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Over last two decades, eCommerce Industry has clearly changed the way Business is transacted for a wide range of spectrum, from B2C to B2B, from local to global market and from products to services spanned across almost all the Industrial sectors. The new sectors are continuously getting added under the purview of eCommerce, transforming the complete Business ecosystem. Increasing trend of the Industry is getting solidify every other day and expected to be one of the major levers being utilized by all Industrial sectors.
The key success factor for any eCommerce enterprise would be to optimally apply their Business and Digital strategies to strengthen Customer experience, Vendor experience, innovative Product catalogues / competitive Pricing and internal Business operations.
Post COVID era, when the Industry is expected to experience exponential growth, it is extremely important especially for small & medium scale eCommerce players to gear up their strategies to uplift all the above four tenants of Business.
Robotic Process Automation (RPA) is defined as the IT layer interacting with existing IT applications by leveraging “Software Robots” which mimics the way human agent interacts with the system to execute any business process. Till the time, interaction rules with existing IT applications are defined, RPA technology can successfully be applied. This essentially means all the business processes which are manual / repetitive in nature, having high volumes with defined business rules are ideal candidates for Automation.
In past few decades, Business Process Transformation has been one of the strategic focus areas for most of the Business Houses, primarily to enhance their productivity & efficiency. This also helps them laying foundation of growth & new opportunities at the same time. After successfully leveraging strategies like, outsourcing, low cost locations & Business process optimization, now the focus is on “Profit maximization”, “customer satisfaction” and direct impact on “Business metrics”. RPA technology comes handy to address this shift in strategy.
Key Benefits of RPA Technology
Increased Productivity & Efficiency
Improved turn-around time
Zero change in existing IT Applications
Enhanced Data security
Enhanced Traceability
High scalability
While productivity / efficiency improvement is one of the key direct benefits of RPA Technology, there are many other significant benefits which makes it even more interesting for both Business and CIO organizations,
RPA Technology typically differentiate itself with other technologies like scripts, macros & screen scraping by providing whole lot of capabilities like over-all orchestration, e2e process mapping, surface integration, exception handling, etc. But the true power of term, “Robot” in RPA is now getting realized by adding more intelligence towards execution.
After stabilizing core UI / Surface integration technology, Industry is now moving towards adding adjectives like “Intelligent”, “Smart”, etc. to the Automation world, specifically by adding cognitive layer to it. Automation execution is slowly becoming more predictable with in-built cognitive & sophisticated algorithms-based features. Cognitive optical character recognition, natural language processing & machine learning are few technologies when clubbed with RPA provides a wide spectrum of solution patterns covering most of the scenarios.
Customer Experience
Vendor Experience
Products & Pricing
Internal Business Operations
In summary, eCommerce Industry is riding on its next wave of Business Transformation by leveraging disruptive Technologies like RPA. “Disruption” is the reality of today’s Business and is keeping them on their toes to continuously innovating the way they operate. Rapid evolution of Technology is adding catalyst to the “Disruption” factor. Time has now come for all small and medium scale eCommerce players to take head-on competition with big fishes like Amazon & Alibaba of the global market, by applying low-cost, yet effective strategies.