Introduction to Retail and CPG
CPG (Consumer Packaged Goods) are those items used daily by average consumers. These items are food, clothes, beverages, makeup, and household products. These items require daily replenishment. CPG is used by customers and sold by retailers. Retail is anyone selling to end-user. It can be through online sources, a brick-and-mortar retail store, and phone orders. Almost 55% of retail work can be automated because 55% of work includes rule-based and repetitive processes. Such as inventory management, work order management, business analytics, demand, and supply planning, invoice processing, and return processing. These processes can be automated using RPA (Robotic Process Automation).XenonStack provides services and solutions for Automating everyday monotonous tasks which assist enterprises in improving business efficiency, Increasing productivity and reducing risk. Explore our RPA Services and Solutions
The retail and CPG industry is evolving rapidly. In today's digital world, the industry acquired RPA (Robotic Process Automation) to increase sales and customer satisfaction. By using RPA, they can innovate and respond to changes rapidly. Thus RPA helps them to improve customer experience, product availability, team member productivity, and cost reduction. So let us get started with the blog RPA in Retail and CPG. But before we talk about what RPA is changing, we need to understand the industry's challenges.
Challenges in Retail and CPG
The industry has to face many challenges. Some of them are:Product Availability
The retail and CPG industry has to maintain the availability of products to make them product available on demand. Due to low visibility, companies spend more than the required inventory. Thus it costs more for this process.
Business Analytics
Retail and CPG industry, accuracy, and efficiency are terms that help them to succeed. The analysis is very important for fulfilling the demands of the market. Any delay in sales analysis and market demand can lose the industry.Work Management
Retail and CPG industry, accuracy, and efficiency are terms that help them to succeed. The analysis is very important for fulfilling the demands of the market. Any delay in sales analysis and market demand can lose the industry.Managing Market Demand
Tasks of order and invoice processing are manual, so it takes too much time to fulfill market demands. It led to a delay in supply to the market. Hence it results in a loss of sales.
Use Cases of RPA in Retail and CPG
Trade Promotion
The retail industry needs to understand the latest trends in the market and observe the performance of competitors and the performance of their products in the market. Trades promotions are handled manually through registers and spreadsheets, which have a high error chance and consume too much time. The absence of accuracy can be expensive for investors. But RPA can automate this whole process of collection of data and generation of reports to simplify trade promotion.Sales Analytics and Returns Processing
RPA can be used to analyze sales. Factors that affect the sailing of the product can be analyzed. It helps to analyze why a product sells in a particular geographic location. RPA provides real-time insight into the analysis. So they can make decisions based on a review which can help them increase product sales. According to Research, 10%-15% of the in-store sales are returned, which constitutes a significant amount to the workload for the staff from back entries to sending it back to the warehouse in some cases. Automating the entire process with RPA helps Retailers concentrate on sales more.New Product Production
While introducing a new product or product line, RPA helps retailers to automate the process, such as customer opinion and surveys. And statistical information for this investigation can be used for adjustments in pricing, inventory, and supply of new products.Supply Chain and Logistic management
Supply chain and management are essential parts of retail activities. Several processes include shipping products from suppliers to customers, such as shipment status tracking, inventory monitoring, and reverse shipment. Robotic Process Automation (RPA) can automate the process of communication; it is necessary between workforces for a successful supply chain. RPA can automate sending emails or details when the product is booked, shipped, delayed, or delivered.Customer Support
For any industry, it is necessary to meet the customer's objectives. They have to pay great attention to customers' queries for their satisfaction. If we talk about e-commerce retailers, customer guidance through automation can help them and their customers as well.RPA can provide an all-time supporter to the customer by creating bots. To keep them in the loop RPA bot can send an update to customers from the process of order to payment. We can also automate the process to answer customers' simple queries and take feedback from them. It can provide 24*7 support to customers.ERP Management
To keep track of prize changes and billing so that we can generate reports for accounts payable and receivable, an ERP is managed. We can also automate this process using RPA. RPA bots can automate the process and manage the ERP system; thus, they can reduce human efforts. Also, Read Robotic Process and Cognitive Automation OverviewBenefits of RPA in retail and CPG
- User in the retail industry has to process many invoices that are in different formats. Using OCR intelligence of RPA, these invoices can be read, processed, and classify.
- The real-time analysis helps them to monitor sales of products. It helps to find the factors responsible for a particular product's sale.
- Market trends can be predicted by RPA while launching a product or product line in the market.
- High support availability and All-time support to customers help to improve customer satisfaction.
As discussed above, RPA helps a lot in the Retail and CPG industries. These companies have so many manual processes that the team member generally performs. RPA automates these processes and frees employees to concentrate on other tasks that need human effort. So this led industry to focus on what matters to the customer. It is noticed that almost $2 trillion can be saved globally by automating processes using RPA. Read Next
