The use of RPA in transportation and logistics is poised to optimize key aspects in their business operations, promising a higher ROI.
Transportation is an important aspect of many industries such as construction, clothing, food, and manufacturing. Managers need to actively track products right from their origin to their final destination. They need to ensure that the products are moving in the supply chain as planned, to ensure timely delivery at the destination. Tracking transportation activities has primarily been a manual task, involving large amounts of paperwork.
The manual process is also inefficient, making it difficult to track the real-time location of the products, eventually resulting in delays in the final delivery. But, what if the process can be completely revamped with a technological solution? Well, Robotic Process Automation (RPA) is just the answer that managers are looking for. Incorporating RPA in transportation and logistics can streamline the process of tracking goods, enabling managers to have complete control over the process.
Benefits of using RPA in transportation and logistics
RPA has a plethora of benefits for enterprises, especially those involved in the transportation and logistics sector. Following are a few benefits of implementing RPA has the following benefits:
Saving time
Automation tools undeniably perform tasks faster than humans. Likewise, RPA tools can execute mundane tasks at a faster pace, thereby helping businesses to reduce their process cycle time.
Improving productivity
Robotic process automation tools are consistent employees, performing their duties with high accuracy. Thus, the productivity of your organization will increase as tasks will be carried out with 100 percent accuracy, ensuring high-quality work.
Reducing errors
Tasks performed by RPA tools are less prone to errors. Even if some error occurs, the error can be found easily, as RPA driven processes are recorded.
Increasing revenue
With reduced process cycle times, increased productivity, and reduced errors in the work process, the revenue, and profit of the organization will naturally increase.
Applications of RPA in transport and logistics
RPA can streamline operations in transport and logistics and help bring down operational costs, improve efficiency, and ensure timely deliveries. Some areas in which RPA can prove beneficial in transportation include:
Order processing
Order processing usually involves heaps of paperwork with manual data entry. The process is highly time-consuming and resource-intensive. Moreover, human errors are a common occurrence. Thus, the process proves to be highly inefficient, resulting in loss of time, resources, and capital. The use of RPA for processing orders makes the procedure automatic. It makes the process short and efficient. With RPA, the orders can be processed quickly and moved further in the transportation chain. Bots can pick up shipments’ PRO numbers automatically from a carrier’s website. The further processes in the transportation chain, too, can be streamlined by using RPA. Human intervention is minimum and the process is less susceptible to errors by implementing RPA in the order processing stage.
Order tracking
Once the order is processed and shipped, the same can be tracked with IoT sensors and RPA in real-time. Employees, as well as the end-customer, will have complete information regarding the location of the product with RPA. The RPA tool can automatically send out emails to the concerned employees and the customer regarding the location of the shipment at predefined intervals. Thus, individuals don’t have to spend extra time and resources in locating their product, especially if the transit duration is very long. Even if the product gets misplaced, the same can be tracked easily from the last known location data gathered by the IoT sensor attached to it. Eventually, the customer can schedule the delivery pick-up time based on the location of the product and can considerably improve their satisfaction levels. This can lead to the customer as well as businesses benefiting from RPA enabled services for transporting and receiving goods.
Invoice processing
As a large number of orders are received, processed, and shipped on a daily basis, the task of processing the invoices grows substantially. Invoice processing usually involves updating large amounts of data. Needless to say, the process is highly cumbersome. Thus, it comes as no surprise that Aberdeen Group’s research found that it takes 4.1 to 16.3 days to process an invoice from receipt to approval. And such long periods can prove to be the difference between the success and failure of the transportation company. RPA can streamline the invoice processing process, making it the ideal choice. RPA can provide end-to-end automation solutions for monitoring pending invoices, reading the invoice details and extracting useful information, and then making the payments automatically. The RPA solution can send emails to the concerned parties regarding the status of the invoice. RPA, thus, helps negotiate a major challenge in the transportation industry.
Report generation
As with the other three processes mentioned above, RPA tools can help streamline the report generation process. The transportation sector generates a huge number of reports on a daily basis. These include reports regarding the order status, payment status, customer feedback, transportation vehicle updates, and many more. Creating reports for so many frameworks for analysis purposes can get very lengthy, tiresome, and erroneous. RPA solutions with artificial intelligence capabilities can automatically generate reports based on the data. The tool can automatically grasp the necessary information from the available data and add it to the report. Thus, it will require minimum to no human intervention when employing an RPA solution for report generation. This will help save ample time and resources, which can be utilized elsewhere for other important tasks.
Communication
Communication plays a key role in the transportation sector. Higher executives, employees, helpers, assistants, as well as the end customers, must be able to receive details about the products whenever required. Since the transportation chain involves multiple partners, communication can become an issue. The concerned authority might not be able to communicate with the desired employee. RPA tools such as a chatbot or an auto-responder can help overcome this challenge. The RPA tools either can automatically keep sending updates in the form of emails or push notifications to the concerned authority at regular intervals. Similarly, a chatbot can be used so that customers can interact and find answers to their questions. The notifications or replies can relate to the order status, such as shipment status, delays, or other process queries.
Customer satisfaction
Customer satisfaction is of utmost importance in the transportation sector. A happy customer is a returning customer. With stiff competition in the transportation and logistics sectors, businesses must ensure that they not only get new customers on board but also retain their old ones. Ensuring customer satisfaction is one way to guarantee a huge customer base. RPA can assure that the customers are always happy. Businesses can link data from various stages in transportation with the RPA solution in a way that customer queries are addressed as quickly as possible. With timely updates, notifications, and a chatbot readily available to answer queries, customers will be provided the best service possible. Thus, customers will readily work with your organization for their transportation needs.
The use of RPA in transportation can help in achieving high-level accuracy, improving process cycle times, and increasing the opportunities for revenue generation. RPA tools are quick to deploy, requiring minimum time to improve work procedure efficiencies and increase the financial benefits. In today’s age, where companies are inundated with the pressures of customers, a sophisticated tool like RPA can surely help businesses meet the varying demands of everyone.
