Automate daily tasks of manufacturing business by utilizing RPA

Amid intense business competition in today’s industry 4.0, RPA is being utilized in various industries to automate production processes. Robotic Process Automation (RPA) is a software technology that automates human’s routine tasks. It is an important technology that facilitates not only the operation of IT departments but also the operation of production processes in the digital age. In this article, we are going to introduce sample use cases in manufacturing factories using RPA. We hope these use cases will help you discover and become aware of issues and tasks that can be solved with RPA in your workplace.

Factory works that can be made more efficient by utilizing RPA

Case 1: Preparing data before creating a production plan

When creating a production plan, you have to get data from various internal systems such as sales system, inventory management system, input the daily production plan while considering resource planning, cost planning, and material procurement, then send the file to relevant parties via email. These tasks can be automated using RPA and you just need to check the generated results. It does not only save time, but the data accuracy can also be trusted, allowing you to focus on creating production plans.

Case 2: Bill of material management

Bill of materials (BOM) management is extremely important in the manufacturing industry. When workers enter each raw material manually, even a small typo can have a huge impact on the manufacturing and processes of the finished goods. By automating bill of materials management with RPA, you can easily share drawings, make changes to factory materials and manufacturing processes, and generate accurate BOMs in a short period of time. As a result, it can prevent incorrect orders of raw materials and produce the finished goods accurately according to plan.

Case 3: Order management

Normally, a person in charge visually checks purchase orders sent by email from various customers and registers the data in the ordering system. RPA is very suitable for such repetitive tasks. The robot automatically downloads the purchase order data from the email, copies the content, and posts it to the ordering system. You can improve the efficiency of the whole operation by reducing human errors and assigning human resources to other tasks that cannot be handled by robots.

Case 4: Quality management

When inspecting product quality, it is common to fill in results on paper form and manually enter the information into the system. However, this analog inspection process is not only time-consuming, but also causes input errors. By using RPA, the inspection results can be converted into electronic data, read by AI-OCR, and automatically transferred to the system. The person in charge just rechecks the results again to make sure there are no errors.

Case 5: Inventory management

Inventory management of raw materials and products is an important task for manufacturing industries. Insufficient raw materials can affect the production process and potentially delay delivery. By automating inventory management operations using RPA, when receiving a product delivery note by email from a customer, RPA will automatically subtract the quantity listed on the delivery note from the quantity in the inventory system. It calculates the inventory balance and automatically records it in the inventory management system. For this reason, staff do not need to check and adjust stock quantity every time, and they can grasp the accurate stock quantity in real time.

Case 6: Report creation

In the manufacturing industry, the person in charge collects invoices and delivery results at the end of each month to create reports and submit them to managers. Normally, the person in charge checks order information and shipping information from each system in the factory, and inputs the data in report formats, then calculates the amounts and quantities manually. If there are many customers, it will take time to create the reports, and human errors can occur in data inputting and calculations. By using RPA, order information and shipping information are automatically retrieved from each system, transferred to a report format, and the data is automatically calculated. It is also possible to automatically attach the created report to an email and send it to the relevant parties. All business processes can be automated using RPA, reducing man-hours and preventing human errors.

Automate the entire manufacturing process from production planning to delivery

We, iCONEXT company, specialize in scratch system development for the manufacturing industry, and we develop software robots (RPA) according to customer requirements and factory characteristics.

We support our customers to apply RPA to automate the entire process from production planning to delivery, making operations in factories more efficient and increasing productivity.

If you want to automate factory operations for more efficiency improvement, or if are interested in using RPA, please feel free to contact us at thaisales@iconext.co.th.

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