Fullcrm is excited about the Manufacturing Cloud announcements at Dreamforce 2021
This year Salesforce hosted both in-person and virtual events attended by trailblazers all over the world, where they announced the latest innovations, enhancements, and resources to be released to customers across all of their products.
For 2021, Salesforce identified that many manufacturers had experienced several challenges over the past year:
- Significant disruption to the supply chain had a heavy impact on operations
- Channel partners needed better collaboration to respond to the ever-evolving needs of their customers
- Service was no longer just about closing cases but becoming a way to differentiate the business, so manufacturers needed to offer exceptional service across all aspects of the business – customers, products, or assets
To resolve the challenges experienced by Manufacturers, Salesforce announced at Dreamforce their new features for Manufacturing Cloud will help:
- Provide a single view of the manufacturer’s entire book of business
- Optimise channel partner relationships
- Create differentiated service experiences
The new updates for Salesforce Manufacturing Cloud from Dreamforce 2021 are:
Enterprise Account Forecasting – available in orgs Winter’22
Enterprise Account Forecasting is the latest feature for Manufacturing Cloud to help bring more collaborative account forecasts onto the Salesforce platform to help provide a true consensus forecast.
Now with Enterprise Account Forecasting, you can add multiple metrics beyond revenue and quantity and include more advanced capabilities such as complex roll-ups and aggregates.
The enhancements with Enterprise Account Forecasting add value for several roles:
Sales Executives can:
- Add custom product categories to Sales Agreements instead of specific product SKU providing more flexibility to businesses.
- Seek approvals on changes to live sales agreements, and approval can be granted either via the Sales Agreement record or via email.
Regional Managers can:
- Use multiple lenses to view the numbers to get the most accurate forecast possible
- Can quickly adjust products using filters with custom dimension set up within the org
The Administrator sets up the above with easy to configure forecast sets for the business unit.
With Enterprise Forecasting Accounts, admins can configure forecast periods, calculation frequencies and custom dimensions. They can also create a baseline forecast formula, using metrics such as seasonality, product attach ratios and other variables to help develop the most accurate forecast for the business.
There is no one size fits all way to forecast for manufacturing, and these new features allow for a tailored approach specific to your business. Allowing for any number of inputs, products, or unique formulas available to determine the forecast better.
Users can now create personalised forecast views or time series forecasting for improved baselines for each of your stakeholders. There are also prebuilt AI models available that can be modified as per the user’s requirements.
Enterprise Account Forecasting is an exciting new feature that will be both scalable and flexible in meeting the individual complexities of each manufacturing business.
Program-Based Business Support: available in orgs Winter’22
Many manufacturers bid for long-term projects or programs and need a way to forecast and manage the jobs’ profitability easily.
Salesforce has released Program Based Business Support to help manufacturers use the forecasted volumes to model and understand the impact of price take-downs, givebacks, pay-to-play, and change requests for longer-term jobs.
Rebate Management : Available Now
Rebate schemes are an effective way for businesses to incentivise partners, but many manufacturers find them challenging to manage because they use spreadsheets, emails and manual processes. Earlier this year, Salesforce released Rebate Management explicitly designed for manufacturers to bring incentive management programs onto the platform.
The feature allows you to customise your rebate tiers, thresholds, benefits and payout periods and automate accruals and payout calculations all within Salesforce.
Using rebate management to manage your incentive programs helps reduce margin leakage and gives program managers, account executives, partners, and executive team members visibility. With these programs becoming managed within the Salesforce platform, this unlocks previously unavailable incentive scheme data for analysis and makes better recommendations.
Rebate management on the platform in Manufacturing Cloud provides deep insight into your partner’s performance and drives better collaboration.
Service-based capabilities for Manufacturing Cloud:
Service in the manufacturing industry is not as simple as just logging a ticket. Service in manufacturing includes servicing products, understanding issues, forecasting parts required, all while coordinating and managing stakeholder expectations. What used to be a disconnected and stressful process, it’s now made simple, thanks to new end-to-end workflow orchestration.
By connecting products, customers and service organisations with a guided experience. Providing the correct information, to the right people, with the actions they need to take. All from a single interface, no matter where they are in the world, so everyone is on the same page.
So what does this mean for businesses? It means you can now resolve issues faster. Drive predictive maintenance for connected products. Develop new service-based revenue streams. By leveraging and connecting existing data, bring new insights and do what you do better.
Roadmap for the future:
We know Salesforce is an excellent investment for manufacturers and distributors as they are constantly enhancing and evolving their solutions to meet the changing industry needs.
One of Salesforce’s differentiators from other providers is it releases innovation three times a year free to its customers. They are also a user-centric solution built on trust and shared their roadmap for the subsequent three product releases.
We will see updates in the subsequent three releases a year they offer across:
- Commercial Operations
- Channel Management
- Service Experiences
Why Fullcrm?
Fullcrm is passionate about helping manufacturers and distributors succeed by leveraging Salesforce’s purpose-built solution, Manufacturing Cloud. We understand the manufacturing and distribution industry and are experienced at leveraging this technology to achieve the best business outcomes.
Fullcrm is a Salesforce only implementation partner because we believe in the platform’s ability to transform a business and drive success.
-> Find out how we were the first partner to implement Manufacturing Cloud in ANZ
