Do More with Less

Those who knows about apparel industry they will agree that we all are using different kinds, types, formats of excel spread sheets to manage day to day business. If we count it is 50 types of different Excel spread sheets are used to manage the business. very interestingly all of these are produced from a source of E-mail from the customer. Process flow is as follows.

Email Received from customer at the Mid Night. Next morning Merchant download the PDF from that mail and forward it to concern dept. and store one copy for his things to do. convert that PDF to excel and send to sample dept. for final touch sometimes and Planning dept. for Booking the space. Another Excel sheet to SCM dept. to prepare Purchase requisition for the Fabric and Materials. Another excel sheet for his T&A to monitor his to do list of that order. Another Sheet for Approval , Comments, Meeting Minutes , Changes happened in sample, daily updates from design dept. and many more. From That Customers PDF file he needs to prepare one Sample Spec, Technical documentations sheet to make the sample team to explain all the requirements from the customers, He needs to gather all the mail correspondence with customer in the development of those orders. In the mean time He need to prepare one set of documents for the QAD dept. with all the technical details, measurements discrepancy records, new requirements from the customers, maximum tolerances levels, different approaches from previous productions or sampling etc. After doing the Material and Fabric Ordering Merchants need to prepare for Follow up, Approval, corresponding, L/C, Sales Contracts, ETD , ETA Documents. And when the material starts arriving the main headache management starts , Short in qty received, Few goods do not meets the standard, colors are bleating, Port got congested, will arrive few days later, as per planning all the material are not on-time, need to prepare claim for the supplier, prepare the replacement order sheet, running to suppliers factory to see the disaster and many more, all of these things need to be documented in MS word or MS excel sheets. So planning is mismatched already , now running behind the planning team , reorganize all the existing plan, set the new priority to save critical orders delivery, sacrifices few orders, rearrange the whole thing and all of these are repetitive excel sheets updates job. After all of these struggle productions starts finally and Target do not achieve, Quality is not as per demand, qty produced have failed test standard, few material was left to be arrived but finally didn't arrive on time, broken stitch, one machine broken down so production stopped for few hours, three main process operator absent so productivity drastically came down, suddenly other style became more critical for delivery , so stop these 3 lines and produce that style in all 4 lines together to meet the ex factory tomorrow and what not ! please bear in mind that all of these things are happening in MS word and Excel Spread sheets maintenance sometimes ( Not all the time)

Meantime Shipment date is knocking at the door so Keep customer requesting to get extension for few days more, Penalty, discount, sea air split, Air shipments everything needs to be managed by Excel spread sheets, Emails, phone call, VDO Conferences, whatsApp, viber etc.

Finally Ex-factory at 2.30 am at night, Logistics, Manage the people, demand management etc also in excel and phone calls again.

From last two decades Bitter experiences we found that it is really impossible to do all these huge repetitive tasks, events by human effort anymore. Few reasons : Orders become smaller day by day, Lead time getting shorter, Style criticality increasing, Online order becoming popular, quick delivery is customers new demand, after all huge competition increased in the business. So , We need state of the Art technology to perform the critical path analysis. We need few Process improvement bypassing the existing path sometime. without un-interrupting the existing procedures. Her we came to a decision of few virtual assistance program. In this stage we are badly in need of Robotic Process Automation. RPA.

Robotics Process Automation RPA is the only way to Do more with Less. Based on the above scenario we understood In this era we all want to produce more with minimum effort or by the help of few Re-engineering in daily processes. RPA is the critical innovation within Industry 4.0 which had helped to make the Physical work process into digital. RPA can help enable manufacturers to improve productivity, meet customers’ expectations and consistently drive product innovation—all while lowering costs.

Robotic process automation or RPA is the development and deployment of soft bots to automate rule based and repetitive tasks performed by people within workflow and process-related applications and operations.

Robotic Process Automation (RPA) is transforming the way organizations across different industries do business. It allows organizations to automate certain types of work processes to reduce the time spent on costly manual tasks and increase efforts to deliver mission critical work. RPA is helping organizations automatically process and store data without performing manual data entry, generate financial reports without spending considerable amounts of time in Excel, and execute customer outreach campaigns without spending hours in a customer relationship management (CRM) program. These types of optimizations have been made a reality through RPA, with organizations just beginning to scratch the surface of its possibilities.

RPA’s benefits extend to both the back office and the C-suite, dramatically improving the efficiency of mundane, administrative tasks. Roughly 25% of a CEO’s tasks could be automated through RPA. For example, RPA can automatically collect data from multiple sources, perform a data manipulation—such as applying data formulas in Excel—and then export or save the information to a readily available location.

One of the main differentiators of RPA from other solutions is that it performs tasks that do not require deep cognitive capabilities. RPA is the automation of a process, but the software is not improved or changed based on the inputs or its results.

Benefits of using RPA

• Easy To Learn
• Fast to Implement 
• Enhances Security
• High return on Investment . Short Pay Back.
• Seamless Integration
• No Down Time : Bot will work for you 24/7 without any interruption.
• Provides Speed , Quick Response
• Provides Orchestration.
• Enhances Manual Process.
• Quality : Without Human Error.
• Compliance : Proof of 100% Maintenance.
• Huge Data Management Ability.
• Employee Experience. Improved.
• Cost Benefits:
• Cost Reduction :
• Improved Efficiency : We can free up your best people to do best work. 
• Scalability :
• Internal Control and Traceability.
• Data Transparency.
• Job Satisfaction : Remove Frustrating, Tedious tasks, So you can focus on interesting value add work.
• A Better Work-Life Balance : Identify Processes and streamline your workflow to reduce those long hours.
• Solve Technical issues fast : Remove technical roadblocks and mundane tasks in 2-3 months.
•  Exceed your Targets : Cutting out Mundane Tasks to focus on your delivery.
• 24/7 virtual Assistants : Dedicated Bots to assist you during the day,or to work for you when you are at home. 
• You Own the Technology : You decide what problems to solve without waiting for IT to make changes. 
• Innovate and Stand out : A strong RPA Game means we can create more Revenue Generation services to offer customers & Drive business growth. 
• Easier Analytics & Insights : Makes Generating Reports Easier. So you get a comprehensive overview on performance. 
• Flexible workforce at your fingertips : Create innovative methods to manage spikes in demand.