ERP systems exist to streamline your business, keep your data in one place, and make life easier in general. But robotic process automation (RPA) takes the streamlining to a new level by removing the labor-intensive part of managing an ERP. RPA software robots can tackle repetitive tasks like data entry, report generation, alerting, and more automatically, so you can reap the full benefit of having an ERP without any of the repetitive, manual processes.
Not only do ERP processes need RPA to make them easier, but also to allow for business growth. If you’re bringing on 100 new customers per quarter, along with all their data, documents, and needs, you need a solution that can help you scale. No matter how much you give RPA bots to automate, they can keep going: nights, weekends, holidays, whenever. So you can grow without worrying that you’ll fall behind on ERP management.
Identifying Processes to Automate
How do you know what to automate within your ERP operations? Think about all the functional areas of your business. How could they benefit from automating ERP activities? Some common tasks where organizations use RPA with their ERP systems are:
- Inventory management: get automatically alerted when stock levels get too low or too high to maintain just the right amount
- Report generation: pull and send sales, financial, or customer reports as needed to the right people
- CRM to ERP data transfers: make accurate data the norm and take all the manual effort out of keeping your data current
Process Map and Optimize
Before you start automating, it’s important to create a process map to make sure you fully understand every step that needs to happen along the way. It’s not an improvement if you automate the process but skip a key step!
A process map should be like a flowchart, showing you how things are operating currently step by step. This is a great opportunity to see if there are any inefficiencies in the process or other steps that should be added. Make the most of your RPA implementation by improving the processes as you automate them. Automation is a great step toward ERP process improvement, but simply automating a bad process won’t get you as far as optimizing it will.
Ready to try optimizing and improving processes with RPA?