How Salesforce Can Help Manufacturers to Achieve a Connected Manufacturing Strategy

Many research reports say that the global manufacturing sector has taken a hard hit by the pandemic. The manufacturing sector has been seen slow to adopt the technology. Only 57% of the manufacturing companies can confidently say that they are quick to adopt the changing market and technology trends. The rest still struggle. The need here is to adopt a connected manufacturing strategy in which Salesforce can be of great help. 

There are many manufacturing companies that fail to quickly react to disruptions in technology. The reason behind this failure is the disparate legacy systems that end up creating asymmetry of information and data silos. Salesforce for manufacturing helps resolve these challenges by creating a more connected approach across data, teams, and operations.

Common Manufacturing Challenges to Handle

Any typical manufacturing ecosystem tends to have a complex business process and operations that involve major challenges that need immediate action. Some of these challenges are:

• Inconsistent data about customers and their needs
• Inability to manage change with agility
• Inaccurate forecasts that don’t match with the real sales and demands
• Lack of visibility into partners’ information and their performance

All these challenges need to be resolved in order to ensure that a manufacturing business is growing while adopting technology change. 

What You Need for a Connected Manufacturing Strategy

To achieve a connected manufacturing strategy, a company needs to improve data sharing and collaboration among teams and partners, with some businesses choosing to hire a fractional COO to help steer the process. Here’s how it can be done. 

1. Enable Sales Team to Drive Predictable Growth

It is important to increase predictability in the manufacturing sector to identify changing market demands and align strategies accordingly. The sales team can collaborate with other teams to evaluate highly accurate forecasts based on the run-rate business. They can also automate manual tasks like quote generation and lead management to cut down the sales cycle. 

2. Empower Partners to Bring in More Revenue

The success of a manufacturing company very much depends on how its partner network sells. This makes it important to increase alignment with partners with a partner management solution that will simplify onboarding and incentive management. You can also capture real-time feedback on products from the field and identify more revenue opportunities. You can also provide partners with tools for self-service and performance tracking to align goals. 

Connected Manufacturing Strategy with Salesforce Manufacturing Cloud

The best approach for manufacturing companies is to adopt Salesforce Manufacturing Cloud to future-proof manufacturing businesses and derive a connected platform to run and manage their operations. It will allow companies to:

• Reduce latency and increase collaboration between teams
• Increase the visibility of the staff into end-to-end operations
• Achieve better alignment through efficient partner management
• Allow integration with different systems that will help to unify data
• Get AI-driven actionable business insights

Along with these, you’ll witness many other fascinating features that could increase the operational performance of your manufacturing business with better collaboration.

Plan a Connected Manufacturing Strategy with Experts

There’s no denying the fact that the manufacturing sector needs to keep evolving to walk parallel to the changing technologies and customer demands. The need here is to follow a connected approach to bring all departments together, enabling better collaboration. All you need is support from Salesforce experts who understand Salesforce for manufacturing and can help you build connected, scalable processes around your business needs. Contact us to learn more about trending technologies for the manufacturing sector.