As part of Salesforce Industries strategy, Manufacturing Cloud enables modern connected experiences for clients by extending front office processes while seamlessly integrating with legacy systems.
As we approach Dreamforce 2022, Salesforce has previewed multiple new features in Winter’23 release for Manufacturing Cloud. In this article, we take you through a sneak peek at these changes and focus on our top 4 favorite features with upcoming release.
But we do go a step further to analyze how these features move the needle for our manufacturing clients. So, here’s a list of ‘What’s New?’ with Manufacturing Cloud in Winter’23 and what it really means for our clients. Read on to explore our top 4 picks.
1. Manufacturing for Sales: Sales Agreements with Weekly Schedules, mass update advanced forecasts records
- What’s new?
- Sales Agreements: Users can now create sales agreements with weekly schedules in addition to existing options like one-time, monthly, quarterly, and yearly schedules.
- View and Update Advanced Account Forecasts: Additionally, users can update multiple values as Advanced Account based forecasting module.
What it means for clients?
- Sales Agreements: While Sales Agreements have been great tool for managing Manufacturing Sales cycles with longer time frames, Salesforce has now provided the ability to create more granular scheduling (and tracking) by enabling weekly schedules (previously monthly) on Sales Agreements.
- Account Based Forecasts: Account based Forecasting is a key tool to plan and manage your forecasts at an account level. The added ability to mass update values based on dimensions like products, locations and categories helps account managers to quickly and accurately update their forecasts. The new release also features advanced filters to view your forecasts
2. Manufacturing for Service: Service Console, identity flows and more
What’s new?
Service Console: Manufacturing for Service got a major upgrade with Service Console. Consoles are great way to provide unified view of end-to-end service interactions in a single screen. These span open cases list, case details, associated knowledge articles, account, timeline view of interactions, contact details and much more.
Other Service Excellence features: Additional Manufacturing specific features include pre-built list views of associated assets, identity verification flows spanning physical or digital interactions to verify customer identity or to process their requests.
What it means for clients?
Service Console: With Service Console for Manufacturing, Salesforce has further unified the customer service interactions with core CRM flow for manufacturing. With a powerful service console, Manufacturing Service Reps can easily address multiple client queries by locating the right account and assets to link to their cases.
The timeline view on service console provides a visual view of all customer interactions on a case.
Identity Flows, Action Launcher and others: Identity verification is often an important pre-requisite to share sensitive information or process a service request. Identity flows and Engagement interaction records can help clients detect potential cases of compliance fraud, identity breach and meet audit compliance standards with Audit Trail. Additionally with action launcher, Service Reps can quickly launch Actions like approvals with a single click.
3. Partner Visit Management for tracking partner visits:
What’s new?
Visit Planning and Tracking: Sales teams can now plan and track field visits to their manufacturing partners with an action plan. These could be for variety of reasons like periodic performance visits for distributors, renew sales agreements, resolve cases, or showcase new products during visits. With the new partner visit management feature, sales managers can schedule visits while field reps can perform visits, track key metrics complete visit tasks.
What it means for clients?
Visit Planning for Sales Managers: Field Sales visits are a key component of Sales execution and building relationships with distributors and channel partners. Now Sales Managers get an excellent tool to propose and plan sales visits for their sales teams that align with their team’s sales execution priorities. Managers can create Action Plans for their reps along with metrics (assessment indicators) to codify insights from each sales visit.
Sales Reps can view Assigned Visits, get navigation guidance on maps and capture metrics: Sales Reps in turn can view their assigned visits on their mobile app and navigate using an embedded map. They can also track key notes about their sales visits, while also capturing key metrics for their distributors, based on the type of visit.
4. Common Components across Salesforce Industries:
What’s new?
AI based prediction layer, Discovery framework for data collection, Smart Form readers: Salesforce has made available a bunch of new features that are common across Salesforce Industries. Some of the coolest features from our perspective include
- AI Accelerator to build machine learning (ML) use cases across multiple Manufacturing Cloud use cases
- Discovery framework to help every aspect of questionnaire driven information collection use cases. For e.g., Partner onboarding questionnaire
- Intelligent Form Reader: uses Optical Character Recognition (OCR) to enable auto extraction of text from forms, map them into specific Salesforce objects and fields
- Einstein Relationship Insights enables exploring interconnected relationships between people and companies spanning unstructured data on the web and Salesforce structured objects.
What it means for clients?
- AI Accelerator allows clients to generate ML predictions on any object in Manufacturing cloud. This allows prediction or multiple manufacturing use cases like distributor performance prediction, cross-sell propensity, attrition prediction based on historical data and other considerations
- Discovery Framework is a useful framework for collecting questionnaires in a user-friendly way and in pre-built objects for multiple manufacturing use cases like distributor onboarding, service requirements, and KYC scenarios
- Intelligent Form Reader: OCR technologies have found wide usage in the manufacturing sector, especially post pandemic. Client Contract details, shipping confirmation and many other 3rd party forms can be directly ‘read’ using Amazon Textract API integration and mapping the data into relevant Salesforce objects. This is a great productivity feature allowing clients to do away with manual data entry of many such forms
- Einstein Relationship Insights: In Manufacturing tapping into the power of connected relationships is often key to getting access to a key decision maker. With this feature, firms can use AI features to suggest connections spanning web and information stored in Salesforce
All in all, Winter’23 release packs quite a punch in terms of new product features that extend the features of Manufacturing Cloud processes. At the same time, when data driven insights are a key source of competitive advantage, Salesforce allows you use AI and visualization features to tap into data within Salesforce and outside to derive insights that help you strengthen your distributor relationships, maintain service levels and provide structured ways to capture and visualize data.
