Shinsegae finds robots increase accuracy and speed of product quality management process

SEOUL -- South Korea's retail giant Shinsegae found that an automated quality control system using robots has increased the accuracy and speed of the product quality management process for its online shopping mall.

A robotic process automation (RPA) solution is an artificial intelligence-based business solution that is ideal for taking care of repetitive and time-consuming chores to increase productivity. RPA solutions can learn new skills without the need to program robots.

Shinsegae adopted RPA in July last year to help human workers check to see if there are any illegal or fake information included in the product information page of "SSG.com," the company's online shopping mall.

"RPA can automatically find product pages with wrong information using prohibited keywords, errors in disclosing product information, and malfunctioning pages," Shinsegae said in a statement on December 24. According to the retail giant, the RPA solution has increased its online mall's quality management process by more than 300 times.

Before the adoption of RPA, Shinsegae estimated that it would take about 51 years to manually check and authenticate information of some seven million products sold through SSG.com. However, the company's robot solution took less than two months to check 10 million product information for errors.

The RPA solution was also capable of detecting common human errors using optical character recognition (OCR) technology. Robots accurately corrected typing errors and wrong information. RPA was 18 times more accurate in detecting errors, Shinsegae said.

RPA has become a popular and powerful tool for companies that are going through a digital transformation. In November last year, Korean Southern Power, a state electricity company, adopted an RPA solution to help its employees find and share documents through a company network with just a few clicks.