Extend Manufacturing Cloud with Automation and Analytics

Learning Objectives

After completing this unit, you’ll be able to:

Outline how Flow for Manufacturing capabilities can benefit manufacturers.
Explain how CRM Analytics for Manufacturing Cloud helps manufacturers make data-driven decisions.
List the prebuilt assets that help admins quickly implement specific Manufacturing Cloud features.

Go with the Flow

Rayler Parts sales and service units are bogged down by manual, repetitive, and error-prone tasks. Here are some tasks they perform routinely.

Account executives create orders after finalizing every sales agreement.
Service reps follow scripts to troubleshoot customer issues.
Service reps determine if a warranty claim for an asset is eligible for a reimbursement.
Account executives and service reps share documents with their customers.

Cindy introduces Elliott and Najma to Flow for Manufacturing, a toolset for automating complex business workflows and decision-making to support holistic customer interactions.

Graphic showing how automation can help quickly perform different tasks.

She briefly outlines each tool.

Business Rules Engine: A collection of objects, services, and components for automating complex decision-making and business processes, like determining eligibility or qualification. Use decision tables to define decisions and actions based on predefined business logic.
Data Processing Engine: An Extract-Transform-Load tool that orchestrates end-to-end data transformation and aggregation. It can aggregate, group, join, filter, slice, apply formulas, and write back a large volume of data. Use it to aggregate transactions and calculate rebate payouts.
Document Generation: Unifies document management and creation. Use it to design DOCX and PPT document templates, create business-critical documents, and coordinate document intake.
OmniStudio: A suite of drag-and-drop components that help you create branded digital experiences across multiple channels and devices.
Flow Builder: A point-and-click tool that helps you automate repetitive tasks, create guided interactions, and define complex business workflows. Use Flow Builder to build workflows that can be triggered manually, driven by an event, or scheduled.

Elliott and Najma are awed by the wide array of tools. They agree: Flow with Manufacturing will boost productivity and create seamless experiences for team members and customers.

To learn more, see Flow for Manufacturing.

Make Manufacturing Data-Savvy

Cindy previously introduced CRM Analytics, a tool for surfacing intelligent insights. Let’s get to know it better.

CRM Analytics is an app that taps into the data in your Salesforce org, breaks it into data segments, and presents it visually through interactive dashboards. It has an intuitive, easy-to-use interface that lets anyone get credible, intelligent, and actionable insights from complex data.

Teams can use preconfigured dashboards that are tailor-made for the manufacturing industry. Here’s the Analytics for Manufacturing app template in the Analytics Studio.

Screen capture of the Analytics for Manufacturing app template in Analytics Studio, showing details about the template and screen captures of the dashboards.

Account managers get insights on account health, product pricing, actuals and planned comparisons, and sales agreement performance. They can also tap into data on team and revenue targets, potential product and account opportunities, rebate performance, and distributor performance. Here’s an example Accounts’ Health dashboard.

Screen capture of the Planned Business tab on the dashboard, showing the revenue realization of an account over the current fiscal year.

With data-driven insights, account managers can achieve the following goals.

Optimize product pricing.
Triage low-performing accounts and products.
Capitalize on cross-selling and upselling opportunities.
Commit to credible targets.
Fine-tune forecasts.
Track rebate attainment.
Apprise the performance of team members.

They can also share insights on data like rebate attainment with partners using the Manufacturing Experience Cloud site.

To learn more, see CRM Analytics Administration for Manufacturing Cloud.

Scale Up with Prebuilt Apps

Cindy has covered a lot of ground. She’s helped the sales team to effectively plan and manage their business and the service team to deliver delightful customer service. But what about Cindy herself?

As the admin, Cindy spends a lot of time and effort setting up different features. She has to configure custom metadata, tools, sample apps, permission sets, forecast sets, DPE definitions, and more. She checks her notes for a faster way to implement Manufacturing Cloud features.

Her deep research pays off. Manufacturing Cloud provides several prebuilt apps so Cindy can jumpstart the implementation. These components are included with a Manufacturing Cloud Learning trial org. All she needs to do is sign up for a trial org, package the components in the Learning org, and install the package into the Rayler Parts org.

Here are the prebuilt apps you can use to extend Manufacturing Cloud.

Prebuilt App	Description
Advanced Account Forecast Product Category	Enables users to generate forecasts at any level in the product category hierarchy and track high and low-performing products.
Advanced Account Forecast Revenue Measures	Enables users to generate granular forecasts for key revenue measures to improve profitability and view gross margin percentage at a product level.
Object Hierarchy Mapping	Enables users to define relationships between Opportunity and Sales Agreement objects used when converting opportunities to sales agreements. They can also define relationships between Transaction Journal and aggregate objects used in Rebate Management.
Pre-Work Estimation	Enables service technicians to generate service estimates, track customer approvals, and create orders.
Data Processing Engine Debug	Enables admins to track the number of records that are processed by nodes in a data processing engine (DPE) definition and visualize a DPE definition. They can get a deeper understanding of the DPE definition structure and plan how to optimize and extend the definition.

To learn more, see Extend Manufacturing Cloud with Prebuilt Apps.

Redefine Manufacturing

Cindy has thoroughly impressed Elliott and Najma. With Manufacturing Cloud, Rayler Parts can manage their entire book of business, deliver service excellence at scale, and nurture meaningful relationships with partners. They can unify customer data on a single source of truth and enrich the experience of their teams. Rayler can fine-tune their operations by infusing data-driven insights into every aspect of their business.

Manufacturing Cloud empowers manufacturers to connect the value chain and become more resilient, agile, and impactful.