In order to strengthen it’s industry-specific cloud solutions, Salesforce has recently launched Manufacturing Cloud & Consumer Goods Cloud. Manufacturers & Consumer goods providers can leverage these solutions to integrate customer data from various sources to offer personalized services and improve customer engagement.
Manufacturing Cloud
Manufacturers often face the common challenge of siloed processes as various teams such as operations, inventory, supply chain could not align with the sales reps. Customer information and other business reports usually scattered across multiple spreadsheets and ERP systems. This impacts performance, timely customer service and also inventory. As a result, the cost always goes up. To overcome these critical challenges, manufacturers lack a solution that can help them understand customer needs, enhance inventory visibility and offer a seamless customer experience. The need was to unify their sales and operations teams in order to have a 360-degree view of their customers. This will accelerate business performance as well as enable an accurate demand forecast.
Salesforce’s new Manufacturing Cloud addressing this challenge efficiently enable manufacturers to get comprehensive visibility and collaboration across value chains. They can have a complete view of their customers leveraging new Sales Agreements and Account-Based Forecasting solutions. This will help them drive higher customer interaction and get more accurate sales forecasts.
Apart from this, Salesforce also launched new manufacturing-focused solutions in its Customer 360 Platform to help manufacturers get higher transparency, streamline collaboration and improve productivity. The new Einstein Analytics for Manufacturing will help sales reps get insights into account health, demand insights, sales agreement progress, etc. While the new Community Cloud for Manufacturing will offer a pre-built template specific for manufacturers, using which they can seamlessly collaborate with their channel partners on leads and opportunities. Using the MuleSoft Anypoint Platform, manufacturers can connect Manufacturing Cloud with other systems. Sales leaders can drive automation across the sales process from order-to-cash.
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Consumer Goods Cloud
In order to transform retail execution & develop a powerful relationship between the field reps and the store, Salesforce introduced Consumer Goods Cloud. Much like Manufacturing Cloud, this will utilize sales data and help field reps optimize product sales at brick and mortar stores.
Salesforce aims to minimize the gap between the backend teams such as inventory, supply chain, and the frontend stores. This will instigate streamlining processes and enhancing in-store experiences. Now consumer goods companies can ensure stocks, align their marketing strategies and assign less time on various operational activities; so that they can spend more time in increasing channel partners & driving sales.
With robust features like a daily list of prioritized and assigned store visits and other required activities can be mapped and routed by Salesforce Maps. Sales reps can access the info using their smartphones related to inventory, planogram checks, return order status, customer service requests, product info like price, quantity, etc.
Consumer Goods Cloud also offers Einstein Vision and Einstein Analytics for consumer good companies. Einstein Vision for Consumer Goods Cloud offers image recognition and object detection solution that enables various audit automation such as easy inventory management, planogram and merchandising compliance checks, and allowing field reps to pay less time on auditing activities and more time building customer relationships.
Through the Mobile Order Capturing feature, a sales rep can capture orders during a store visit and collect important data such as product, quantity, and pricing. This will help them present a complete report on their store visits.
Manufacturing Cloud and Consumer Goods Cloud will be generally available from October 15, with Einstein Analytics for Consumer Goods to follow in February 2020.
CEPTES: Your Salesforce Partner
As a leading Salesforce solution provider, CEPTES offers end-to-end Salesforce solutions for manufacturing & consumer goods industries including implementation, integration, consulting and support to enterprises as well as mid-commercial companies. Our 10+ years of industry expertise and Salesforce experience help us understand critical business challenges and implement solutions that can improve business productivity, get a complete customer view, minimize costs and accelerate business growth in the world’s #1 CRM platform. Please get in touch with our Salesforce experts to see how you can get the best out of your Salesforce investment.
