Manufacturing in Australia has been hit on quite a few fronts over the past couple of years.
From a looming talent drain, critical supply chain disruptions to component and microchip shortages, it’s no wonder manufacturers are exploring innovative ways to stay resilient.
Automation, dynamic pricing, customer insights from AI, and more efficient business processes are just some of the technological treats that manufacturers want to sink their teeth into. However, a study from Infosys found that many of these benefits are only possible once businesses are at least 60% of the way through their digital transformation. (Here’s hoping you’re close to or over halfway.)
Connecting systems and data silos so they can connect in real-time is half the battle to wrangling a business towards its digital goals. It helps prepare the way for Industry 4.0 and other modern manufacturing practices. Let’s look at some of the types of Salesforce CRM integrations that are delivering real value back to businesses.
Visibility across the revenue flow
One area that many businesses start with in digital transformation is to gain greater visibility and management of their revenue. Everything from pricing to quoting function across a business can touch many departments and be an area for higher levels of human error. Manual processing slows the ability to respond quickly to customer leads and can result in lost deals.
By bringing automation, accuracy and consistency into pricing and quoting, you’re helping the business put its focus back on customers and deliver them straightforward deals in rapid time. CPQ can also be integrated into your ERP systems for added efficiency gains.
Streamlining with RevOps
Revenue Operations or RevOps is a business mindset, and model that looks to identify and streamline the journey of revenue through a business. It’s kind of like those classic detective dramas where the wise captain advises the team to “follow the money”. Once the path of revenue is mapped across a business, it can be simplified down with the intent of automating, streamlining and smoothing its journey so it has the least friction.
One benefit of the RevOps approach is that it clearly identifies and gives you a priority list of integrations to go after. These are the moments along the journey where a department hand off data or processes to another business unit. Quite often systems align with business units, so these become the obvious areas to start with to help reduce inaccuracies, data degradation and unnecessary manual processing.
Smarter agreements through DocuSign
DocuSign is a great example of a specific Salesforce integration that can deliver tangible benefits for manufacturers. Automating agreements, contracting and quoting tools can help to dramatically speed up the time to close deals. It can feature and support both CPQ and RevOps integrations as agreements are the backbone of any business. For manufacturers, DocuSign supports procurement teams with proactive vendor management, which is crucial to maintaining a consistent supply chain.
DocuSign’s features let you request signatures with one click in any object, sign electronically and automatically push and pull data between Salesforce and generate proposals and agreements. It manages the contracts from end-to-end and even helps with agreement renewals management. There are a range of native integrations into popular CRM and ERP systems to easily connect them.
Enterprise-wide CRM Integrations
Salesforce integrations with common ERP systems from SAP, Oracle, IBM and Microsoft can deliver some big benefits including real-time inventory view, 360° view of customers and sales order cycles, as well as access to critical business information and processes. This can lead to automation of data management tasks, increased levels of data accuracy, visibility, customer service and help teams make more informed decisions.
It’s important to start by focusing on what you want to achieve out of integrating Salesforce with your ERP system. Then you can choose the best option to suit your business, from preconfigured out-of-the-box solutions or custom integrations.
For more common ERPs like SAP and Oracle, there are native integrations available with Salesforce that cover off the main needs nicely. For the less widely used ERPs, you might need to go down the API path with Salesforce and build a custom integration. Alternatively, if you just need to get your hands on some of the data, there are other platforms like Mulesoft which can help connect data between your CRM and ERP.
Summing up
When Australian manufacturers embrace Industry 4.0 methodologies and become more hyper connected to devices, systems and networks, there are real benefits to gain. This approach helps remove some of the usual obstacles that get in the way of our competitive edge; high labour costs and distance to global markets.
Integrations are not always straightforward, and many businesses can get bogged down in integrations that are too complex or are out of alignment with their business objectives. Before launching into any integration, companies need to ensure transformation projects are going to support the future state of the business. Our Simplus team works with manufacturers to plan, identify and deliver smart integrations between your systems that help give you an edge.
Sign up for our webinar – Making the Revenue Connection: Best Practices for Growth to learn how Simplus, Salesforce and DocuSign can help accelerate growth and streamline revenue.
