Revolutionizing Pharmaceutical Business Processes with SAP Intelligent Robotic Process Automation
There is no getting around the fact that upcoming work environments will experience a rise in intelligent robotic process automation (RPA) bots. We have already witnessed the widespread RPA, reducing the need for human intervention and accelerating time-to-market. RPA is now being combined with intelligent and AI technologies to help people exercise judgement faster. This will lead to better integration with the SAP application stack.
The recent global crises caused by COVID-19 have had a significant and wide-ranging impact on business priorities. The pandemic has compelled businesses to swiftly adjust their strategies in response to evolving factors such as customer demands, market conditions, and emerging priorities. And the pharmaceutical industry is no different. The sector, which was previously hesitant to embrace even automation, has started harnessing powerful technologies like Intelligent Robotic Process Automation (iRPA) to streamline processing and drive better consumer experience.
Automation Explosion in the Pharmaceutical Industry
The pharmaceutical industry now confronts obstacles such as a diminishing pipeline, reductions in R&D budgets, and increasingly stringent regulations. Consequently, there is a pressing demand for a solution to manage business operations effectively, ensuring greater speed, accuracy, and cost-effectiveness. Consequently, there has been a surge in the adoption of Robotic Process Automation (RPA).
Integrating RPA into the sector’s standard operating procedures will remain crucial for enhancing productivity, delivering faster customer service, restructuring work distribution, reducing expenses, and efficiently completing monotonous and repetitive tasks with precision and speed.
What Is SAP Intelligent RPA?
SAP Intelligent RPA suite is a comprehensive collection of cloud-based automation tools that offer end-to-end solutions. It utilizes intelligent bots to design process automation through the Cloud Studio, creating seamless workflows from start to finish. What sets SAP Intelligent RPA apart is its ability to provide businesses with valuable insights that empower them to make informed decisions, ensuring their relevance in a rapidly evolving landscape.
Employees invest significant hours in performing monotonous computer tasks on a daily basis that can be readily automated. SAP Intelligent Robotic Process Automation (iRPA) expedites the digital transformation of pharmaceutical business processes by automatically eliminating replicable, repetitive and routine-based tasks, thereby freeing up the human workforce to engage in more valuable tasks.
This helps realign human capital for strategic initiatives and enhances data’s precision and security by minimizing the likelihood of human error and guaranteeing adherence to data protection regulations. Furthermore, iRPA improves workplace efficiencies by automating more intricate tasks.
5 Ways SAP Intelligent RPA is Transforming Performance and Productivity of the Pharmaceutical Industry
Intelligent RPA has gained traction in the pharmaceutical sector by automating peripheral processes like finance, sales inventory, and supply chain. It is now embraced in critical areas such as research and development (R&D) and regulatory functions.
Here are five methods through which SAP iRPA has enhanced the performance and productivity levels of the industry:
Seamless Integration with SAP Applications
Intelligent bots alleviate a major challenge faced by employees, who often need to switch between multiple applications. These bots enable the execution of processes across various systems, software, and cloud solutions, providing employees with seamless data transfer and swift access to numerous applications. This effortless integration enhances speed, efficiency, and cost-effectiveness.
Streamlining Purchase Order Follow-up
Effective purchase order management is crucial for pharmaceutical companies, involving various steps from order issuance to goods receipt. Although the process remains consistent across purchase orders, a single SAP report must be improved for comprehensive follow-up, leading customers to depend on multiple reports.
However, SAP iRPA implementation revolutionizes this process. It enables users to swiftly generate daily reports on open purchase orders, drastically enhancing follow-up system efficiency. By leveraging the SAP iRPA tool, pharmaceutical companies can prioritize specific cases while automating other tasks, resulting in a streamlined follow-up process and improved overall efficiency.
Evaluating Suppliers: Enhancing Decision-making and Performance
Tracking suppliers’ information is crucial for the purchasing department to negotiate competitive rates and ensure timely delivery. Supplier evaluation involves assessing various parameters such as price, delivery, goods receipt, invoice verification, quality, and price changes.
To obtain the necessary data, reports need to be generated. Implementing SAP iRPA streamlines this process by allowing business users to export data to multiple Excel sheets and conduct comparisons to create a consolidated, error-free report. This report can then be published on a weekly basis, providing businesses with real-time data to facilitate the supplier selection process.
Cost Optimization
By leveraging SAP iRPA, businesses can achieve cost savings by enabling round-the-clock execution at a fraction of the cost compared to human equivalents. Implementing robotic technology proves to be highly cost-effective and aids in reducing operational expenses.
Routine manual tasks are prone to human errors. SAP iRPA helps mitigate this issue and improves accuracy, thereby saving costs associated with error-prone activities. In addition, businesses can reduce expenses incurred due to human errors by eliminating the need for task repetition.
Interface Monitoring
Interfaces are crucial in facilitating various transactions but are prone to frequent failures. Unfortunately, users often remain unaware of interface failures until they encounter a failed business transaction. This can lead to a reliance on support teams to identify and resolve the issue, ensuring the timely completion of the transaction. However, identifying interface problems can be a time-consuming and complex task.
A more efficient approach is to implement SAP iRPA for daily interface monitoring. This proactive approach allows the support team to focus on resolving issues before users even need to raise a support ticket. By implementing interface monitoring through SAP iRPA, businesses can prevent disruptions and ensure smoother operations.
Must Read: SAP S/4 HANA Implementation – A Complete Guide
Final Say
Before the COVID-19 outbreak, Robotic Process Automation (RPA) significantly impacted digital transformation in the pharmaceutical industry, increasing productivity, enhancing work capacity, and boosting overall employee satisfaction. Amidst the COVID-19 crisis, the pharmaceutical sector started opting for iRPA, which played a crucial role in enabling the industry to respond and mitigate the adverse effects of the pandemic swiftly.
As a result, the pharmaceutical industry quickly reorganized its resources to ensure uninterrupted business operations. As the industry strives to recover from the recent economic downturn, SAP Intelligent RPA (iRPA) will facilitate its business continuity with improved performance and ROI, ensuring long-term sustainability. Looking at the rising demand, ImpactQA has nurtured its SAP expertise and has been actively seeking complex software solutions to cater to pharmaceuticals and improve performance and responsiveness.
