But there is more than just financial gain for individual businesses. The above cited white paper envisages that the positive repercussions of transportation and logistics going digital at society level are going to reach $2.4 trillion. So the potential of digitisation is forecast to cross the industry borders and have a positive impact over society and environment.

This being said, you might start to wonder what exactly is the contribution of robotic process automation to the digital revolution in logistics. Let’s answer this question by looking at a couple of RPA use cases in transportation and logistics. We will thus go on to list 8 processes that are improved when swapping manual for digital performance.

Real world use cases for RPA in transportation and logistics

1. Shipment scheduling and tracking

Initial pick-up requests, or checking and reporting shipment status between internal systems and portals are rule based, low exception and high volume tasks in logistics. This is to say that the subprocesses of shipping look like they “were made for software robots”.

Bots’ capacity for data management can be put to good use for extraction of shipment details from incoming emails, or for logging jobs in scheduling systems. The perfectly accurate provision of pick-up times in customer or carrier portals can considerably increase customers’ satisfaction with your services.

2. Invoice processing and credit collections

Software robots are the right choice to carry out this process because of their integrative capacity which can streamline the workflow. End-to end automation of order-to-cash processes for many (read, hundreds) large third party logistics (3PL) carriers is achievable since bots can integrate with the commercial transportation of goods.

RPA thus helps to surmount a major challenge for logistics companies, namely, getting paid in due time after fulfilling a job.