Transport Shipping and Logistics (TSL) is all about cooperation. However, successful collaboration doesn’t come easily.
Data sharing today has become very important because different stakeholders within a supply chain – TSL being one of them – have their own way of doing things and their own IT infrastructure to support individual business processes. Thanks to RPA’s most important feature of linking systems that cannot see each other, it has become broadly applicable in the TSL industry, recognizing it as having one of the highest potentials for automation.
RPA can boost the efficiency of the following processes and tasks:
Shipment scheduling and tracking from initial pick-up request to checking and reporting shipment status between internal systems and external portals extracts –passing on details from incoming emails, logging jobs in scheduling systems, and providing pick-up times in customer portals.
Preparating reports (shipment status reporting, inventory rotation, occupancy of storage units, etc.).
Supporting tendering process on customer transportation portals.
Receiving, entering & validating orders.
Invoicing with the use of integrating systems with customer’s portals, automatically extracting shipping data, and attaching scanned PODs.
Automatically performing rate look-ups from multimodal carriers and 3PLs and capturing data from load boards and emails into internal systems.
Procurement: supporting purchasing activities (P2P); verifying the correctness of internal order placement; preparing price lists based on submitted offers; verifying documents sent by suppliers (offers, invoices, notes) in terms of their compliance with internal control procedures; etc.
Apart from logistics, enterprises operating in various industries – financial services, healthcare, manufacturing, public sector, retail, and far beyond – have implemented RPA.
Supply-chain automation opportunities: the following heat map increases the efficiency of the time spent for process identification.