As the world moves into the era of Industry 4.0, Robotic Process Automation (RPA) is gaining momentum across all sectors. It's happening because companies are learning how important it is to automate a process and increase efficiency.

Retailers have long used robots to help with inventory, supply chain, returns processing, invoice and contract management, and store planning management.

But did you know that RPA also supports multiple office tasks such as onboarding, staff selection, payroll, and training? The finance department can optimize activities around regulatory compliance, cash flow management, incentive claims, and receivables.

Top 5 main uses of RPA in Retail Management :

1. Product Introduction

In retail, new products are introduced regularly. As new products come along, older products have to be updated too. For example, attributes such as pricing and stock quantity can change often. Client and customer opinions are monitored in real-time (using RPA) to tweak product rates, manage inventory and adjust pricing.

2. Marketing Planning

Retail trade promotions are essential to the processes of retail businesses, but the manual execution of these activities is costly for retailers. Retailers can overcome these costs by using RPA to gather and analyze data. This will enable them to offer trade promotions that appeal to customers' preferences.

For example, rebate management—a sales promotion activity widely used in the food industry—can be used to increase sales of a product while also providing customers with the rebates they desire.

3. Product Categorization

Retailers must implement a global and local classification system for products. Classification is vital to the success of any retail organization, as it allows customers to find products quickly and easily.

The Everest Group conducted research that revealed that automated retail solutions can improve product categorization accuracy by 98.5%. Thus, retailers who utilize robotic process automation are able to more accurately place several products in relevant categories based on user-related factors.

4. Invoice Processing

Invoicing is a repetitive task that takes up a lot of time, and workers are surrounded by paperwork. As a result, human intervention continues to dilute profits. RPA can streamline this process in retail outlets and make it easier to collect information, segregate data, and process invoices.

5. Business and Sales Analytics

Retailers can use sales analytics programs to help with decisions such as trade promotions, churn rate, and product introductions. A retail-specific automation platform can provide real-time reports based on customer preferences and user behavior regarding a particular product or product features.

Furthermore, retailers can combine these insights with predictive analytics capabilities to support stock optimization. As a conclusion, consider RPA if you're looking to overcome inefficiencies that are holding back your organization. The use cases with employees performing time-consuming and complex processes will be the first you look at—and rightly so. But don't forget about the hundreds of other non-human tasks that we discussed in this article.

A more efficient business today means that you can save resources for other pressing projects tomorrow. RPA can help give your business a competitive edge by reducing costs, increasing the speed of implementation, streamlining processes, and improving accuracy.