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Top 15 use cases of RPA in Manufacturing

Updated: Jan 5



Manufacturing organisations are shifting their production units from human resources to physical industry robots to assemble, inspect, and ship their products. Even though these robots assist in the maintenance of the assembly line, manufacturing companies continue to struggle to manage their operational procedures and back-office tasks.


Manufacturing automation has attracted advanced developments in factories across a wide range of industries. Significantly, the industrial sector is witnessing error-free and streamlined procedures without completing full performance to provide the best products with the use of RPA.


Businesses are increasingly turning to robotic process automation (RPA) to perform repetitive and routine activities, despite the hurdles provided by a pandemic that shows no signs of slowing down. Thanks to robotic process automation, jobs that used to take days or weeks to accomplish can now be finished in minutes or hours.


The advantages of Business process automation use cases in the manufacturing business are assisting organizations in optimising costs, efficiency, accuracy, less wastage, increased focus, improving stakeholder productivity, adhering to compliance better, and building system agility.


According to industry data, the losses caused by these manual efforts are close to 30-40%. So, in addition to the production process, it is now time for the manufacturing industry to use RPA throughout all operations. They can achieve up to 40-50% cost savings in various areas of work by utilising Robotic Process Automation technologies in their back-end operations.


Why the Manufacturing Industry Requires RPA Bots


Manufacturing industries are under constant pressure to remain competitive in the global market and to do so, they must reduce costs while improving overall effectiveness, such as customer responsiveness, business-enhancing, transparency for both regulatory and commercial reasons, and business agility. Attaining these goals is dependent not only on core manufacturing activities but also on the correct top reasons.


As a result, manufacturers should implement innovative technologies such as RPA to improve the effectiveness and efficiency of their non-core actions, which influence gating limitations. With the increasing challenge of finding trained resources and expertise to support system enhancement and system maintenance, discovering additional productivity improvements and cost savings becomes increasingly compelling.


So, what are the ideal RPA Functional Areas and Use Cases in Manufacturing to understand?


To help you understand the processes, we've compiled a list of the Top 15 RPA Use Cases in the Manufacturing Industry. Look through each of the use cases listed below individually.


Top 15 RPA Use Cases in the Manufacturing Industry


Supply chain management & optimization


Invoice Processing


Invoice processing is critical to a manufacturing company's procure-to-pay (p2p) or source-to-pay (s2p) operations.


Invoice processing is difficult owing to invoices in various forms such as pdf, email, or pictures, reviewing relevant details such as bank information or supplier details, and data representation from many systems such as ERP, CRM, banks, suppliers, and so on. Companies that use manual processes waste time receiving, assigning, and approving bills. Invoice processing begins with the receipt of an invoice and finishes with the completion and recording of payment.


RPA (Robotic Process Automation) is a more efficient payment method. The above-mentioned invoice processing difficulty can be overcome by automating the entire process with RPA. Without any human intervention, all data will be updated in the appropriate systems. The method of collecting data from vendor invoice data, which are rule-based tasks, and sending it to the target system capturing invoices or matching invoices to accounts that run at configured intervals while sending a mail with the bills to be approved, is referred to as automation.


RPA bots can automate invoice processing by doing the foll