Context 

Innovation has become more important than ever before. To remain competitive, organizations must get on the lookout for all the latest technologies they’re bombarded with. In the previous decade, the retail company has tried a variety of growth techniques to boost its sales. It has been re-inventing its marketing mix to stay at the top of the retail food chain.

RPA within the retail industry can automate repetitive tasks, like inventory management, customer engagement, loyalty scheme management, bill generation, etc. it’s going to help retailers stay relevant, effective, and optimized.

How does RPA within the retail industry help?

Retail is the concluding step of a complicated supply chain that has several additional costs that keep adding at every stage. RPA can reduce these costs, and potentially also improve the profit margins of the retailer.

RPA can help to reinforce productivity and accuracy across a selection of operations within the Retail industry. The utilization cases for RPA in Retail:

• Sales Analytics: Comprehensive analysis of sales data demands an intensive effort. Automated analytics provides rapid access to reports and provides real-time insights to maximize sales opportunities.

• New Product Introductions: RPA improves collaboration between R&D, manufacturing, and marketing departments, by automating processes associated with alerts and monitoring client opinions in real-time.

• In-Store Planning: RPA brings the facility to make use of data to anticipate customer expectations and make store-specific merchandise disposal, optimally fit with consumer demographics and preferences.

• Order and Returns Processing: RPA processes the orders and returns, retailers can do a faster turnaround by avoiding delays within the processing of those activities, leading to longer and bandwidth to handle exceptions.

The customer

The customer is a leading food and beverage (retail) company with a global portfolio that includes multiple brands sold in more than 200 countries around the world. 

The Challenge

One of the marketing strategies to retain the company’s brand image is its smart and thoughtful promotional ideas. Consistent with the seasonality of purchase of products, climate conditions, festival season, and other regional events, the company’s regional marketing team conducts local promotions, which appear on their product packaging. These retail promotions go through a lengthy and sophisticated process and are reviewed by multiple departments before getting finalized.

Each department has a specific role to play within a successful promotional campaign and possesses to review and approve the assigned task. The progress of the tactic was tracked through email systems and spreadsheets which caused large problems. It caused delays in implementing the promotion and thus the inefficiency in tracking the processes. So their need of the hour was to renew their core to urge those workflows to be efficiently automated for an enormous scale.

Other challenges included time-consuming processes requiring users to access multiple systems like ERP, document management, websites, and MS Office. It was identified that RPA could help to automate the end-to-end process to realize cost savings whilst also reducing average handle times and error rates. Overall, these improvements would also improve the top customer experience. 

The solution

AIRA designed an automated workflow solution that is simple, flexible, and adaptable with a user-friendly interface. It gives the power to easily and accurately plan promotions, track progress, and evaluate their effectiveness. By managing all kinds of promotions across all channels during a centralized system, the corporation can coordinate promotions across all departments that are involved within the promotion process. 

The business process automation system optimizes and streamlines the entire operation of product promotion; it can plan, track and approve projects at a glance, annotate work, identify blockages and get projects delivered on time. Custom email alerts are sent to select users or groups to tell them of the actions required or the status of the project, which significantly reduces the time and resources involved.

The Result

• Reduced operational costs:  Employees will have time to work on value-adding activities.

• Multi-tasking: RPA can process many different tasks as long as they do not take place at the same time.

• Robots never sleep: Many of today’s digitally-enabled processes can be orchestrated to operate autonomously 24/7, driving real-time transactions.

• Allows for growth: Robots can respond to a growing workload with speed, agility, and resilience.

• Improved quality & control: RPA reduces errors, produces detailed activity logs, that enable programmable controls.

Testimonial 

“One of the explanations we chose for AIRA is because they’re an open sort of company, they permit us to urge our hands on their software without having to go through an entire bunch of rigmarole of how you’d go and fill out this and fill out that. Robotics has not only directly improved the method, but also laid the inspiration for further improvements because of process insights and performance transparency. The time savings have been huge. Automating just this one process helped us save 100-200 hours per annum. The entire process is faster and more accurate. With AIRA, everything is perfect and completely controlled.”

About AIRA

Artificially Intelligent Robotic Automation  

AIRA is an AI and ML-powered digital agent that is designed specially to overtake and automate your everyday tasks and business processes through robotic automation. AIRA offers effective and scalable integration with digital technologies and legacy systems to free your workforce from labour-intensive/low output tasks. It also allows you to craft your automated workflow to build your personalized low code/no-code automation suite.