What is the Salesforce Manufacturing Cloud (MC)? This question became the new buzzword when Salesforce launched its new offering, Manufacturing Cloud. Before we dive in, let's look at why manufacturers might need a product like Manufacturing Cloud in the first place. Manufacturers are constantly faced with new challenges. Many manufacturers still have their customer information split over several spreadsheets and numerous ERP apps. This design can have a detrimental impact on service level agreements (SLAs), account performance, and the ability to accurately estimate demand.

Enter Manufacturing Cloud. Salesforce Manufacturing Cloud is designed to improve collaboration between sales and operations teams by providing deep insight via new sales agreements and account-based forecasting tools. It gives them insight into their consumer interactions and allows them to develop more accurate sales estimates. Salesforce Manufacturing Cloud is built on the native Salesforce CRM platform, it can be easily integrated with ERP solutions and order manufacturing industry systems from a variety of other vendors using pre-configured APIs.

 

Leads

Salesforce Manufacturing Cloud includes native lead management capabilities that can be adjusted to any organization. Leads can be renamed to reflect how you refer to leads, prospects, and purchasers. Lead management enables your opportunity teams to qualify leads before routing them to sales, giving your sales reps access to the most recent prospects and ensuring that not a single lead is missed. Leads have no relationship with Accounts or Contacts.

Sales Agreement

Sales Agreements capabilities in Salesforce Manufacturing Cloud provide visibility into all contract terms agreed with your clients. This provides you with more control over how you plan your sales and operations, further harmonizing them. Sales Agreements provide real-time updates, allowing you to eliminate spreadsheets and obsolete data.

This allows you to interact with your customers and meet their dynamic forecasts while mitigating market volatility and managing emergency orders. With the ability to examine projected sales, current sales, discounts, and quantities, you will be able to better understand and follow the growth of your business. Custom metrics allow you to track the key performance indicators (KPIs) in your Sales Agreements that are most important to your firm.

Custom mappings can be created for formula, currency, and number fields in sales agreement products and schedules. Sales Agreements can help your firm realize revenues by keeping your data updated and also benefit operations down the line.

Account-Based Forecasting

Along with the addition of sophisticated Sales Agreement capabilities, Manufacturing Cloud enables more accurate and personalized forecasts based on run-rate business and sales pipeline.

Gone are the days of faxing forecast spreadsheets to sales, finance, and operations. A unified picture of your forecasts based on a single source of truth will enable your teams to communicate in real-time with increased flexibility, transparency, history monitoring, and, perhaps most significantly, accuracy. Users that have access to an account through the Account Team can provide prediction changes depending on a range of parameters, ensuring that your customers' changing needs are identified and accounted for.  

While greater collaboration is a significant benefit, perhaps the most interesting aspect of Manufacturing Cloud's Forecasting feature is the opportunity to construct a formula that is tailored to your company's specific sales cycle, including the inputs or metrics that are most important. Even as planning becomes more sophisticated in today's digital era, one of the biggest challenges your customers confront remains accurate forecasting of the inventory they will require. 

Case Management

Cases in Salesforce are used to manage a business process with several people involved. Typically, this translates to customer service concerns, however, cases can be used for any event requiring contact between your business and customers or between internal departments. Standard cases allow you to track the issue, assign it to a person or a queue (whether automated or human), and document the job done. This provides reps with visibility into the customer's issue and how it was resolved.

Workflow Automation

One of the most significant automation tools in Salesforce is the ability to create and manage complicated business processes, whether they are conducted sequentially or concurrently. Because Manufacturing Cloud utilizes the resources available to Sales and Service Cloud, these processes can be created in at least three ways:

Workflow Rules - They are the simplest to build but are also the least flexible option. With workflow, you can create a task, send an email, edit a field, and send an outgoing message.

Process Builder - The process builder enables you to create more sophisticated processes with greater flexibility, including the use of conditional scenarios to generate a larger range of output. Another significant advantage of Process Builder is its user-friendliness. Setting up a new or altering an existing process involves extensive visualization as well as point-and-click configuration. 

Flow - Flow is the most flexible and sophisticated solution for workflow automation. Flows can be used to develop processes based on dynamic data collection and to create call scripts, which require technical knowledge to set up and manage.

Reports And Dashboards

One of the features that distinguishes Salesforce is the ability to generate reports on nearly any data in your organization. Because many of us prefer to consume information visually, there are equally remarkable dashboarding options that employ charts and graphs to portray your data. You can dive down into the Report data that makes up a Dashboard at any time while viewing it.

 

Manufacturing Cloud has a comprehensive analytics package, including Reports and Dashboard representations.

 

Artificial Intelligence

Salesforce's analytics made available through Manufacturing Cloud is extremely powerful but it only scratches the surface. Significant investments have been made in Artificial Intelligence, which will continue to transform the way we think about and understand our business and customers.

Salesforce has already accomplished numerous milestones in this arena with innovations such as Einstein Discovery and Einstein Next Best Action, which follow similar decision-making principles as analytics but can be extended much further. Einstein Prediction Builder can provide key business indicators such as customer turnover or lifetime value. Einstein Language and Einstein Vision can assess market sentiment toward your products or services based on what people write about you on social media. Einstein Bots and Einstein Voice can seamlessly connect to your data, facilitating customer interaction, voice-based data updates, and more.

Appexchange

The AppExchange is an App marketplace where you can find tools that integrate with Salesforce apps. Although not all apps on the AppExchange integrate with Manufacturing Cloud, there are several excellent options available to you.

Even if your vendors are not listed on the AppExchange, they may have pre-built integrations with Salesforce. In this case, your Salesforce Consulting partner should be able to integrate their solutions for you at a minimal cost. Firms that integrate one or more AppExchange apps will have higher adoption of their Salesforce application.

 

Einstein Analytics For Manufacturing Cloud

In addition to the Dashboards that may be integrated into your pages, the Analytics Studio has more detailed information about your organization. Einstein Analytics for Manufacturing Cloud provides out-of-the-box key performance indicators across a wide range of topics, including account health, product demand, market penetration, and Sales Agreement compliance.

Community Cloud For Manufacturing

Communities are an excellent platform to exchange information and work with folks who are critical to your business processes. Communities can be readily configured to match your company's needs with point-and-click tools and prebuilt templates. Engaging with consumers and channel partners through the community portal can boost productivity and collaboration, allowing manufacturers to acquire more business. The manufacturer-specific pre-built template provides customers and partners with access to resources such as Knowledge Articles,  Leads, Opportunities, and more. When partners and customers can interact with businesses, they save numerous hours by not having to be on the phone or lose documents in endless back-and-forth emails. Chatter allows you to notify partners quickly and convey messages to inform others of changes.

Data Migration

Data transfer and Data Visibility are so critical to implementation that there are a number of events that occur throughout the data transfer that may be unfamiliar to those who have never done it.

Clients must prepare data during the project to ensure that it is in a format suitable for loading into Salesforce. Sometimes, Salesforce consultants may be unfamiliar with your data, so they are unable to prepare it properly, hence the duty falls on Salesforce customers. This means one needs to segregate the data into distinct Excel tabs. Businesses/households should be on one tab, contacts on another, opportunities on another, activities/notes on still another, and so forth. When preparing this data, ensure that all of your records have the necessary relationships in place so that the data can be loaded correctly. 

Data Sharing

If we create a visibility model that limits what people can view based on their role, we frequently need to create sharing rules for data across many users. For instance, we may want to share household, customer, and bank account information with everyone on the domestic service team. These rules must be discussed in the initial stages of the project, and if normal Salesforce sharing rules do not fulfill the business requirements, one needs to write additional code to augment the sharing model.

Migrating Outlook/Gmail Accounts

If you wish to transfer contact data from your email app to Salesforce, you will need to set aside more time to prepare the data. As an example, I have Adam Lee Talbert at X Company in my contact folder, whereas you have Adam Lee at X Co in yours. If we combine and load the data, we will get two firms and two contacts. If you also move CRM data, you may encounter a third party or firm.

Data Visibility

Salesforce gives you a variety of options on how to configure the data visibility model. You can have an open visibility model, in which everyone can view all data, all fields, and alter all records; a severely restricted visibility model, in which you can only see select records and some fields are hidden; or something in between. What initially drives visibility is record ownership, thus if we create the visibility model so that you can only see your records you have to be the record's owner to see them. When you create a role hierarchy, you can provide others higher up the hierarchy access to your data, even if they are not the record's owners. How does this relate to data migration? If you wish to limit who may see what data, you should define who the record owner is for each client as part of the data preparation process.

User Training and Adoption

The success of Salesforce is driven by how your users use it. Poor Salesforce adoption can seriously impede your ability to get your staff to enter data accurately or at all. This is not just limited to Manufacturing Cloud. It doesn't matter which path your organization takes; getting your users on board is a top priority. There is no gold standard for driving user adoption, but the methods outlined here will help guarantee that your users understand and, more importantly, accept Salesforce as a solution.

Invest in Training - Educate your staff on where to enter data, how to enter it, and, most crucially, why they're entering data.

Adopt Salesforce Chatter - Chatter is designed to be an internal social network for businesses, with a feed-style interface that allows you to make announcements and solicit feedback on them.

Customize Salesforce - Prior to implementation, do surveys with your various user groups to determine what works and what doesn't for them, as well as what type of modification is required.

Make Clean Data a Priority - Simply put, Salesforce relies on data. All of your reports, dashboards, and everything else will be based on the data stored in Salesforce.

Enforce data entry - If it isn't in Salesforce, it never happened.  For instance, if your representative does not receive a commission check at the end of the month, they will understand why because their sales data was never entered into Salesforce in the first place. 

Hire a Salesforce Administrator - Regardless of the size of your firm, you'll need a Salesforce professional on your team. Your users will surely have questions on a daily basis, and it would be very helpful to have someone who is always available to assist.

Involve Senior Management - As with any organization, it starts at the top. Involving senior management reinforces your commitment to the project. Management has a vested interest in the project's success, therefore ensure they promote the platform throughout the organization. Their participation will bring about transformation throughout the organization.

Girkon is a global Salesforce partner with over 200 certified Salesforce professionals on board. We offer a full spectrum of professional Salesforce services - consulting, configuration, customization, integration, training, maintenance and upgrades, and ongoing support. Schedule a free demo today.

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