From Warehouse to Delivery: 12 Best RPA Use Cases in Retail Industry

The past few years haven’t been easy for the retail industry: first, the pandemic, then supply chain disruptions, all topped with the great resignation. But unfortunately, many businesses still aren’t out of the woods, and new dangers lurk around the corner.
One of the most alarming hazards is inflation. 60% of small business owners name rising prices as their top challenge, and they have all the right to worry. Inflation affects operational costs and customers’ spending power, making them less likely to spend money on non-essential expenses. At the same time, retailers are under pressure to retain their employees, strive for sustainability, and continuously deliver better shopping experiences.
In light of these challenges, businesses must innovate more than ever in search of new solutions such as Robotic Rrocess Automation (RPA). This article discusses 12 RPA use-cases in retail to show you how the technology can help you face old and new challenges by increasing the efficiency of your business.

RPA is an automation technology that excels at handling simple but time-consuming and data-heavy tasks. About 60% of critical customer and retail processes can be automated, making RPA a very powerful solution for businesses seeking to optimize their workflows.

Here are the top 12 RPA use cases in retail, from sourcing and delivering products to assessing and optimizing your operations.

Sourcing and shipping goods to stores is a critical sequence of repeatable processes. RPA bots can easily take them over for an improved time and cost efficiency.

Supply chain management is a multifaceted domain. It involves intense data crunching, such as supply and demand planning, vendor evaluation, or shipment scheduling. But it also relies on laborious processes like invoice processing, purchase order management, procurement, or supplier onboarding. You can expedite all of them through supply chain management automation.

Knowing which products are in stock is essential to avoiding shortages or excessive inventory. Automated inventory tracking tools continuously update the condition, expiry dates, location, and quantity of your products across all systems to give you full visibility into your supply while avoiding costly, time-consuming labor.

The next step is pairing RPA solutions with AI and machine learning (ML) to predict dynamic supply and demand. Then, based on these forecasts and your current inventory, RPA systems can automatically place orders to prevent stockouts and speed up the resupply process.

To find the optimal store layout, you need a thorough understanding of your offering, customers’ preferences, behavior patterns, and good intuition to know how to nudge them in the right direction. That’s no easy feat.

Instead of relying on instinct, use RPA to make decisions based on data such as visit duration, sections visited, most frequent paths, or the number of stops. Automation software can continually gather and analyze this information to help you plan your store layout. This helps deliver the most convenient and pleasant shopping experience, leading to more sales.

Expanding your catalog is as much an opportunity as a risk. That’s because launching a new product requires significant effort. Meanwhile, success ultimately depends on many factors often beyond your control.

RPA can help you optimize every stage of the launch process. For instance, you can use RPA systems to…

• gather data about competition,
• analyze customer behavior,
• streamline communication between departments and business partners,
• expedite marketing efforts,
• adjust prices and stock to demand.

While automation won’t guarantee that every new product will instantly catch on with your customers, it’ll lower the risk by reducing the effort and helping you make better-informed decisions.

As your retail business and offers grow, you may need help assigning a relevant category to every new product. It’s a laborious but crucial task that dictates how easily customers find what they need and purchase.

A study by Everest Group reveals that RPA can improve categorization accuracy by nearly 100%. The algorithm considers various product features, e.g., brand, color, or size. It uses predefined product mapping rules to create a coherent, easy-to-navigate product catalog quickly.

Online and brick-and-mortar stores are part of the same business and should be aligned. You need to integrate data collected online and offline—RPA is perfect for this job. With retail automation, you can…

• provide up-to-date information about product availability online and in physical locations,
• deliver a consistent customer experience thanks to information collected from all your channels,
• develop better loyalty programs and marketing campaigns based on online and offline customer data.

Integrating online and physical stores is one of many ways RPA can help your eCommerce business—read our eCommerce automation guide to learn more!

83% of customers name good customer service as the decisive factor (other than price or the product itself) when making buying decisions.

RPA can help you deliver better, automated customer service by reducing response times, streamlining ticket submission and handling, and reducing the error rate. When coupled with AI, RPA-p