RPA Benefits And Use Cases For Manufacturing Industry

The automation of manufacturing activities can fuel productivity growth with better compliance management practices and bring other substantial advantages at both individual processes and entire business levels. By embracing Robotic Process Automation (RPA) technology, manufacturers can achieve performance benefits such as increased throughput, process visibility with real-time monitoring, higher quality, and reduced downtime in addition to significant labor cost reductions. Despite implementing physical robots to assemble, test, and package products, most of the manufacturers are still struggling to simplify and manage their complex back-office processes, and fulfill volatile regulatory requirements. These are high in volume, repetitive, error-prone, and tedious processes that consume a considerable amount of human employees’ time and effort. RPA bots can execute these tasks in just few minutes without any error. It also makes the manufacturing systems agile by increasing their capacity to incorporate rising demand as well as resume normal operations when it subsides.

With its innovative set of tools and practices, RPA allows enterprises to migrate from tedious manual processes to automated ones with the integration of legacy systems. This way, businesses can continue to run their existing business processes without major disruption. Compared to the cost of modernizing existing systems, RPA bots would cost substantially less expensive.

Popular RPA Use Cases in Manufacturing Industry

Across industries, manufacturers from small to large scale can automate a broad range of labor-and time-intensive manual processes using RPA, while reducing costs significantly. Below are the most prominent RPA Use Cases in manufacturing industry across the globe:

RPA for Invoice Process Automation

Manufacturers automating invoice process with RPA have experienced average manual effort reduction by 85% and improvement in compliance by 10x times. As they receive invoices from multiple vendors in different formats with unstructured data, it takes long hours and efforts to match invoices with purchase orders manually. It leads to multiple errors and reworks causing increased turn-around time. To eliminate all these bottlenecks, RPA can automate the end-to-end invoice process with substantial outcomes. In addition to this, you can integrate RPA with existing ERP software to automate its invoice process and reduce your dependency to human employees.

Automate Bill of Material (BOM)

All the employees in a manufacturing company refer to this critical document-Bill of Material (BOM), to decide what, how, and where to purchase raw materials, components, sub-components, and other materials required for developing a product. The possibility of manual error in creating and interpreting the BOM can cost to the manufacturer substantially. To address this manufacturing challenge, companies are deploying RPA bots and standardizing the entire process with enhanced compliance. By eliminating spreadsheets to manage BOM systems and reducing the need for paper, it makes the document error-proof. A detailed traceable list of all the parts used to build a product is created in a hierarchical structure for recurrent and future development. In addition to this, it also set up automatic alerts for missing or wrong entries in a BOM.

Automate Logistics & Delivery Processes

RPA improves end-to-end supply chain management by automating manual tasks involved in various manufacturing logistics processes such as shipment scheduling and tracking, capturing loads and rate look-ups, and order or inventory tracking. It also speeds up invoicing by integrating systems with customer portals. The automation in the supply chain enhances the customer experience by updating customers about shipment status based on real-time monitoring.

RPA for Compliance Report and Management

In the manufacturing industry, accomplishing benchmarked compliance is a challenging task due to data silos, consistency of monitoring, outdated parameters as well as lack of coordination among different departments. However, it is essential to ensure keeping up with internal and external regulations and policies in a manufacturing business to avoid penalties and lawsuits. RPA can ensure an accurate and insightful compliance process by automating:

• Data manipulation processes including entry, transfer, and storage
• Verify process logs against regulation and policy documents to identify non-compliant steps and alert auditors about the same
• Extraction of data from business datasets, and validation of data with original sources like financial reports, invoices, and ERP data
• Prepare compliance reports and send them to concerned managers for verification
• Updating internal policies to incorporate external policy changes
• Generate a comprehensive audit trail for later compliance analysis

There is a broad range of other RPA use cases in manufacturing apart from the above-mentioned ones in the vast manufacturing industry. If you feel like your business is not moving into the digital age quickly enough and existing systems are too complex or old to integrate and automate, then ESS RPA consultants can help you to move forward with your RPA goals faster.