RPA in Retail | Retail Process Automation

Automated PO creation from approved requisitions sourced from your ERP (SAP MM, Oracle Purchasing, NetSuite Procurement, Microsoft Dynamics 365 Supply Chain), replenishment system, or a demand forecast output. When a reorder trigger is met (stock below reorder point or demand forecast indicates future stockout), the bot creates the PO in the ERP with the correct vendor, item quantities, negotiated unit costs from the price agreement, and the applicable delivery date based on the supplier's standard lead time. For suppliers that accept EDI, the bot transmits the PO as an EDI 850 transaction via SFTP or AS2; for suppliers with order portals, UI automation submits the PO directly.

Supplier acknowledgement tracking: the bot monitors for supplier PO acknowledgements (EDI 855 acknowledgement, email confirmation, or portal status update) and escalates unacknowledged POs to the buyer after a configurable follow-up window (typically 24-48 hours). Delivery schedule monitoring: expected delivery dates tracked against system records; bots flag orders approaching delivery date without an ASN (Advance Ship Notice, EDI 856) or confirmed despatch notification. Discrepancy management: on goods receipt, the bot compares received quantities against the PO quantities using configurable tolerance rules (±2% for catch-weight items, exact match for discrete units) and routes any discrepancy to the buyer with the PO number, expected quantity, received quantity, and the supplier's ASN reference.

Price updates propagated from your master price file or ERP to every sales channel simultaneously. Channel integrations: Shopify Admin API (PUT /admin/api/2024-01/products/{id}/variants/{variant_id} for variant-level pricing), Amazon Selling Partner API (Pricing API PUT /pricing/v0/price for competitive pricing updates), eBay Trading API (ReviseItem for fixed-price listings), Google Merchant Center API (price feed update via Content API v2.1), and POS system APIs or UI automation for systems without pricing APIs. Channel-specific pricing rules enforced per-channel: MAP (Minimum Advertised Price) enforcement prevents the bot from submitting any price below the configured MAP threshold per product; Amazon marketplace pricing constraints (reference price, strikethrough pricing rules) checked before submission to prevent policy violations.

Promotional pricing automation: promotional events defined in a schedule (start date/time, end date/time, promotion type, discount value, eligible SKUs or categories). At the configured start time, bots activate promotional prices across all applicable channels simultaneously -- not one channel at a time with a 20-minute lag. At end time, prices revert to standard. Last-minute promotional pricing that previously required a merchandiser to be available at exactly 06:00 on a Saturday runs automatically. Margin floor protection: configurable minimum margin percentage per SKU or category ensures promotional prices cannot be set below cost + minimum margin regardless of the discount applied -- preventing accidental below-cost promotions on high-discount campaigns.

Automated three-way match: purchase order, goods receipt, and supplier invoice matched for quantity and price. Matched invoices approved automatically for payment. Discrepancies flagged with the specific difference for accounts payable review. Reduces invoice processing time from days to minutes and catches supplier billing errors before payment.

Automated reconciliation of physical inventory counts against ERP stock records. Bots compare count data from your WMS or counting device with system records, calculate variance, and generate exception reports for stock room managers. Scheduled reconciliation runs without requiring staff to manually compare spreadsheets against system data.

Automated returns workflow: eligibility checking against return policy, return authorisation generation, refund trigger in the payment system, inventory update, and supplier return processing where applicable. Bots handle the structured portion of returns processing so customer service agents handle customer communication, not system data entry.

Automated daily, weekly, and monthly retail reporting -- sales by channel, inventory turnover, supplier performance, and promotional effectiveness. Bots pull data from your ERP, POS, and e-commerce systems, consolidate it, and deliver formatted reports to the right stakeholders on schedule. Reports that currently take a team member hours to assemble run automatically.

We start by mapping your highest-volume manual processes, measuring the time and error rate, and calculating the automation ROI before writing a line of code. Retail operations often have 5--10 automatable processes -- we help you prioritise by impact and implementation complexity so the first automation delivers measurable results quickly.

Retail automation requires connecting systems that weren't designed to talk to each other. We design the integration architecture for your specific system stack -- ERP, POS, e-commerce, WMS, marketplace connectors -- and implement the right integration approach for each: API where available, UI automation where not, database integration for on-premise systems.

Every retail process has exceptions: a supplier doesn't acknowledge a PO, a price update fails on one channel, an invoice has an unexpected line item. We design exception handling into every automation -- bots identify the exception, log it with context, and route it to the right person for review. The automation handles the 90% and surfaces the 10% that needs human judgment.

Automation dashboards showing bot performance: tasks completed, exceptions raised, errors logged, and time saved per process. Alerting when a bot fails or an exception rate increases above normal. Monitoring that gives your operations team visibility into automation performance without requiring technical knowledge to interpret.