What are the benefits of Manufacturing Cloud to business in the manufacturing industry? How can these organizations use this comprehensive solution from Salesforce to better their downline and improve customer satisfaction and experience?
Manufacturing has often been considered a manual industry. However, innovative manufacturing organizations have moved a step further and deployed technological advancements that allow them to streamline their processes without losing their personal touch. This has allowed them to improve customer satisfaction without losing the customization that clients want.
Salesforce recently released research findings that showed that competitive manufacturers are 2.2 times more likely to relocate their sales and operation systems to the cloud.
Although legacy tools and dispersed data still pose a challenge to many manufacturing industries, Manufacturing cloud is Salesforce’s response to help those forward-thinking manufacturers make the digital jump.
Manufacturing Cloud is a seriously compelling platform for efficient production management, dynamic reporting for decision-makers and strategic sales motions. The platform packs together capabilities to streamline ERP and CPQ integration thereby giving full visibility into data insights across the entire organization.
Benefits of Manufacturing Cloud in your Salesforce Org
With Manufacturing Cloud in place, your organization is poised to successfully maneuver the competitive landscape (now and into the future). Below, we look at the top five benefits of Manufacturing Cloud to organizations in the manufacturing industry.
Inventory management
One of the challenges that manufacturers often encounter daily is how to balance inventory supplies with the ever-changing customer demands. It is a tricky situation whereby if surplus inventory exists, your profit margins are threatened. On the other hand, if supplies are in shortage, then your customer loyalty is on the line.
With Manufacturing Cloud comes Customer 360. The Customer 360 gives manufacturers the ability to closely track customer demand and compare this with the inventory in real-time. Together with other tools in the manufacturing cloud, you can even take this further and predict future demand levels which will help you to prepare inventory operations accordingly.
Seamless contract updates
Anyone who has ever dealt with long-term contracts between manufacturing companies and their clients knows how the back and forth editing process can be a headache-inducing activity.
And because Salesforce knows how much long-term contracts contribute to the revenue bottom-line, Manufacturing Clouds comes equipped with a seamless update functionality that allows contract managers to update the contract information with ease.
The automation features in Manufacturing Cloud means that contract updates can come from one source yet maintain version control and access to all parties that need to access the contract information.
Together with other additional innovative integrations like DocuSign CLM, managing contracts can be such a breeze right from negotiation, contract signing and updates. Throughout the entire process, all concerned departments have clear access to the same information as needed.
Easily trackable leads and conversions
Manufacturing Cloud makes it possible for manufacturers to have a digitized framework that allows them to track their prospects throughout the entire sales lifecycle and at the same time get useful insights from those interactions that can influence decision-making and product improvements.
This is a game-changer in today’s manufacturing landscape. These insights can be used to generate alternative or additional sales models that can supplement traditional business models for better growth and revenue.
With manufacturing cloud, anytime a prospect falls away, sales agents are notified immediately through attrition alerts, and they can take immediate action to ensure that the pipeline is kept full and those customer relationships are nurtured accordingly.
This data also helps the marketing department as they can integrate the insights into their email, content and event marketing strategies and ensure that only those strategies that have the most traction are concentrated upon.
Automate
Manufacturing cloud is such a successful industry solution for many reasons, but at the top, is its ability to provide endless possibilities for process automation.
There is so much that manufacturers can automate with manufacturing cloud, from simple tasks to complex ones like how shipment leaves the factory floor. Users can build their automation functionalities or use pre-built ones in the Manufacturing Cloud.
What’s better is the fact that all these automated processes are relying on accurate data captured from the data analytics powerhouse- the Salesforce Einstein.
Dynamic business forecasting
Across the manufacturing industry, there is no better forecasting tool than Salesforce’s Manufacturing Cloud.
Not only does it support your business development efforts through insights regarding product performance across the board, but at the same time, you can use it to prepare for growth and keep a personalized look on each account using the account-based forecasting features.
With the reporting and forecasting features of marketing cloud, you can fix struggling client accounts using a data-backed strategy that allows you to fix what needs to be fixed quickly.
To ensure there are no gaps in your sales approach due to disjointed ERPs or other systems, you can merge these systems into a single source of truth with Salesforce. Many of Plumlogix’s clients who are loyal to the Salesforce platform are that way because of the forecasting element of Marketing Cloud- a tool so useful in strategic decision making.
Plumlogix to the rescue with Marketing Cloud
Do you wish to get started with Marketing Cloud or already have Salesforce but need to further optimize for business transformation using Marketing Cloud?
Plumlogix has worked with many manufacturers are different tech stack maturity to bring magical digital transformation for business growth, now and into the future. Talk to us today to learn more about how we can help your manufacturing business.
