The Bot is being used to track details of competitor brands as compared to a range of customer products across 15 different retail websites from online aggregators such as Takealot and HiFi-Corp. In addition to the online search results, the Bot also includes the in-store prices observed at retail outlets by the Customer’s Sales Reps that are captured in an app.

During the process step of online searches, the Bot uses RPA embedded skills such as visual understanding to identify the relevant elements on the websites and capture specification and pricing details of over 40 SKUs, as well as identifying new models to market, and the resulting marketing competitor analysis report is compiled by the Bot twice a month.

This work was being done by a marketing professional, manually searching and collecting data from websites, taking more than 7 hours per week. The unattended Bot runs in 45 minutes, overnight, with the report waiting for the team in their inbox in the morning ready to action.  The spare capacity released by the automation of this task has been redirected towards the marketing professional spending more time on the interpretation of the analysis which requires more insight and intuition, something a Robot cannot do.

Although more commonly seen aiding in Finance Department functions, this Bot deployment goes to show that a Robot can be used anywhere there is a rule based, repetitive, mundane task.