The COVID pandemic increased the sense of urgency for manufacturers to embrace digitalization initiatives but manufacturers are now pondering where these investments should be made and in what order. The uncertainty initiated by the pandemic revealed an urgent need for business agility to match with changing competition and customer needs. This presents an enormous opportunity for manufacturers to reimagine their operations and the experiences they would like to deliver across their value chain encompassing their suppliers, channel partners, and customers. Manufacturers in the new normal would want to become Easier to do Business with – easier for their customers, for their partners, and for their employees.
Customer-facing roles have been permanently altered by the pandemic for most manufacturers, with increasing focus on adapting to a hybrid working mode and investments into digital tools for enhanced collaboration and productivity in a Work from Anywhere world.
The pandemic revealed the vulnerabilities of relying solely on a global supply chain. Today, there is a need for companies to mitigate risk by designing a local supply chain alternative when global supply chains are compromised. There is a renewed focus on minimizing physical supply chain distance and greater partner cooperation.
New business models like servitization are an important part of forward-looking manufacturers’ strategy. Prior to the pandemic, manufacturers focused on driving operational efficiencies through standardization. However, currently the focus is on developing more meaningful customer engagement across the distributor/dealer ecosystem and end customers through a customer-centric approach to delivering personalized solutions, subscription based offerings, and services.
Lastly the focus on Sustainability and putting in place clear action plans towards achieving Net Zero emissions is becoming an imperative for Manufacturers. Mr. Raj Ravuri, Director, Industry Advisor-Manufacturing, Salesforce India share more insights on the same
What are some of the challenges faced by manufacturers?
A manufacturer’s network can be extremely intricate and valuable data remains in silos that is difficult to access and eventually loses its relevance. This creates major challenges for manufacturers seeking business insights that are key to their success. These challenges include:
- An incomplete and inconsistent view of customers, their assets and their service needs
- Lack of visibility into partner channels, their inventory, sales performance, quality
- Revenue and production Forecasts that don’t match the ground reality of demand and sales
- Inability to tackle change with agility
- Grappling will be a maze of legacy systems, disparate point solutions, and data locked within the ERP
- Sales, operations, finance, analytics teams, and business leaders don’t have a single source of data and thus cannot easily collaborate or make quick, agile decisions.
- Channel partners are forced to make reactionary decisions, instead of nurturing a collaborative, engaged business relationship.
In the past, the manufacturing industry may have been slow to adopt technology, but this is changing rapidly as businesses, market demands, and customer needs evolve. A typical manufacturing ecosystem involves complex business processes that are carried out by multiple stakeholders. A manufacturer could have just one/ few distributor partner(s) or thousands of dealers, resellers, or channel partners that ensure their products reach the right markets.
The manufacturer of today faces an uphill task in terms of improving customer and channel transparency along with forecast precision amid turbulent and unprecedented times. To solve these problems, manufacturers must leverage cloud technologies that unlock data from legacy systems and allow every customer function to communicate and collaborate using a single source of truth.
How is Salesforce helping the manufacturing industry in accelerating digital transformation?
Manufacturers who embrace digitization are leading the industry into the future, increasing innovation and efficiency across the board.
Salesforce is partnering with manufacturers in enabling the delivery of unified digital experiences across their value chain. Our “Modernize Commercial Operations” solution helps manufacturers improve their systems and processes for generating and capturing revenue. One of the two components to the solution “Modernize the manufacturing selling process” makes all customer information visible on a single platform, providing collaborative, workflow enabled selling processes infused with AI insights, predictions, and recommendations, and supporting guided configuration, cross-sell / Up-sell, pricing recommendations, approvals, and one-click quoting and contracting process. For example, by leveraging Salesforce, Penna Cement consolidated data from across disparate systems to give its sales and service teams a holistic customer view to close more deals.
The second component “Integrated Revenue Management” brings elements of revenue management process onto the same platform. Manufacturers can create, track, and manage customer and channel partner volume agreement performance over their lifecycle. Forecast anticipated revenue and volume from new sales opportunities and volume commitments across all revenue streams. As Channel partners are key to Manufacturers growth and in building trust with their customers, with our Simplify Partner Engagement offering, we can extend engaging digital experiences to suppliers and channel partners. Channel partners can get visibility into orders, service cases, sales agreements, and rebates, and even collaborate with you around demand forecasting. Manufacturers of Discrete products such as tools, machinery, heavy equipment, automobiles etc also need to focus on delivering exceptional after sales service. Our Transform the Service Experience solution enables faster and smarter service experiences optimized from the contact center through field service to the end-customer. Our platform can form the foundation on which you create new service businesses, turning service from a cost center into a revenue center.
How has the COVID-19 pandemic affected manufacturing processes in India?
Indian manufacturing firms faced multi-faceted and integrated problems in terms of taking advantage of labor and other inputs and realizing sales and the delivery of goods and services, each of which has been affected by changing market conditions (increased prices and weakened demand due to the economic crisis), government regulations (restrictions, lockdowns and stimulus packages) as well as health and humanitarian impacts (illness of workers and loss of -incomes and livelihoods).
To mitigate the impact, the Indian Government launched various measures to support businesses. Manufacturing activities were identified and segregated into essential and nonessential activities. Essential categories (such as groceries and pharmaceuticals) continued functioning during the lockdown. In order to improve domestic manufacturing and attract major investments in the value chain, the government released PLI schemes.
India’s role in the post-COVID-19 era, particularly in the industrial sector, is a subject of great interest, hope, and speculation to the rest of the world. Many experts around the globe strongly believe that India will emerge as one of the most preferred centers for manufacturing. In order to make that belief a reality, the most suitable strategy for India would be to enhance its national value chain. Despite the disruptions of the pandemic, India exhibited innovation in almost every field owing to the concentrated efforts of the Government of India, businesses, and multiple stakeholders.
Can you share examples of companies that Salesforce is working with within this sector?
We work closely with a number of manufacturing customers, including Pidilite, Unimark and more. JCB, ABB, Siemens, Schneider Electric, Honeywell are some of our renowned global customers who leverage Salesforce solutions for their operations.
We recently announced our collaboration with the JSW Group to support their ambitious digital strategy. Using Salesforce Sales Cloud and Service Cloud, the Indian conglomerate aims to offer a single group interface, enhancing its distribution, customer experience and supply chain for its large project division across steel and cement businesses.
Gemini Hydraulics has strengthened customer connect by leveraging Salesforce. The streamlining of the service process has boosted service team productivity by 10%. Additionally, salespersons now have information updated in real-time at their fingertips. Gemini is now pursuing company-wide digitisation to achieve even stronger business process orientation.
As manufacturers move towards the new normal, digital transformation will continue to be a critical part of strategic decisions.
