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Overnight fulfillment…direct to 7.8 billion customers worldwide…during just one 24-hour window each year. Would your company take this on?

One CEO does, and he’s positively legendary. Santa and his elves must produce more than 21 million gifts every day of the year to ensure his order ratings, on-time deliveries, and fill rates achieve 100 percent.

While Santa keeps much of his operations a trade secret, we’re 99 percent sure he has a highly automated supply chain.

Now, Santa has had many solutions pitched to him from many vendors—to automate his supply chain. But supplying gifts to the “nice” segment of the world’s 2 billion children (and let’s face it, most of them will be “nice”) is infinitely more complex.

Automation can handle some of those essential but tedious tasks. But what Santa really needs and relies on is intelligent automation—that is RPA with artificial intelligence (RPA is Robotic Process Automation, for those of you trying to keep our acronyms in line). With this, he can convert millions of handwritten letters or chat texts into digital orders almost instantly. He can then have his elves enabled with bots that can then identify inventory levels for the pre-made, more popular gifts requested—and even match them against actual stock.

Santa’s make-to-order assembly of more uncommon gifts, however, requires a huge supply network with an enormous range of materials: maybe precious stones for Sophia’s bracelet or thermoplastic components for Samir’s drone. In these cases, Santa could use RPA to research the supplier, place orders, track progress, and even create an exception queue to keep our children happy and toys down the chimney. 

Supply chains are essential to business. Be sure to check out how AI and machine learning can transform your supply chain by typing the words “supply chain” into the search box on our website.

From everyone here at Automation Anywhere, we wish you happy holidays and a happy New Year!