The wave of digital transformation started with Industry 4.0 revolution and continues to be top of mind for C-suite executives following the pandemic. Manufacturers are prioritizing increasing process efficiencies, improving demand planning, and implementing digital transformation as the top 3 imperatives for their organizations.
AI as a digital disruptor is at the doorstep of the manufacturing industry and becoming increasingly vital for enterprises to adapt to survive in the market and continue to gain a competitive advantage. Traditionally operating solely on ERP systems, manufacturers are now focusing more on cross-cloud solutions that combine ERP and other automation to facilitate customer acquisition and retention. CRM solutions like Salesforce combined with ERP systems such as SAP allow enterprises to adopt lean manufacturing and automation to stay ahead of future demand.
Leveraging AI-driven data, the Manufacturing Cloud platform continues to prove itself as one of the cloud software of choice for top manufacturing companies. Manufacturing Cloud is an umbrella of different clouds built on the Salesforce platform. It brings sales and operations teams together with a unified view of market and consumer demands. This helps you more accurately forecast, plan, and drive predictable business performance.
The main features include Sales agreement management, Account-based forecasting, Rebate management, Account manager targets and a mix of both Service Cloud and Sales Cloud features that help the manufacturing industry at its core. What does this mean for manufacturers?
Manufacturers are continuously searching for innovative solutions to infuse agility and intelligence into their value chain to better withstand future industry disruptions and pivot ahead of demand swings. The reality is an integrated supply chain, insightful forecasts and real time agreement status will optimize competitive advantage, improve profitability, and accelerate growth through insights. This is where Salesforce helps to develop scalable architectures to enable business transactions with frictionless and insight-based user and customer experiences.
Salesforce technology is designed to integrate equipment and customer data to provide a single view across the value chain, playing a pivotal role in not only improving customer satisfaction by timely servicing customer assets in a cost effective manner, but also helping manufacturing companies to maintain their own equipment on a regular basis. These interconnected capabilities allow manufacturers to effectively deliver on the value proposition, enhance customer experience, and achieve financial objectives to ensure the right cross-functional technologies are in place.
Manufacturing companies are realizing that they are reaching the limits of value when it comes to their current business forecasting models. Many struggle to maintain accurate financial models, supply chains, and sales operations to establish a more predictable, recurring revenue stream. With Salesforce, Manufacturing organizations can derive faster insights and develop hyper-connected account based forecasting models catered to top line growth and margin expansion.
Equally, many manufacturers face major challenges that come from within their organizations. Lack of correct standard business processes and communication gaps within teams lead to an increase in the risk of planning failure. Our sales facing Demand Forecasting Tool seamlessly integrates with ERP systems for inventory reconciliation to initiate demand fulfilling processes by creating purchase orders in ERP.
Manufacturing workflows around data collection and analysis are very disconnected. From historical sales data, warranty data and service data to partner training data and asset data, all the information is gathered within various ERP, home-grown applications, spreadsheets and dake lake platforms. The data challenges for manufacturing automation are centered around seamless connections between complex systems and internal applications. The ability to analyze, visualize and act upon this data will be central to an organization's ability to stay ahead of competitors while delivering a customer-centric experience.
To maximize your Salesforce investment, we’ve packaged up a collection of our intellectual property, knowledge, and experience from similar solutions to provide a user-friendly no-code solution for manufacturing organizations. Our Salesforce-SAP Connector is a versatile accelerator that provides complex ERP data integrations and supports full and delta loads with a built-in error-logging mechanism. Learn more.
Salesforce provides capabilities to leverage siloed data into actionable insights by seamlessly connecting warehouse ERP systems with CRM applications ensuring customer and partner facing web applications interface with sales and service team systems automatically. Salesforce technology removes automation and digitization hurdles by providing the right solutions that integrates with your current ERP system so that buyers interact with their personalized data in real time and to ensure that your ERP remains the main system of record.
Manufacturing companies are realizing that they are reaching the limits of value when it comes to their current business forecasting models. Many struggle to maintain accurate financial models, supply chains, and sales operations to establish a more predictable, recurring revenue stream. With Salesforce, Manufacturing organizations can derive faster insights and develop hyper-connected account based forecasting models catered to top line growth and margin expansion.
On the other hand, existing service models fail to enable customer preferences for integrated, modern and seamless experiences. Manufacturing companies need to improve their connectivity with their customer and offer faster turnaround time for servicing customer needs. Salesforce solutions for manufacturing allow for easy access to invoice details, orders and shipment data to proactively reinvent the customer relationship between the company and the customer and to create customers for life.
Evolving customer demands and expectations, as well as macro-level industry shifts, drive the need for digitizing supply chains and unifying platform strategies. Our global team’s expertise in discrete manufacturing has delivered robust solutions, such as flexible lead to quote processes connected directly with distributors and industry partners to increase productivity and collaboration across the entire value chain. We understand the priority of seamless integration with ERP systems to keep pertinent information in front of customers, sales, and service teams for top tier user experience. Contact us to learn how you can push the boundaries of innovation.