Four Benefits of RPA in Logistics

CIO Applications| Tuesday, July 06, 2021

RPA bots can automate repetitive, time-consuming processes like converting purchase requests into purchase orders and forwarding them for approval once they've been deployed.

FREMONT, CA: Our economy relies heavily on logistics. The industry needs to stay running to ensure that producers have the ingredients they need to keep building and products reach the market on time. Despite this, manual operations are still used in more than half of transportation and logistics organizations' processes. Whether it is data entry or validation, m shipments, validating purchase orders, or a variety of other data-intensive activities, robotic process automation (RPA) can help automate them. Here are four benefits of RPA in logistics:

Order and Inventory Tracking

Many third-party logistics providers have partnerships with dozens or even hundreds of carriers, payment processors, and suppliers to develop their business. However, these connections can increase the manual data entry required to process and retrieve the order and tracking information you need to provide to your clients.

When you add RPA to the mix, a software robot may automatically access the carrier's systems to extract all relevant data and feed it into your systems with 100 percent accuracy and appropriate validations conducted at every step. Suddenly, providing your consumers with important tracking and order information is simple and painless.

Freight Management

The ultimate purpose of freight management is to get freight from the point of origin to the point of destination as quickly as feasible. RPA can help you improve your freight management by delivering items on the schedule, in the right amounts, and at the lowest possible cost. In addition, planning optimization tasks and appointment scheduling, load prioritizing and consolidation, route optimization, and freight accounting can all be automated.

Purchase Order Management

Many manual inputs can go into PO management, from approvals to inventory inspections and reviews. RPA bots can automate repetitive, time-consuming processes like converting purchase requests into purchase orders and forwarding them for approval once they've been deployed. Purchase orders can also be reviewed by RPA bots, which can scan for specific criteria or execute tasks like comparing the PO to the accompanying invoice. They can then check and route POs that follow the defined rules while flagging any that don't so they can be manually examined.

Shipment Scheduling and Tracking

To give consumers visibility of inventory and delivery information, most logistics companies use B2B or web portals. The difficulty is that many of these websites aren't connected to the internal transportation management tools you use to plan and track shipments. This necessitates manually rekeying data between the systems, which wastes time and increases the risk of errors.

Instead of a Customer Service Representative (CSR) handling the transfer of information from web portals to internal systems and beyond, RPA automates the process. As your shipment scheduling and tracking are automated in the background, your CSRs are freed up to handle more critical customer support issues.