call us : +1 (607) 304-3229                   contact@ceptes.com                        

Tag: Manufacturing industry

CEPTES > Blog > Manufacturing industry
Manufacturing, Sales Cloud
August 20, 20200

4 Ways Salesforce is Transforming Manufacturing Industry

In today’s world, the manufacturing sector is evolving rapidly. From the first industrial revolution that occurred two centuries ago, to the Fourth Industrial Revolution, or Industry 4.0 of today, the development has been exponential. Industries and their operations are having to adapt to the quickly changing global, political, and economic decisions. At the same time, changing customer expectations are affecting the supply chains throughout the world. To stay relevant and ahead of the competition, manufacturers must adopt a flexible, lean, and adaptable operational strategy. It is crucial for them to embrace technological innovations if they wish to move from traditional mass production to customized production.

Challenges that manufacturers are facing today

There are, however, some challenges that manufacturers may face if they’re unable to embrace Digital Transformation properly:

  • Inability in implementing a flexible business methodology that can be modified and tailored to customer’s behaviors and needs.
  • Choosing what technologies to implement is a challenge, as there are multitudes of options and routes that the company can take; however, choosing what is right for them is not always clear.
  • Budget constraints must be taken into cognizance since many technologies come at a steep price.
  • Accurate forecasting using analytics to understand the trends & shifting market conditions.

The manufacturing companies of today understand that in order to successfully implement a sustainable business strategy, they must optimize their process in a way that enables better decision-making, efficient workflows, production, and better customer experiences. The last goal is the most crucial part, as customer centricity and personalization of customer experiences is the surest way to achieve a competitive advantage.

To stay ahead of the curve, the companies in the manufacturing sector are opting for the best technological platforms and other such integrated systems. Salesforce is the most preferred platform for countless manufacturing companies all over the world. With its wide range of features and integrations, Salesforce eases the challenging process of digitally transforming your business.

Here are top 4 Salesforce’s capabilities that make it the trusted platform for manufacturing companies:

  1. Customer-centric Approach: As we’ve established above, to gain a competitive advantage in the cutthroat competition, companies must place their customers at the center. Salesforce provides you with real-time information on your customer interactions and issues so that you can deliver the best-personalized service. By maintaining customer satisfaction, your digital transformation journey would be hiccup-free.
  2. Transparent Processes: Salesforce lets you drive transparency in a company’s business by ensuring that there is a single reliable source of data. A consolidated view of business agreements, order management, inventory, revenue, etc. helps you stay on top of things.

Such integration of data on the granular level makes decision making a seamless process. Added to that, all your employees have ready access to the information they need, cutting down unnecessary delays.

  1. Forecasting: For a growing business, or for a company that has implemented digital transformation, accurately forecasting the needs and growth metrics is crucial. Even slight missteps can spell doom for the company. Salesforce leverages the power of its advanced analytics tools and powerful AI to help you make accurate forecasts of your planning, operations, finances, and sales.

With accurate forecasts, you can allocate your budget effectively and take a lean approach to resource utilization. Analytics also provides actionable insights so that you can make comprehensive and well-informed recommendations.

  1. Seamless Communication: During times of major technological overhaul, proper communication is critical. A platform like Salesforce allows your interdepartmental teams to communicate seamlessly. The platform connects your other applications and software to the ERP and Order Management Systems so that the information flow is streamlined.

Salesforce also improves your communication channel with your customers. By providing omnichannel communication capabilities, Salesforce lets you respond to your customers’ queries effectively.

With a decade of Salesforce consulting experience in the manufacturing industry, CEPTES brings the power of Salesforce to your company; CEPTES’s Salesforce solutions help you seamlessly collaborate your business processes, gain a complete 360-degree customer view, and secure better returns on investments. Our experts will guide you throughout your digital transformation journey to help you get the best out of Salesforce. To know more, please get in touch.

Manufacturing, SMEs
August 7, 20200

How next-gen manufacturers can leverage the power of Salesforce in the Fourth Industrial Revolution

The Fourth Industrial Revolution or Industry 4.0 began way back at the turn of this millennium with autonomous production, Internet of Things (IoT), and Internet of Services (IoS). The past decade has seen an accelerated pace of changing trends, all of which are bringing about optimization – smart and flexible supply chains, tremendous exchange of data, and making everything “smart”. Industry 4.0 has had far-reaching effects on our lives; it has altered people’s way of thinking, working, and mindset. While the benefits of Industry 4.0 outweigh the challenges, the effect has still been felt, and even more so in the small and medium enterprises. They are being forced to adapt to new business models, rethink their organizational structure, understand business cases, and mold their organization according to the industry.

Most Small and Medium-Sized Enterprises of the manufacturing industry are currently looking to regain better financial stability and persevere as much as possible, in the face of shifting market conditions. All these goals are more than achievable with the help of a digital transformation in certain departments of the manufacturing industry. 

Salesforce, the preferred tool of the majority of these organizations, brings in powerful functionalities in the form of its offerings to help them regain financial stability in today’s world of rapid change. You can leverage the power of Salesforce and its various features discussed below to ride the digital transformation wave and gain a sustained competitive advantage.

Powerful Analytics

First and foremost, companies must look thoroughly at their current financial standing, product performance, and account health. Einstein Analytics provides excellent insights, predictions, and recommendations on your day-to-day operations. Your account teams can leverage the power of analytics to discover and optimize processes.

Salesforce can seamlessly be integrated with any ERP connectors and templates that help you capture order information and reduce complexity. A simplified system, like any well-oiled machine, requires less maintenance and consequently fewer resources.

Accurate Forecasts

Salesforce provides a unified view from which your teams can collaborate in real-time to develop faster and more accurate forecasts. New opportunities can be easily identified and followed. You can even create your own forecast algorithm and metrics suited to your business. Accurate forecasts help you capitalize on every possible lead while making sure that optimum use of resources is done. 

Customer is king

Manage your customer relationships and drive business growth with real-time visibility into the sales process and key accounts. Salesforce provides a 360 view of customer activity and relationships as well as the shifting market conditions and consumer demands. Salesforce Community Cloud is well equipped for this operation and helps you stabilize demand and supply.

Inter-departmental Collaboration

Salesforce Manufacturing Cloud enables seamless and fast communication between various departments in your organization. Integrating Community Cloud with Marketing Cloud provides a real-time view of account activities to help you remove bottlenecks. Removal of bottlenecks is an effective way to boost productivity and achieve stability.

Leverage Channel Partners to drive more revenue

Salesforce’s robust Channel Management helps you benefit from your relationships with channel partners to drive more revenue. Using the platform, your manufacturers can collaborate directly with dealers and distributors on marketing, sales, and services. Partner Communities provide superior account management across new and run-rate revenue schemes.

With all these capabilities and more, you can count on Salesforce and its vast array of tools like Sales Cloud, Marketing Cloud, Communities, and Analytics to stabilize your financial stream and drive accelerated growth. CEPTES has been a leading Salesforce consultant for more than ten years, and our certified consultants, with their comprehensive knowledge and experience of providing Salesforce solutions & manufacturing industry expertise, will make sure that your company sails across any disruption smoothly. To know more, please get in touch.

Manufacturing
July 30, 20200

How Modern-day Manufacturers can Streamline Sales Pipeline with Salesforce

Challenges faced by today’s manufacturers

With the advent of Industry 4.0 and an increasing intervention of technology in manufacturing, companies throughout the world are rethinking their incumbent sales process. To keep up with the ever-evolving technology, manufacturers are undergoing a digital transformation of their current business models. However, due to the rapidly changing market and consumer demands, this transformation brings a lot of challenges to the manufacturers. Some of the problems plaguing manufacturers in today’s world are:

  • Inability to manage sales orders effectively
  • Conducting accurate demand forecasting
  • Difficulty in incorporating customer needs
  • Inability to integrate data

The changing customer demands have forced the manufacturers to stay ahead of the curve and rethink their business models.

CEPTES understands the needs of modern-day manufacturers to move from a product-centric model to a customer-centric model. With our team of Salesforce certified consultants, we can help you leverage the power of Salesforce to optimize and streamline your sales pipeline.

Salesforce Manufacturing Solutions

Salesforce can help you achieve a connected manufacturing process that can help you address today’s complex business challenges and streamline various business processes such as inventory management and control, supply chain management, process visibility, etc. by minimizing costs and maximizing ROI.

As an integrated platform, Salesforce helps manufacturers achieve enhanced process visibility and convert more leads into deals by optimizing customer information and improving the sales process with the world’s #1 CRM platform.

With a wide array of features such as the ones discussed below, Salesforce helps you offer the best experience to your customers and gain a competitive advantage.

  • Transparency

The ERP and order management systems store Sales Agreements, to ensure that there’s a single accurate source of this information, 

you can define your own time-phased metrics for a better view of customer relationships.

  • Unified Forecasts

Your sales, planning, operations, and finance teams can collaborate using a unified forecast tool, to develop more accurate forecasts.

Using Salesforce’s Formula Builder, define a forecast algorithm that reflects your business.

  • Customer Centricity

Salesforce helps you manage customer relationships to help you drive your business growth. You get real-time visibility into key accounts, service issues, and sales processes, which helps you respond to changing customer dynamics easily.

  • Collaboration

Salesforce’s Community Cloud extends the power of collaboration in the Manufacturing Cloud to provide better visibility to your customers and channel partners. Collaborative planning helps reduce latency in the planning process and ultimately improves the accuracy of your forecast.

  • Advanced Analytics

With the power of Einstein Analytics, Salesforce helps you generate accurate sales insights and recommendations. The platform is highly customizable and easy to use. Your executives and account teams can discover insights into pricing, product performance, account health, and sales agreement compliance.

  • Seamless Communication

Salesforce Manufacturing Cloud helps your teams across different departments to communicate seamlessly. A real-time view of your system and account activities helps you remove bottlenecks and boost productivity.

Benefits of Salesforce

  • Better visibility of processes and the sales pipeline
  • Improved productivity, shorter sales cycles, and high conversion rates resulting in an increased ROI
  • Expansion of your aftermarket parts revenue
  • Reduction in manufacturing costs thanks to intelligent sales forecasting
  • Optimization of customer experience with a 360-degree view and data-driven services
  • Optimize customer experience with data-driven services

CEPTES brings a decade of manufacturing industry experience to help manufacturers accelerate your journey to success, gain a complete 360-degree customer view, collaborate your business processes, and achieve a better Return on Investment. With our diverse offerings including implementing, integrating, and enhancing Service Cloud, Marketing Cloud, Sales Cloud, Community Cloud, and Salesforce Analytics, we have assisted leading manufacturing companies accelerate their Salesforce adoption rates and improve productivity. To know more, please get in touch with us.

Manufacturing
June 10, 20190

Salesforce for Manufacturing: How to grow faster in the 4th Industrial Revolution?

Manufacturers are in the middle of a disruptive shift. The 4.0 Industrial Revolution has triggered a significant change in the way manufacturers are operating. The industry has transformed from conventional manual production processes to strong new automated production techniques. As businesses are becoming more customer-centric, manufacturers are rapidly moving beyond the product with personalized service at scale. However, manufacturers face continuous demand to offer higher standards and efficiency as customer expectations are increasing stimulated by technological advancement and swiftly growing competition.

Today’s world has become more connected than ever. Customers expect higher from the service providers and they want more ways to engage with brands. Looking at the way modern small manufacturers are adopting technology across business verticals, they are giving a big fight to manufacturing giants. As the industry can’t stand quiet, they must adopt emerging technologies in order to connect with their customers in entirely new ways.

In the 4th Industrial Revolution, manufacturers have sprung automating some of their production processes and are putting a lot of focus on quality enhancement. But in this process, they are moderately ignoring sales and marketing which will give increase their top line. ERPs, Automated Tools, Solutions, etc. are undoubtedly raising the manufacturing process, However, an efficient and unified CRM is what modern manufacturing industry requires. CRM helps manufacturers of all sizes to optimize their customer data, stay aligned with the current trends, and offer exceptional customer experiences across various touchpoints.

Why Salesforce for manufacturing?

Before going into why Salesforce for manufacturing, let’s get into the common manufacturing industry pain points. Today’s manufacturing industry typically encounters below challenges.                                                                                                                               

  • Siloed processes
  • Disconnected customer experience
  • Process visibility & traceability
  • Quality & compliance management
  • Higher field service costs
  • Lower rate of customer engagement
  • Speed – Customers always ask ‘How soon’
  • Absence of an integrated system
  • Channel partner management

If you are a manufacturer, you must have faced most of the above challenges. How to get rid of these tough challenges? How to accelerate your journey in the 4th Industrial Revolution? To accommodate the paradigm shift needed for smart manufacturing, An integrated business solution powered by a robust platform must be an integral part of your manufacturing company’s digital transformation strategy. And who else can better provide this other than the world’s #1 CRM platform Salesforce?

Optimize your manufacturing process and maximize your ROI with Salesforce

Salesforce offers an extensive range of features and customized solutions to manufacturing companies. Leveraging Salesforce, manufacturers can have a 360-degree view of their customers through a connected ecosystem, improve and predict sales and service processes, offer highly personalized customer experiences, efficiently manage field service workforce, and fetch actionable business insights.

An integrated view of the customers

Siloed systems and complex data make it difficult for manufacturers to have a comprehensive view of their customers. Salesforce enables manufacturers to have a single integrated view of their customers that offers them the edge to stay competitive and ensure that they provide seamless and personalized experiences to their customers across various touchpoints.

Smart manufacturing

In the 4th Industrial Revolution, technology is playing a pivotal role in transforming businesses. In manufacturing, disruptive technologies like IoT and AI are helping manufacturers blur the gap between them and their customers. Salesforce IoT Cloud embraces automation and efficiency through intelligence across multiple verticals such as sales, service, back office, logistics, field service and enables respective teams to deliver data-driven smarter solutions that transform into better customer experiences.

Delivering customer experiences through connected systems

In the smart manufacturing era, customers expect exceptional experiences and value-added services. Often manufacturers grapple to engage their customers because of their legacy systems and siloed business departments. In order to offer personalized services, manufacturers require a connected system and all the data in a centralized location. Salesforce offers seamless integration with external systems and tools. And a powerful integrated system enables manufacturers to deliver smarter services and excellent customer experiences.

Key Salesforce Offerings

Salesforce offers a powerful platform and a wide variety of products to interact with customers in an automated, personalized and innovative way. Some of the key offerings are;

Efficient sales process

Sales Cloud allows a manufacturing company’s sales teams to manage customer data, create & manage leads, accelerate sales productivity, forecast future demands using Einstein Analytics. Sales Cloud built-in features allow manufacturers to manage partners and their sales process to get the best results. Discover more about Sales Cloud here.

Omni-channel service

Salesforce’s Service Cloud allows service agents to access and update customer data while on the move. Service Cloud with Salesforce IoT Cloud monitor the status of the machines as well as optimize maintenance activities. The integration of Service Cloud and Einstein Analytics make customer service highly efficient.

Automated marketing

Salesforce’s Marketing Cloud helps manufacturers track and optimize all of their customer journeys and collect all the information required for efficient communication. Pre-defined engagement journeys target contacts at the right time and using the right channel. Automated lead scoring and nurturing features help marketing teams generate more number of quality leads.

Business applications

Manufacturers are building highly intuitive business applications to engage their customers using the Salesforce platform. These Lightning Applications are highly secure and cost-effective, offers amazing user-experience, mobilize data across your business, and generate a high rate of user engagement.  

What can you expect?

Salesforce’s customer success platform and CEPTES’s Salesforce expertise along with manufacturing industry experience enables a manufacturer to rapidly transform into a customer-centric business. With Salesforce CRM, you can expect;

  • Better visibility of process and sales pipeline
  • Increased ROI on sales investments through high conversion rates, shorter sales cycles, and improved productivity
  • Control over inventory and reduced manufacturing costs through intelligent forecasting
  • Enhanced customer satisfaction through a 360-degree customer view
  • Better partner, supply chain, and logistics management

Why CEPTES?

CEPTES is a Salesforce Silver Consulting and AppExchange Partner specialized in offering various Salesforce solutions to businesses of all sizes. With 150+ global customers, 3 global offices, 10 years of technical expertise and more than 80% certified Salesforce professionals, we help manufacturing companies achieve their digital and technological objectives. Our Salesforce offerings include implementation, integration, migration, enhancement, development, and support of Sales Cloud, Service Cloud, Marketing Cloud, Community Cloud, Pardot, App Cloud, Integration Cloud, Salesforce Analytics, Lightning Migration, and Salesforce Consulting. Get in touch with us today to start your digital transformation journey in the 4th Industrial Revolution.

 

Also Read: How CEPTES helped one of the leading manufacturing companies leverage Sales Cloud for process automation.

 

Customer Success, Manufacturing, Sales Cloud
April 22, 20190

How CEPTES helped one of the leading manufacturing companies leverage Sales Cloud for Process Automation!

The Industrial Revolution 4.0 has transformed the way traditional businesses are managed across various industries. As most of the industries are becoming more customer-centric, they continually look for innovative strategies in order to keep up with the fast-shifting market and stay ahead of the competition. To maintain a competitive edge in such a fast-paced business landscape, manufacturers are embracing smart manufacturing by implementing integrated business solutions powered by a robust platform like Salesforce.

Before we go deep into how CEPTES helped one of the top manufacturing companies of Australia in their digital transformation journey, let us have a sneak peek of why manufacturing industry is using the latest technologies to achieve the highest success for their customers and what are the most complex challenges that today’s manufacturers are facing. When we talk about challenges, there are plenty; such as increasing global competition, lack of automation, minimizing costs, maintaining quality and compliance, process visibility, getting rid of siloed processes, etc. However, the biggest challenge that manufacturers are facing today is siloed processes and lack of process visibility and traceability.

Australian manufacturing company Brother has 19 production facilities and 43 sales companies operating in and around 41 countries. They were into the production of quality innovative products for the print and imaging, labeling and sewing markets. Some of Brother’s key products include laser printers, multi-function centers (MFCs), fax machines, labelers, label printers, and a broad range of home and industrial sewing machines.

Brothers was looking to customize their Sales Cloud system in order to automate certain business processes such as creating/generating PDF from Case, auto email notification to support upon the status change for a claim,  auto display of customer details, create/generate CSV report from Case-based on defined levels, and auto calculation of dates. They were looking for Salesforce leaders who can understand their requirements and help them customize their Sales Cloud system in order to achieve certain goals. As a Salesforce Silver Consulting Partner and one of the experts in Sales Cloud customization, our Sales Cloud certified consultants analyzed Brother’s Sales Cloud system and helped them to achieve their targeted results.

We have created a custom button and with the Visualforce page rendered the page as a PDF. Email notification goes to the current logged in user. Our Sales Cloud experts created a Process Builder and an email template like letterhead and used Apex class which is invoked by the process builder to send a notification. As the customer wanted to create/generate CSV report from Case-based on defined levels, we created a custom button which will open a Visualforce page which invokes an Apex class that generates CSV file and sends to the current logged in user. And finally, to help them auto calculate of dates, on a custom Visualforce page, when the date is being changed, this invokes an Apex class and display the expiry date before saving the record.

The customization was seamless without impacting any of the on-going business processes. After they go live with the customized Sales Cloud, the manufacturer was able to generate reports and email notifications. Customer support was notified whenever a claim gets completed and also customer details were displayed to the users whenever they select a customer in a record. In addition to this, a user was able to see the expiration date before saving the record, which was a challenge before.

As per a recent IDC report “By 2020, 60% of the G2000 manufacturers will rely on digital platforms that enhance their investments in ecosystems and experiences and support as much as 30% of their overall revenue.” Salesforce is helping manufacturers converting more leads into deals by optimizing their customer information and improving their sales processes with the world’s #1 CRM platform. CEPTES has been helping many manufacturers increase their efficiency, quality, and ROI leveraging Sales Cloud and enabling them movie beyond their product with personalized service at scale.

Salesforce brings you tools, resources, and thought leadership to build efficiency, growth, and full-on manufacturing success. To know more on how you can optimize your manufacturing processes and get the most out of Salesforce implementation, get in touch with our team.