The retail ecosystem evolves constantly. Retailers need to reduce costs and increase efficiency in a challenging market where consumer spending is unpredictable, costs are rising, and finding staff with the right experience can be difficult, as explained here by Rory Gray, vice president UK & Ireland, UiPath.

Within this environment of constant evolution, retailers need to keep investing in innovative online services, refresh core systems, and develop smarter, more personalised offers. All this has to be achieved while rethinking the role of the store in the age of heightened, technology-driven consumer expectations.

Robotic Process Automation (RPA) has the potential to transform the retail industry. One area to address is automating and improving productivity and accuracy across retail business operations. According to consultancy firm McKinsey & Company, 54% of the work done in retail has the potential to be automated. By automating time-consuming manual processes, retailers can free up the time of their managers and employees to interpret more accurate retail demand signals, and improve customer retail experience.

Back-office retail functions can also be improved. Take this example of a U.S.-based global retailer. In order to obtain all of the data necessary to process tax invoices, employees were undertaking a few manual steps. The work entailed employees accessing vendor websites and using search filters to find invoices. Employees then analysed the invoices and used the content for reporting.

It was a tedious process that led to human errors and could clearly benefit from automation.

Software robots now crawl through the vendors’ websites to search, retrieve, sort, and file the necessary data. Automating the process has substantially reduced process time and achieved 100% accuracy, freeing up employees to focus on more mission-critical tasks.  

Another retailer, based in India, has used automation to achieve efficiencies in a different area. This retailer had to reconcile a high number of open items every month. The items spanned 35 countries and employees had to navigate between SAP and other systems. Automation reduced the amount of manual labour by interfacing between the two systems directly.

In addition to this, the company automated repetitive and error-prone calculation of supply chain costs for 200 accounts across 11 countries. Robots now process supply-chain-related transactions and transfer the processed data directly into SAP, eliminating many of the inaccuracies. The result is that employees can now calculate costs directly.

In Brazil, a retailer was using store closing reports to validate information for each of its registers across hundreds of sites. Inevitably, the store’s employees found the manual process used to pull these reports to be slow and time-consuming. Automating the process freed store employees to spend more time serving customers and ensuring stores are attractive to shoppers.

In the UK, a retailer faced a different kind of challenge. It was struggling to save time on user permission updates. Employees had to undertake the task and gain manual approval from their manager. With the high number of employees, the process took a long time – anything between two and four days.

Automation was an obvious option. Implemented in four weeks, software robots now crawl through the retailer’s database to capture a list of employees needing to update their permissions and managers can approve all user permission requests at one time. Automating the process reduced the time spent on this cycle and was readily scalable. The benefits were soon seen in increased productivity.

The common thread in these cases is the recognition by the retailers concerned that manual processes were using employee time unnecessarily, when they could easily be automated. The solutions were easily implemented and designed to meet the specific challenges each retailer faced.

These are just a handful of examples of the automation revolution that is set to sweep through retail, eliminating error and increasing productivity.

Software robots are easily scalable, with massive capacity to save time and boost efficiency into back-office and supply chain operations of retailers, along with customer experience functions. Whether under the supervision of an employee, or fully autonomous, software robots are already powering productivity in retail.

There is every reason to believe McKinsey when it says that the retail automation market will grow from USD$8.7bn (£6.64bn) last year to more than USD$14bn (£10.68bn) in 2022. Automation will transform human resources functions, the supply chain, sales analytics, promotions, in-store planning, and the introduction of new products. The range of possibilities is vast and will enable forward-thinking retailers to overcome some of the challenges they face.