What is Manufacturing Cloud and how can it grow your business?

Background

The manufacturing industry is a vital cog of the global economy. Globally, manufacturing output exceeds $35 trillion across the 34 largest manufacturing regions. This sector is also on the verge of renewed productivity, innovation and efficiency as technology innovation heralds the next generation of manufacturing in an connected ecosystem powered by intelligent analytics.

Salesforce Manufacturing Cloud was designed with an intention to help drive this transformation with a solution specifically designed for manufacturers to unify accounting and forecasting for greater transparency and collaboration across their entire ecosystem. This unified platform provides a clear view of customers with account-based forecasting solutions that enable them to precisely forecast, plan, and drive improved business outcomes.

What is Manufacturing Cloud?

Salesforce Manufacturing Cloud is a new offering from Salesforce, specifically designed for manufacturers. It is an AI-powered, cloud-based manufacturing platform, built to take the industry to the next level of digital innovation.

• Unify customer-centric operations across the organization
• Prebuilt objects, frameworks and processes for manufacturers
• Unmatched innovation, including minimal-code tools and integrated AI

Helping manufacturers align sales and operations

One of the key success criteria in the manufacturing industry is building great products great products and meeting market demand with efficient production and fulfilment. The first step in that process is to ensure accounting teams have holistic visibility of the book of business for a customer. That includes ongoing business, business run rate and potential opportunities. This visibility translates to more accurate forecasting, more predictable outcome, and eventually, more revenue.

Predictability is the top priority for all stakeholders in the manufacturing ecosystem. Customers want to be sure about pricing, availability and delivery; distribution partners need efficient delivery channels; sales teams need pricing based on real-time volume assumptions; and operations teams want to build and procure components based on the most accurate forecasting.

To achieve all this, manufacturers must have a clear understanding of the entire shipment history of a customer, current production plans, and production forecasts. One of the key challenges most manufacturers face is information and data stored across multiple systems such as ERP, CRM and SCM. And with the involvement of various teams, the whole process faces resistance and makes the sales and operations process hazy. And to make things worse, those closest to the customer- sales and distribution partners are not accurately represented.

In the current manufacturing ecosystem, there is gaping opportunity to link customers, sales teams and distribution partners to change the entire operational paradigm. Going forward, manufacturing leaders around the globe will set a new standard for connection and engagement with their customers. To achieve this would require complete access to previously stored data and to be able to extract insights out of that data.

How Manufacturing Cloud works

Manufacturing Cloud was created to align sales and operations, to improve the sales forecasting process for both current operations as well as new business opportunities, and to extend the new process to partners. Here’s how. 

Sales agreements allow manufacturers to unify current business with data stored in external systems such as ERP with agreement terms so both accounts and operations teams have a 360-degree view of the customer. Sales agreements are automatically updated with changes, thus providing a single source of truth. Account teams can now manage the full sales agreement cycle with clear visibility into promised and actual order volumes. They can also view the performance of the agreement vis a vis the forecast and other metrics.

Account-based forecasting provides insights across the business to allow operations, sales and finance teams to get more accurate forecasts. Account teams can easily update changing customer needs based on market demands, which in turn allows the productions team to adjust plans and estimates in real time, thus making transactions, profits, and revenues more predictable.

Many manufacturers also sell their products through a fleet of distributors and dealers who have feet on the ground and true knowledge of changes in customer demand. Manufacturing Cloud integrates them into the forecast process with a pre-built collaboration driven community template. 

With this revolutionary capability, manufacturers now have an opportunity like never before to get real-time insights into product and customer performance, and the agility to translate these insights into action.  That’s the hallmark of an agile business.

Intelligence at the core

Manufacturing Cloud is a key part of Salesforce’s design philosophy – Customer 360, which allows manufacturers to deliver smart field services, channel management, B2B Commerce, and much more, on a single platform across their business.

One new feature of Manufacturing Cloud is Einstein Analytics for Manufacturing. Account managers can now get intelligent analytics with KPIs across important data sets like account health, market penetration, price information and demand insights. By unifying and analyzing these data points, account managers can proactively engage with customers to grow the relationship. Also, by identifying these key trends, account managers can recommend upsell and cross-sell opportunities.

The analytical ability is integrated directly into the business process of the account teams that provides real-time insights into sales agreements, forecasted performance, and customer interactions to predict the overall health of the business relationship.

In the past, account teams obtained this information in chunks from different sources and in various formats, and often outdated. With Manufacturing Cloud, manufacturers now can embed it into their entire business process.

With Einstein Analytics the platform is flexible and adaptable to cater to changing business needs. The insights around products and customers, will drive forecasting accuracy.

Manufacturers today need to navigate greater complexity and the disconnected manual systems of the past won’t work in todays connected world. Leading manufacturers are

Manufacturing Cloud enables all manufacturers to do capturing, integrating, and analysing data from across their organization to drive better business outcomes. All that with a single platform for unifying, exchanging and acting on information. It’s the force driving digital innovation and the next generation of manufacturing leaders.

How can Manufacturing Cloud help my business?

Unify the digital journey on a single platform.

Build a unified view of your entire business, transform service experiences, simplify partner engagement, and make data-driven decisions with Customer 360.

With Manufacturing Cloud you can strengthen partner engagement, streamline and monetize service, unlock data for greater impact, and increase employee productivity and agility.

MODERNIZE COMMERCIAL OPERATIONS.

A unified platform will accelerate your sales cycles makes it easy for customers to do business with you:

• Manage recurring business on a single platform that is designed for manufacturers
• Track performance against sales agreements
• Forecast demand

SIMPLIFY PARTNER ENGAGEMENT.

Suppliers and partners are key elements of the manufacturing value chain. Improve performance with:

• Streamlined and collaborative business processes
• Shared visibility of agreements, orders, cases and forecasts
• Channel incentive programs

TRANSFORM THE SERVICE EXPERIENCE.

Manufacturers need to offer unified experiences to customers, partners, and employees. Transform your experiences by:

• Automated service processes and self-service to Improving satisfaction
• Improve field service performance while minimizing disruption
• Discover new service revenue streams on a unified platform

ENABLE THE WORKFORCE OF THE FUTURE.

Attract top talent and empower them by providing employees with the tools to do their work from anywhere:

• Deliver productive, collaborative experiences on a single platform
• Scale expertise through knowledge and information access, analytics, and AI
• Ensure compliance and drive efficiency with business process automation

UNLEASH YOUR DATA.

Unlock disparate data and make faster, smarter decisions with AI-driven intelligence:

• Deliver data when and where it’s needed across your business
• Acquire insights with integrated analytics and AI
• Transform insight into action by engaging on a unified platform

Key Features of Manufacturing Cloud

About Author

Indranil Chakraborty

Indranil is a technology enthusiast with over 25 years of experience in project management, operations, technology and business development. Indranil has led project teams in egovernance, business process re-engineering, product development and worked with Government and Corporate customers. Indranil truly believes in the power of technology to drive productivity and growth for teams and businesses.