The food and beverages (F&B) industry is rife with multiple challenges on all fronts. Whether it is the back-office tasks, materials sourcing, or ensuring that clients have enough products to meet customer demands, there is a lot that requires considerable improvement. On top of it, there is growing scrutiny from various stakeholders regarding what goes into our F&B. It requires considerable oversight on the part of each party in the supply chain. This is where robotic process automation (RPA) can come in handy. It can play a critical role in the agricultural, manufacturing/processing, and retailing parts of the F&B industry. RPA can expedite other aspects, including order management, invoicing, and complaint handling.
Challenges in Food and Beverages Industry
The industry is facing various challenges, such as:
Regulation
Stakeholders are demanding greater scrutiny of F&B processes, resulting in greater regulation of the industry.
Demand
Consumer demand is growing each year, resulting in increasing pressure on legacy processes and systems.
Cost
The cost of sourcing, manufacturing/processing, and retailing different products is rising, putting pressure on businesses.
Waste Reduction
There is pressure on the F&B industry to respond to the threat of climate change and focus on ways to reduce waste.
eCommerce
Businesses in the F&B industry, especially retailers, must respond to a growing trend of purchasing F&B products online.
Slow Innovation Cycle
Businesses must respond quickly to the consumer demand for newer products without adding to the environmental waste.
RPA Use Cases in Food & Beverages Industry
Safety Audits
RPA can play a critical in various areas, including F&B safety audits. This process requires considerable manual work, and a minor mistake can contaminate the product, making it unfit for human consumption. More human interaction with the products during lifecycle stages increases the risk of contamination, making RPA implementation essential. RPA can help with temperature control, validating documents, and minimising human interaction.
Data Validation
Ensuring that the products are delivered to the processing warehouse or the retailer meets the guidelines is an exhausting and time-consuming process. Employees must manually check for labels, logs such as temperature control, supplier credentials, and more. RPA can automate the entire process, removing or limiting human involvement. It can compare all the documents with your organisation’s in-house compliance regulations or the industry’s standards.
Prompt Payments
There are various businesses in the F&B industry, including restaurants. Without prompt payments to vendors, restaurants can risk on-time delivery of the various items, including perishable goods, to be used in the cooking process. RPA can be programmed to automate the entire payment process, ensuring that your suppliers are paid whenever they meet the specified criteria. It ensures on-time delivery and better relationship with third parties.
Price Updates
It is a time-consuming process to manually update prices. It can be even more challenging when as a retailer or restaurant owner, you have hundreds of items on offer. RPA can help in this regard. An increase in an item’s price will be automatically reflected in the pricing of any product that contains that item. Online retailers can benefit from greater personalisation which RPA can help them achieve by automatically creating offers for each customer.
What Next?
If you are looking for RPA solutions in Dubai or anywhere else in the world, check out our RPA solutions page. We continuously add to our list of RPA solutions and offer customised solutions to meet your unique business requirements. You can request a free demo to see how our RPA solutions can add value to your organisation.
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