The Salesforce Manufacturing Cloud is a purpose-built CRM solution designed specifically for manufacturers. It unifies sales, service, marketing, commerce, and supply chain on one platform to provide a 360-degree view of customers and complete visibility into manufacturing operations. This article provides an overview of Manufacturing Cloud, key statistics, top features, and benefits that make it an ideal solution for manufacturers looking to improve productivity, accelerate time-to-value, and drive growth.
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Statistics on Salesforce Manufacturing Cloud Implementation
Salesforce is gaining popularity worldwide at an exponential rate. This can be understood with the help of the following statistics:
- IDC projected that the manufacturing industry spent $256 billion on digital transformation in 2020. This expenditure would cross $362 billion in 2023 as more manufacturers embrace Industry 4.0.
- A Salesforce survey of 750 manufacturers in 2021 found that 95% expect to rethink business operations due to COVID-19. Top focus areas include improving supply chain agility (56%) and enhancing sales and marketing (53%).
- 63% of manufacturers already use a CRM system, while 22% plan to implement one within 12 months, per Salesforce’s 2021 State of Service report.
- Salesforce powers over 5,000 manufacturing companies worldwide, including 3M, Schneider Electric, Siemens, Ford, and General Motors.
- According to a Nucleus Research study, manufacturers gain $5.58 in benefits for every dollar spent on Salesforce Manufacturing Cloud.
Key Features of Salesforce’s Manufacturing Cloud
Salesforce Manufacturing Cloud provides manufacturers with the following key capabilities:
360-Degree View of Customers
The Manufacturing Cloud platform unifies data from across the business to provide a single source of truth for customer information. This includes sales, service, e-commerce, finance, supply chain data and more. With comprehensive customer profiles, manufacturers can gain insights to personalize engagement across channels.
Sales Forecasting and Agreements
Manufacturing Cloud enables accuracy in predicting and tracking demand. Custom formulas can be configured to account for complex, long-term sales agreements and large orders from channel partners. Companies get improved visibility for production planning and inventory management.
Account-Based Marketing
Manufacturers can coordinate targeted campaigns across sales and marketing. Account profiles provide insights to personalize messages and nurture prospects with the right content. Salesforce Datorama also enables tracking of marketing performance at an account level.
Configure, Price, Quote
Manufacturing Cloud helps streamline the opportunity-to-order process with guided selling, configurable products, and integrated quoting. Sales reps can deliver accurate proposals with custom prices, validations, and approvals. This supports faster deal closure with complex orders.
Omnichannel Commerce
Provides a seamless buying experience across web, mobile, and other touchpoints. Omnichannel support has always been one of the technology challenges that retail and manufacturing industries face.
With technology integration, manufacturers can offer self-service and enriched product information to customers and channel partners. This allows them to browse catalogues, configure products, view inventory, get pricing, and place orders online.
Field Service Management
Enables manufacturers to schedule technicians, dispatch work orders, and track assets in real-time. Companies can monitor equipment performance to optimize maintenance and identify sales opportunities for upgrades or replacements. The Salesforce mobile app allows technicians to manage tasks, track time, and resolve issues from anywhere.
Supply Chain continuity and visibility
With supply chain analytics and planning, companies can assess supplier performance and risk factors like geographic concentration to improve resilience. Inventory and order management provides visibility across the supply network.
AI-powered platform
Salesforce Einstein AI capabilities deliver forecasts to predict outcomes, recommend best actions, automate tasks, and surface insights across sales, service, marketing, and commerce.
Connected Product Design and Development
It allows manufacturers to implement digital transformation of their product development processes truly. With a centralized platform, cross-functional teams like engineering, quality, sales, etc., can work collaboratively on the same digital product records from concept to end-of-life.
Asset Management
Asset management capabilities provide 360-degree visibility into the performance and health of all production machinery, tools and factory assets. Real-time sensor data and predictive maintenance analytics help schedule repairs proactively to minimize downtime and optimize asset utilization.
Suggested Reading: Salesforce Revenue Cloud for Seamless Customer Experience
Benefits of Salesforce Manufacturing Cloud for Manufacturers
Salesforce Manufacturing Cloud enables manufacturers to transform operations, improve agility, and deliver memorable customer experiences. Key benefits include:
Increased sales productivity
By providing a unified view of customer accounts and orders across the business, reps can focus more time on selling than manual entry or data lookups. Shared insights also equip the sales team to have relevant conversations and close deals faster.
Improved demand forecast accuracy
With long-term sales agreements, order history, and marketing campaigns connected in one platform, manufacturers can achieve greater precision in predicting demand. This visibility enables aligning production and inventory to meet customer expectations.
Faster time to market
Streamlined opportunity-to-order processes allow manufacturers to turn quoted opportunities into booked orders swiftly. Guided selling with configured products also helps sales reps build quotes configured accurately per the customer’s specifications.
Higher customer retention
Manufacturers can build deeper customer engagement and loyalty by providing tailored, omnichannel sales and service experiences. A comprehensive view of each account also helps anticipate needs and resolve issues faster to improve the customer experience.
Increased operational efficiency
Unified data, improved collaboration between departments, and end-to-end automation of workflows enables significant productivity gains. This allows sales, marketing, service, engineering, and production employees to get more done.
Lower IT costs
Leveraging Salesforce – the #1 CRM platform – as an all-in-one manufacturing solution eliminates the need for complex, costly integrations across separate legacy systems. Automation and AI engines lower demands on IT teams for manual data tasks.
Enhanced Competitive Advantage
The AI capabilities also assist in promptly evaluating new technologies, competitors, and market trends to innovate offerings, consistently gaining an edge over others. The platform allows streamlining operations for enhanced efficiency while accelerating the delivery of new, cutting-edge products and services.
Conclusion
The Salesforce Manufacturing Cloud delivers substantial value in connecting sales, service, marketing, commerce, and supply chain data on a single platform tailored for manufacturers.
With customer-centric solutions and automation across opportunity, order, and service processes, manufacturers can boost sales productivity, improve forecast accuracy, accelerate time to market, increase customer retention, and lower IT costs. The proven ROI, vast partner network, and continuous innovation of Salesforce ensure manufacturers can achieve digital transformation goals quickly and at scale.
Embark on the Manufacturing Cloud journey with Cloudely. Email us at hello@cloudely.com for more details.
