Manufacturing Cloud: 5 Crucial Advantages

The manufacturing industry has seen a massive rise in adopting cloud-based solutions over the past few years. The demand for expedited production, increased agility, and lower costs continue to grow. As a result, manufacturers across the globe are turning to the cloud to meet these needs.

Salesforce Manufacturing Cloud serves as an intermediary between your company and all other available software solutions from third-party vendors. It gives you access to different applications through a single system, accessible from any device.

Many benefits are associated with using a cloud system for your business’s manufacturing processes. In this blog post, we’ll explore the features and benefits of Salesforce Manufacturing Cloud and its foundational importance for your manufacturing business.

What is Manufacturing Cloud 

Manufacturing Cloud is a CRM platform provided by Salesforce that is specially created to meet the needs of the manufacturing industry. It brings features that give manufacturing companies a 360-degree view of all the ongoing operations and collaborators. Most importantly, it empowers manufacturers to elevate their productivity and efficiency in a way that offers better customer service and a more innovative way of working.

As a manufacturer, you want to understand if a new platform that can change your old ways of working is worth the effort and investment. Hence, we dive into the advantages of adopting Manufacturing Cloud for your team and how it will benefit you in the long run.

Benefits of Manufacturing Cloud 

1. Manage Agreements With Constructive Business Forecast/Predictions

Manufacturing Cloud is specially curated for the needs of the manufacturing industry. This notion reflects in every feature. Agreements across teams, partners, distributors, and clients are essential to manufacturers. The platform enables you to handle all of them in one single platform. Having a single Source of Truth (SoT) for such activities seamlessly ensures all relevant people are included in these agreements.  

Admins can manage and maintain their sales agreements with ease through multiple features. They can compare agreement prices and quantities with actual order cost and amounts for mapping and calculating accurate reporting. You can offer your Channel partners access to effectively engage and negotiate on run-rates and much more. Also, enabling automated account forecast calculations for agreements by configuring forecast metrics will simplify lifecycle management of all sales agreements while delivering accurate predictions. Using the forecast algorithm, you can define needs based on business prerequisites and have visibility into personalized results considering all factors.

This reduces chances for error and any legal consequences due to incompetent processes and lack of due diligence. You can also extract your existing contracts from the ERPs and keep track of them through the new platform. 

2. 360-Degree Visibility on Inventory Management

Gain intelligent cloud insights with Einstein analytics to analyze existing data and retrieve performance-based trends on products. Access to a 360-degree view of operations allows you to track customer demand and avoid going out-of-stock to keep customer loyalty towards your brand. This cuts down on manufacturing the products that are expensive to produce and aren’t doing well in the market. At the same time, you can understand which products do have healthy sales and stock up to keep pace with demand. This will help you to manage customer expectations well.

There are too many instances in B2B and B2C commerce where products run out of stock well before customers have placed an order, but it’s not reflected in the available data. A platform that gives you detailed inventory data can help you better manage your eCommerce systems and avoid such mistakes. Furthermore, the platform’s well-segmented storage makes it easy for your sales teams to share current product catalogues.

Returns are a part of running a manufacturing business. However, if too many return requests are raised for some products more than others, such data will help you do quality checks and make better business decisions.

3. Manage Leads and Improve Conversion Rates

Manufacturing Cloud’s CRM platform will empower your sales team with a lead management system optimized for your industry. By automating the lead tracking process and distribution, you’ll save time and be able to focus on your focused sales strategies. You can identify and fetch targeted prospective customer lists and drive more conversion rates.

Customizable CRM analytics dashboards give you the opportunity to attribute activity to different account managers as well as track overall teams’ performance. You can set the targets for each account by providing a customized dashboard that is enabled to evaluate data for all accounts as well as products through metrics such as: target revenue, actual revenue, current attainment, projected attainment and prorated attainment.

Businesses can also analyze and navigate customer engagement to find out what products have the highest sales and work on reaching prospects who are more likely to convert to customers. Such strategies can fasten conversion rates and help sales teams perform better.

4. Increase Collaboration with Rebate Management

With Manufacturing Cloud, every business process can be automated without manual intervention. It varies from updating order requirements in real-time to collaborating with operations teams, and sending orders through fulfillment processes. Similarly, businesses can also influence their channel purchasing behavior by automating their rewarding schemes for their partners, distributors, and their customers. And it can be based on sales volume, revenue or growth to offer payouts by analyzing and investing in the best-performing rebate programs.

This eliminates manual calculations for details of payout amounts and automates the process of rebate calculation. The easy to integrate program aids in customizing and creating flexible and extensible rebate programs as per business needs.

Besides, you can efficiently collaborate with the operations, sales, and product teams through the community cloud. The platform lets you record all the documentation and conversations with partners and distributors.

5. Lower Costs on an Agile and Scalable Platform

Arguably the most significant benefit of implementing Manufacturing Cloud is the chance to lower overall costs by avoiding multiple platforms and vendors, including those that may be outdated and unable to keep up with modern digital demands. This single platform is powerful enough to handle every task and reduce dependency of heavy investments in IT infrastructure (hardware and maintenance). The servers and licenses are based on a subscription model as it is deployed on the cloud.

The Cloud for all your Manufacturing Needs

Why waste your resources and investments in multiple platforms when one can do it all? This is the kind of freedom that Manufacturing Cloud offers you. It is a user friendly tool that enables you to focus on business health and profits while taking care of the other logistics with intelligent features. 

If Manufacturing Cloud looks like the next step for your business, as an experienced Salesforce partner, RafterOne can support the implementation process. Get in touch with us today!