How RPA can help Indian Army?
The Indian army with 1,129,900 active, 960,000 reserves and 158 aircraft stands guard at some of the most trying terrains owns the pride of world’s second largest armed force. After the independence, it has secured the Indian boundaries with Pakistan, China, and Bangladesh with topmost valor and efficiency. In order to continue to serve its primary goals i.e. to win a war, the army needs to keep on developing various capabilities, taking into account ever growing threat and sensitive operating environment. However the acquisition of such capabilities requires much more than just hardware. Besides the weapon system, it also requires associated maintenance infrastructure, together with an assured supply chain and complete infrastructure for training. These are required for sustaining the weapon system at the desired performance level for the entire life cycle and for continuously manning it by fully proficient crews, i.e. whole life management approach.
The military supply chain has no parallel to any commercial supply chain both in terms of scope and deadly seriousness of the operations. The proper functioning of these support services is paramount for the soldiers at war. Even a small delay could result in unimaginable loss of lives and sometimes even war. (Source).
For the Indian army, the potential uses of RPA and its Machine Learning features could be a quick and beneficial solution to enhance its technological capabilities especially in supply chain management.
A research report from (ISG) Information Services Group says about 72% companies across the globe will use Robotic Process Automation by 2019 to automate support tasks and a critical fact that not jobs, but tasks are being automated, allowing employees to focus on high-value activities, freeing them of repetitive pieces of work across all type of industries. RPA in Supply Chain is set to have a drastic impact in terms of productivity, efficiency, and accuracy.
The study also highlights that RPA has resulted in an average of 43% time reduction for tasks. These are enormous reap for any enterprise, but would massively benefit by effectively managing the complex supply chains.
In the earlier phases of RPA, bots were not smart enough to handle the complex scenarios like supply chain management and could only automate parts of the supply chain that were rule based and followed a set of patterns. For anything else, manual intervention was involved. However today, the integration of intelligent bots with machine learning capabilities and cognitive abilities has led the RPA to replicate humans to an extent.
At the higher level, RPA in Supply Chain can be used to predict outcomes and support complex decision making, thereby, helping Indian Army with more than just robotic tasks as mentioned below:
1) RPA eliminates the intensive manual information processes.
2) It maintains time-sensitive relationships between inventory and the army camp.
3) It enables low cost information interchange in hours or days.
4) It provides dashboards for instant identification of problems and the ability to see how these problems affect the rest of the supply chain and, therefore provides the ability to act upon them immediately.
5) Accuracy is critically important for the supply chain as a small mistake can cause huge negative impacts. RPA can simplify efficient flow of goods, services, money, resources to the army.
RPA and ML are not the same thing, but have a vital mutual relationship. Machine Learning provides the technical underpinnings of RPA, allowing them to reliably process the data and manage it in line with predefined instructions.
RPA technology has the capability to support digital transformation in supply chain management for the Indian army.
By,
Vishal
Comments
Post a Comment