Retail companies face many challenges in meeting their digitalization goals of consolidating IT systems, integrate the supply chain, and deliver the best customer experience.
As the number of products increase, so does the number of partners and how often data must be interchanged in the supply chain or reported to authorities.
Many retail companies rely on SAP or another large ERP system to deliver most of their IT infrastructure, and this is often not where the challenge is. Rather it is in integrating SAP with all the external partners needed to run the operation, both service partner and supply chain partners.
At SmartRPA we have long time experience of working with companies in the supply chain and we typically see that companies in retail already after 1-2 years have automated over 100 processes with our SmartRPA Kapow solution. Processes that mainly originate in the finance department and the logistics department.
ERP synchronization: Import/export data to ERP system (for example SAP) from external partners.
VAT reporting: Automatically import VAT related information from external partners into SAP for timely and automated VAT reporting.
Change of delivery: When goods are send to a shop there are often last-minute changes to what was ordered compared to what is delivered. The registration and communication of these change can be automated.
Procurement processing: When a supplier adds or changes product information is must be registered into internal systems. With many suppliers and many standards for product description, this tedious manual process can in many cases be fully or partly automated.
Sourcing: Finding product pricing and availability across many suppliers is a process which can both be automated and also performed with a much higher frequency than what can be done manually.
Tracking: Replace manual tracking at supplier’s web site with automated tracking synchronization directly into internal procurement platform.
Track delivery: Your customers expect they in real-time can track shipments and you would like them to do that inside your customer portal. Robots can in near-realtime retrieve tracking information from external partners directly inside your customer portal.
Order and Invoicing: Intelligent OCR extraction combined with support for various other order formats such as email, Excel and PDF, makes it possible to automatically import orders and invoices into ERP and subsequently deliver invoices and orders back to suppliers and customers.
Examples of Automated Processes
Know Your Customer (KYC)
The KYC processes are regulatory required and consists of gathering data on customers, counterparty banks and their board members.
Credit Line Origination
In order to open a new credit line, a number of processes like credit scoring, background check and account opening must be completed.
Registration of Clients
(branches à main office): Ensure that customer data from branches is instantly imported to the central systems, allowing customers full service from the outset.
Error Handling
(system errors): Almost any system in a bank spits out errors they aren’t designed to handle – typically due to a lack of integrations to other internal or external systems.
360° Customer view for meeting preparation
To get a complete view of a customer engagement several sources of information must be visited and information must be consolidated.
