processes, including name recognition, automatic email replies, chatbots, and language detection. In addition, with web-integrated RPA, the manufacturing enterprises can effortlessly monitor, access, as well as update the changes on their web-connected system. Therefore, a manufacturer can experience more rapid communication with RPA tools.
-
Data Migration
At the time of migrating data from an old machine or on paper to a digital system, it was difficult as well as time-consuming to find, organize. and utilize data.
RPA Solution – Integration of RPA software can streamline the migration process from paper to a completely new digital system. RPA bots digitize the paper files and integrate them into the new system properly. Such kind of automation saves time and reduces human error as it avoids duplication or missing files.
-
Customer Support & Service Desk
Customer service plays a vital role in the success of any business including manufacturing. Businesses should adopt advanced technologies to enhance the interaction with their customers. In addition, in the front office, the customer service representative has to navigate multiple screens while responding to a single customer, as it requires to access data from various systems.
RPA Solution – Deploying RPA platform allows the employees to access data stored on multiple systems at one place and then empowers them to serve better. In addition, it can also be used to put a reminder while the salesperson starts following with clients, upholds a contact schedule and so on. He/she can access multiple stored data in one place and this enables to serve the customers better.
Conclusion:
It is the right time for manufacturing domains to incorporate the next wave of automation in non-core processes issues with RPA and experience cost reduction and productivity enhancement. As such, the manufacturing enterprises, which want to unlock the complete potential of their management, productivity, and administration, should consider implementing the RPA solutions in their functional area.
Looking to grow your manufacturing industry, contact us today.