The Scenario
My customer carries a huge stock for a range of over 20,000 products which it delivers to customers around the UK in reaction to time-pressured orders.
A point of pain within the order fulfilment process is that of running out of stock of any particular item and not being able to fulfill a customer’s order in time.
The customer does not have the spare capital to schedule orders from manufacturers and to hold on to huge quantities of unsold stock.
The brief
To find a way of automating detection of low stock which meets a simple re-order point and trigger a detailed re-ordering process.
The solution
By deploying RPA and evaluating stock levels managed within the customer’s online store against trigger levels, I have been able to fully automate issuing a stock re-order notice that arrives before the start of any working day.
The re-order email contains not only the number of items to purchase but, based on a unique algorithm and analysis of all previous trading positions, is able to include predictors, with fair accuracy, of when stock may become low and also advise if any previous re-orders have not been fulfilled by manufacturers.
RPA is currently running on-prem in my own infrastructure and is soon to be migrated to AWS.
The return
The customer will be able to ensure they only hold required stock levels, reduce operational cost and restore their own customer’s faith in their ability to provide an excellent and timely service.