RPA changes the rules of the game in the retail industry丨The international retail giant RPA application record
At present, global enterprises are in the stage of digital transformation, and retail enterprises are no exception. With the general increase in market size and the rapid growth of business scale, business processes in the retail industry have become complicated, and the amount of transaction data involved will continue to rise. Especially in recent years, the complexity of the business environment, coupled with the soaring labor costs, has put retail companies under increasing pressure.
How to meet the era of robot automation in the next stage, reduce costs and increase efficiency, and enhance corporate competitiveness? RPA will give the retail industry a surprise.
RPA may change the rules
of the game in the retail industry. With the expansion of the market, the retail industry is also facing challenges such as increasing customer demand, growing transaction data, and increasingly complex business processes. How to reduce costs and increase efficiency has become a key issue for retail companies.
According to data from McKinsey & Company, more than half (54%) of jobs in the retail or fast-moving consumer goods (CPG) industry are likely to be replaced by automation. Nowadays, RPA has been recognized by more and more retail enterprises, and it has achieved remarkable results in reducing retail enterprise operating costs and improving business efficiency.
RPA is changing the rules of the game in the retail industry through various technological advantages. The emergence of RPA can effectively control and improve business processes, optimize the supply chain of retail enterprises, and solve the problems of traditional business processes that cannot bear excessive business volume. Save costs for enterprises, increase productivity, and enhance customer experience.
RPA is committed to solving a large number of repeated fixed business processes that are common in enterprises. As a software program, it can replace manual manual operations (such as keyboard entry, mouse clicks and movements, system triggers and calls, etc.), with extremely low error rates and never rest.
While RPA greatly improves existing work efficiency, it also raises productivity to a whole new level. More importantly, RPA exists in a "plug-in" way, which can be deployed without affecting the existing IT structure of the retail enterprise, with low cost, safety and ease of use.
Which processes in the retail industry apply to RPA?
1. Large business volume: The daily transaction volume of retail business is large.
2. Clear rules: A large number of operations in daily operational procedures are based on clear rules.
3. High maturity: The retail industry is a mature industry, and most business processes are standardized and not easy to change.
4. Low complexity: Many tasks in the retail value chain can be broken down into relatively simple sequential tasks.
5. Multiple system software: Retail industry usually adopts different system platforms in store management, e-commerce business and other fields. The connection between these systems requires flexibility.
International retail giants have taken the lead in embracing RPA
1. Amazon's RPA application
In May 2019, global retail giant Amazon deployed RPA process automation robots in its warehousing, customer service, after-sales and other departments, replacing 1,300 job positions, saving Amazon a lot of working time and manpower Resource cost. In order to further increase its RPA operations, two months later, Amazon announced that it would invest 700 million US dollars to help about 100,000 employees in the group to train new skills including data science, RPA, artificial intelligence, etc., with the aim of expanding its The popularization and promotion of RPA helps employees improve their own technology in order to better integrate into the era of robot automation.
2. Suntory's RPA application is
recognized as the leading retailer of beverages and soft drinks in Japan. Suntory Group has also begun to apply RPA to improve productivity and future competitiveness of the company. The RPA solution can effectively reduce the error data and response delays caused by manual operations in the past, save a lot of time for employees, release manpower, and enable them to undertake more humanized tasks. In addition to establishing an RPA service center at the headquarters, Suntory has successively implemented process automation solutions in its Asian subsidiaries (Singapore, Thailand, Vietnam, etc.).
3. Walmart's RPA application
Walmart uses RPA+AI to monitor retail stores in real time. With the intensification of competition in the retail market, the world retail giant Wal-Mart is applying RPA (Robot Process Automation), AI (Artificial Intelligence), ML (Machine Learning) and other technologies to physical stores to manage with more effective digital technology, and Make customer shopping experience more enjoyable. Wal-Mart has launched a smart retail laboratory in a direct store in downtown Tallahassee, Florida, USA.
At present, each shelf of the store is equipped with a sensor and vision camera. These two devices are mainly used to monitor the items on the shelves in real time. For example, the vision camera will scan the entire shelf in real time. When the laundry liquid on the shelf in the cleaning area of the store is vacant, the camera will recognize this information and use the RPA robot to check this information. The information is sent to the warehouse staff computer system, and the staff will intuitively see this data to replenish the goods as soon as possible. At the same time, the vision camera will also identify the wrong product on the shelf (putting milk on the laundry detergent shelf), wrong price tag, etc.
In the past, manual replenishment of shelf items was not only time-consuming and laborious, but also impossible to replenish in real time, which often caused the situation that users did not have goods when they wanted to buy. Now through this technology, a warehouse manager can monitor 12 shelves at the same time, while in the past, a worker can only be responsible for two shelves at most. The overall efficiency has been increased by 6 times, and the speed of replenishment on the shelves has been improved, making the customer's buying experience more Comfortable.
Not only foreign retail giants, but domestic large-scale retailers are also actively deploying RPA, such as Ali and Suning. As the future of the retail industry, the pace of RPA platform landing in retail companies will further accelerate. In order to seize the next wave of retail outlets, retailers are bound to include RPA as their first choice for digital transformation of enterprises.