Manufacturers understand that as customer and market demands fluctuate, it can be difficult to maintain a healthy balance between production and sales.

With Salesforce Manufacturing Cloud, your company will be able to update these processes quickly, allowing you to have better profit margins with greater productivity.

What is the Manufacturing Cloud?

The Manufacturing Cloud is a Salesforce product that allows companies to see and collaborate between the sales and operations departments of a manufacturing company. The product allows workers to access information about customers through sales agreements and forecasting solutions.

The manufacturing cloud can be used to quickly reconcile run-rate data with negotiated contract terms to an ERP (enterprise resource planning) software. The data is updated in real-time, immediately updating order and manufacturing volumes, allowing your company to be more efficient with accurate results and forecasting.

Why Does Your Company Need the Manufacturing Cloud?

Most manufacturing companies have suffered at one point or another due to incorrect data. When people are imputing information into different spreadsheets or documents, information can naturally become jumbled or looked over. This misinformation can end up potentially costing a company, either by not producing enough to meet demand or by producing too much that isn’t needed.

Salesforce’s manufacturing cloud streamlines all your information so that is nothing is lost or looked over. Your team will be able to make good decisions based on the data and minimize loss overall while increasing revenue sales for the company.

Manufacturing cloud will reduce your need for extra warehouse space while knowing that you are producing the product that will meet customer demand.

What are the Key Features of the Manufacturing Cloud?

The two key features of Salesforce’s Manufacturing Cloud are its sales agreements and account-based forecasting.

Sales Agreements

The sales agreements feature makes it possible for manufacturers to organize their management systems with the negotiated contract terms, keeping track of both revenues and planned volume. It also unifies data from an ERP with run-rate business, allowing both your account team and your operations department to have a detailed profile of each customer.

When changes are made to an existing agreement, it is updated immediately to ensure that everyone can access the same data. Your team will be able to view and manage the sales agreement and see the exact data on order volumes, allowing them to make good operational decisions.

The sales agreement feature also streamlines the renewal process, allowing your sales team to accomplish more and bring additional revenue to the company.

Account-Based Forecasting

The account-based forecasting feature allows manufacturers to not only view their current business but to find and develop future opportunities. Your teams will be able to break down internal silos while creating forecasts which are far more accurate than the pre-manufacturing cloud.

They can also update information as customer needs change and adjust the forecast accordingly. As everything updates quickly, others will be able to access the information in real-time and update their projects to make your business more efficient and profitable.

Set Up Account Managers for Success

To set yourself up for success, you can customize settings for all your account managers, giving select people the permissions they need to manage the workflow. These settings may be different for every position on your team.

You will be able to determine if a team member can view or edit information, as well as create new or delete existing objects. These objects can be customisable for the following:

• Accounts
• Contacts
• Contracts
• Opportunities
• Orders
• Price books
• Products.

With full customisation, you can ensure that the data’s integrity is maintained by roles you trust the most, while still giving visual access to other team members.

How Can SalesFix Help?

Salesfix is an Australian-based Salesforce Consulting Partner that offers valuable training to your Salesforce implementation. Setting up a new CRM within your company can be daunting and our skilled team of dedicated professionals are happy to help.

We have helped several Australian companies find success with Salesforce and we would be happy to sit down with you and discuss your CRM needs.