Tech leaders in manufacturing firms largely feel the pressure of supply chain disruptions. The disruptions like labor shortages and varying freight prices not just keep them from fulfilling end-user demands, but even from efficient planning and forecasting. Regardless of these complexities, many leaders focus on driving growth. So, how can they augment supply chain profitability when facing these challenges?
The answer lies in Robotic Process Automation. With the help of reliable RPA tools like Automation Anywhere, forward-thing manufacturers can improve supply chain efficiency while minimizing waste and redundant processes. Automation Anywhere RPA solutions enable manufacturers to optimize the supply chain by improving transparency and lessening workflow complexity. However, for creating fail-safe RPA solutions, manufacturing leaders should hire Automation Anywhere experts from a recognized partner company.
Hiring Automation Anywhere Partners – Balancing Orchestration and Automation
Orchestration and automation are the key levers of supply chain digitization. According to a recent survey, around 69% of global manufacturing organizations mention that balancing these two aspects is crucial for boosting the average return on investment. Orchestration helps manufacturers connect and organize all the supply chain participants (distributors, retailers, and consumers) in a unified environment. This helps in improving both process and data transparency and enables manufacturers to obtain insights. Automation is crucial for manufacturers to make specific processes/tasks faster and error-free.
By collaborating with Automation Anywhere partners, tech managers in manufacturing firms can drive a combined (orchestration and automation) modernization and improve supply chain value. The dedicated Automation Anywhere experts can build digital workers in line with data privacy regulations and standards. Besides these aspects, the experts help manufacturers in accelerating digitization impact by scaling digital workers across the organization. A trusted Automation Anywhere partner can help manufacturers in:
- Assessing and executing manufacturing automation ideas at scale
- Incorporating cognitive technologies like AI and Machine Learning with RPA bots to easily map the supply chain processes and automate
- Putting automation in the hands of every supply chain participant in an organization
- Hyper-scaling automation deployments through best practices and blueprints
Four Areas Focused by Automation Anywhere Experts for Supply Chain Optimization
1. Inventory Management
Inventory management for manufacturing businesses is becoming more complex, with control stymied by outdated systems and error-prone manual processes. These legacy systems lack forecasting capabilities and adaptability to growing market requirements. This makes it difficult for manufacturers to respond quickly to unforeseen demands and disruptions. Also, sourcing supply chain information from emails, spreadsheets, and documents limits the ability of manufacturers to make tactical decisions.
Automation Anywhere experts help manufacturers no longer rely on legacy inventory systems or search through vast data sources to make effective data decisions. These experts configure and connect digital workers with existing systems for automated inventory monitoring, and determination of appropriate stock levels.
With a data-based demand plan, digital workers enable manufacturers to examine inventory turnover, costs, and latency, and accordingly make supply chain decisions. Automation Anywhere experts can set inventory threshold levels in digital workers to assess risks accurately and optimize production schedules. With these automated actions, manufacturers can improve productivity, security of supply chain processes, and business confidence.
2. Production Capacity
Another key need for manufacturers across the world is to increase supply chain process capacity without installing hardware equipment or resources. This objective can be fulfilled by building and launching digital robots with the help of an experienced Automation Anywhere services provider. These digital bots can eliminate wait time, errors, and float in the processes, and increase the efficiency of plant and tooling. The experts configure bots to access real-time, precise production data to make decisions. With these insights, manufacturers can lessen machine downtime and optimize maintenance schedules.
A more scalable production schedule and data-driven execution are both crucial for manufacturers to obtain a resilient supply chain. Automation Anywhere experts understand this requirement and increase the production capacity through scalable bot deployment. These bots can also improve the production quality and processing time and help manufacturers augment their service levels.
3. Logistics Management
With the disjointed supply chain environment still contributing to material shortages, the capability to meet user demand as planned is crucial for manufacturers. End-users are more likely to mention delivery performance as a key aspect of purchasing decisions.
Automation Anywhere experts can develop digital workers for logistics management. These bots can perform efficient delivery capacity management and recommend logistics plans for manufacturers.
With the help of APIs and intuitive tool support, Automation Anywhere experts can easily integrate bots with an existing logistics management tool. This integration offers transparent insights for manufacturers. The experts also ensure that the digital logistics bots organize shipments based on varying stock levels and perform efficient distribution. Experts can also program these bots to recommend optimal routing after assessing market conditions, freight claims, and charges. These bots can also periodically analyze the health of the delivery chain and flag possible hindrances and risks.
4. Customer Experience
Delivering incredible end-user experiences requires fulfilling expectations around product quality, freight transparency, and service. Automation Anywhere RPA experts also help in improving these aspects.
Ensuring flawless product shipment is crucial for user fulfillment. For this, Automation Anywhere experts integrate Machine Learning models with QA bots to autonomously identify defects and anomalies in products. This enables continuous evaluation of products when they move through assembly or dispatch lines, flagging defects.
Another option that Automation Anywhere experts prefer for improving user experience is deploying IQBot within the manufacturing environment. This bot can also autonomously resolve user queries with the help of intelligent technologies like OCR, NLP, and Machine Learning. This also helps manufacturers minimize the costs spent on maintaining human support agents and the workload for support personnel.
Key Productivity Gains Offered by Automation Anywhere RPA Partners
- Real-time Insights
With the combined utilization of RPA, AI, and ML capabilities, Automation Anywhere partners offer insights and improve supply chain transparency. The data-driven insights help manufacturers eliminate adverse outcomes. Also, by deploying intelligent bots, manufacturers can minimize the time spent on task planning and analysis and refocus their efforts on delighting end-users and clients.
- Resilience
Resilience is another important aspect of a healthy manufacturing supply chain. Automation Anywhere RPA experts offer resilience by creating bots with an unerring focus on the tasks it is assigned. Regardless of uncertainty or disruption, these bots can adapt to the tasks and respond rapidly to the market requirements. Also, the bots built by experts improve resilience by offering a precise and immutable audit trail for quality assurance and reporting.
- Sustainability
Automation Anywhere partners can also fulfill the environmental objectives of manufacturers. The dedicated partners build bots to increase process efficiency, which means less waste, controlled energy consumption, and lower emissions. With the ability to easily analyze multiple data sources, Automation Anywhere experts make the bots well-suited to fulfill ESG reporting objectives. This is a crucial aspect of any sustainability strategy.
- Resource Allocation
Automation Anywhere RPA experts enable the agile allocation of resources through bots in line with real-time demands. These bots offer the ability to modernize front-end business processes quickly and effectively. Also, Automation Anywhere bot creators help manufacturers improve operational efficiency by decreasing process cycle times and improving warehouse throughput.
Closing Thoughts
Manufacturing supply chains are undergoing a transformative evolution. This will continue growing as new technologies are launched and new regulations come into action. To remain successful, supply chain automation is the best strategy that manufacturers should adopt. Automation Anywhere RPA partners are largely helping manufacturing supply chains to become more resilient, efficient, and adaptable so they can remain on top.
