- This week, Salesforce announced several new products including the Consumer Goods Cloud, the Manufacturing Cloud, and the Sustainability Cloud.
This past week, Salesforce announced several major products. These products include the Consumer Goods Cloud, the Manufacturing Cloud, and the Sustainability Cloud.
Consumer Goods Cloud
U.S. consumer goods companies spend about $200 billion every year for in-store merchandising and marketing, but consumer goods executives point out that 52% of their merchandising and marketing plans are not executed as intended in stores — which means over $100 billion in annual trade spend is not optimized.
Salesforce Consumer Goods Cloud is a new industry product that enables consumer goods companies to drive revenue growth and maximize return on investment through improved retail execution capabilities.
Retail execution — which is getting the right products to the right stores at the right time — is essential to the success of consumer goods companies as 95% of consumer goods products are sold in physical stores. And Consumer Goods Cloud enables representatives to use artificial intelligence to optimize key tasks, drive higher revenues through better promotion execution, order management, and elevate the in-store experience for the end consumer.
Consumer goods field representatives are responsible for delivering product and driving brand awareness in stores. But they often rely on outdated systems, spreadsheets, and paper-based reports for determining their daily travel routes, where products should be placed in the store, and to share real-time business insights and opportunities with executive teams and store owners.
“Retail execution remains one of the most important pieces of a consumer goods brand’s strategy, but so much opportunity is wasted if the field rep doesn’t have the data and technology needed to make smart decisions,” said John Strain, the SVP of Retail and Consumer Goods at Salesforce. “Consumer Goods Cloud provides these field reps with the tools they need to be successful on the ground, while helping build both business opportunities and stronger relationships with their retail partners.”
The Consumer Goods Cloud is going to help consumer goods companies transform their business by giving a powerful and intelligent solution to field reps, streamlining operations, and elevating in-store experiences for the end consumer. And now field reps can ensure that shelves are always in stock and pricing and promotions are aligned to expectations while spending less time on operational activities and more time building relationships and driving sales with retail channel partners.
The core of Consumer Goods Cloud is to help improve visit planning, optimize visit execution, and easily capture orders and data. To improve visit planning, field reps will have access to a list of prioritized and assigned store visits for the day with required and suggested activities with in-app map functionality to intelligently manage routing. And to optimize visit executions, reps have access to customizable templates based on store or segment types to help ensure that specific store needs are met every time ranging from inventory and planogram checks to return order processing and surveys from a mobile device. With mobile order capturing capabilities, a rep can capture orders during a store visit, collect important data such as, product, quantity, and pricing thus ensuring they have completed all their assigned tasks and reported them correctly while providing executives with a complete view of the visit.
Accenture and PwC are key consulting partners for the Consumer Goods Cloud. Accenture and provided deep retail industry expertise to the development of Consumer Goods Cloud, which complements Accenture’s Cloud TPM Salesforce. And PwC developed the Connected Digital Front Office solution built on Consumer Goods Cloud — which leverages analytics to enable increased productivity and drive profitable growth for companies across B2B and B2C in a single platform.
Accenture and PwC are key consulting partners for the Consumer Goods Cloud. Accenture and provided deep retail industry expertise to the development of Consumer Goods Cloud, which complements Accenture’s Cloud TPM Salesforce. And PwC developed the Connected Digital Front Office solution built on Consumer Goods Cloud — which leverages analytics to enable increased productivity and drive profitable growth for companies across B2B and B2C in a single platform.
“Execution is everything,” added Pam Brown, the Chief Commercial Officer of the Promotion Optimization Institute (POI). “Teams spend substantial time planning promotions with retailers, but many are not executed as planned. The 2019 POI State of the Industry Survey notes only 29% of survey respondents agree that they have the tools they need to make appropriate decisions, and only 38% of respondents state that they are satisfied with the ability to execute at store level. Salesforce Consumer Goods Cloud has engaged this opportunity with a platform and analytics to help manufacturers make informed decisions at the point of sale and ‘sell more’.”
The Consumer Goods Cloud will be generally available on October 15, 2019. And Einstein Analytics for Consumer Goods will be generally available in February 2020.
Manufacturing Cloud
The manufacturing industry depends on predictability and its capital-intensive businesses often have complex physical operations that cannot be quickly or inexpensively modified to meet changing customer demands. But operations teams are usually not always aligned with sales reps to ensure they have a single and real-time view of all aspects of their customer relationships. This is due to critical customer insights being siloed across spreadsheets and multiple ERP systems — which can negatively affect service level agreements, account performance and the ability to accurately predict demand.
And the resulting inventory stockouts, buildups, and warehousing costs reduce operating margins and negatively impacts revenue. In order for manufacturers to provide a seamless customer experience, they need a solution that helps them better understand the needs of customers while improving visibility across the entire value chain.
The Salesforce Manufacturing Cloud is a new industry-specific product for manufacturers. Manufacturing Cloud brings sales and operations teams together with a unified view of market and customer demands to accurately forecast, plan, and drive predictable business performance. Companies are able to better meet commitments and run a more streamlined business while improving customer satisfaction using Manufacturing Cloud.
“In the manufacturing industry, changing customer and market demands can have a devastating effect on the bottom line, so being able to understand what is happening on the ground is imperative for success,” explained Cynthia Bolt, the Senior Vice President of Manufacturing, Automotive, and Energy Industries at Salesforce. “Manufacturing Cloud bridges the gap between sales and operations teams while ensuring more predictive and transparent business, so they can build deeper and more trusted relationships with their customers.”
The Salesforce Manufacturing Cloud delivers a new level of business visibility and collaboration between the sales and operations organizations of a manufacturing company. And this allows them to have a better view of their customers through powerful new sales agreements and account-based forecasting solutions thus providing visibility into their customer interactions while enabling them to generate more robust sales forecasts.
Salesforce collaborated with major manufacturing and sales companies through the product pilot program, including Kawasaki Motors Corp., U.S.A. – Engines Division, Hitachi Chemical, CF Industries, Mipox, GELITA, etc.
The Manufacturing Cloud features include sales agreements and account-based forecasting. The sales agreements feature allows manufacturers to unify their run-rate business with data housed in ERP and order management systems with the contract terms negotiated — including the planned volumes and revenues — so operations and account teams can have a 360-degree view of the customer.
And if any changes to the agreement are needed, they are immediately incorporated into the existing sales agreement thus ensuring there is always a single source of truth.
This allows account teams to manage the full-sales agreement lifecycle and have visibility into committed and actual order volumes, the performance of the agreement against the forecast, and time-phased custom metrics. And it also simplifies the renewal process thus ensuring account teams continue to bring in revenue while increasing margins.
The account-based forecasting feature provides manufacturers with a complete view of their current business alongside future opportunities. And this allows sales, finance, and operations teams to develop more accurate forecasts while breaking down internal silos. Plus account teams can also add updates on changing customer needs or market demands, which allows the team to collaborate and adjust forecasts in real-time, helps make business transactions, and it makes profits and revenue margins more predictable.
Salesforce is also releasing manufacturing-specific innovation across the Salesforce Customer 360 Platform to help manufacturers deliver greater transparency, streamline collaboration, and grow their businesses.
And Einstein Analytics for Manufacturing provides account managers with access to intelligent experience with out-of-the-box KPIs into account health, demand insights, product penetration, and sales agreement progress.
“Our customers have a clear desire to align sales forecasts with their core sales and operations planning demand and production planning functions. We can’t wait to see Manufacturing Cloud give manufacturers a huge boost in tackling these challenges,” commented Andy Schoka, a Managing Director of Manufacturing at Acumen Solutions.
The MuleSoft Anypoint Platform unlocks data from any application, data source, or device whether that data is on-premise or in the cloud. And by enabling organizations to connect Manufacturing Cloud with other systems, sales, and operations leaders can automate the complete order-to-cash process, create a comprehensive forecast view, and drive business process automation across all sales channels.
Accenture, Deloitte, and Acumen Solutions are pilot partners of the Manufacturing Cloud. And Deloitte Cloud4M was built on Manufacturing Cloud by Deloitte Digital — which is Deloitte’s creative digital consultancy and a Manufacturing Cloud pilot partner.
Cloud4M is a pre-configured and multi-cloud software solution designed to simplify decision making in B2B sales agreements and throughout the end-to-end customer engagement process, tailored for manufacturers, and industrial product companies.
Plus Rootstock’s ERP system was built on the Salesforce Platform and feeds actuals from its ERP to Manufacturing Cloud in order to track compliance against sales agreements. And Rootstock’s planning engine consumes sales forecasts from Manufacturing Cloud to improve the quality of production, procurement and distribution plans.
“At its core, the problem sales and operations planning had tried to solve and continues to try to solve is a lack of coordination between business functions. Manufacturers tend to operate in silos, resulting in less-than-optimal achievement of KPIs and stresses the business’ ability to achieve its revenue and profit target,” noted Reid Paquin, a Research Director for IDC Manufacturing Insights. “Digital transformation dictates that planning decisions be made with a 360-view using near-real-time information on demand and consumption”
Manufacturing Cloud, Einstein Analytics for Manufacturing, and Community Cloud for Manufacturing will be generally available in October 2019.
Salesforce Sustainability Cloud
Salesforce has had a reputation for giving back to the community as it gives back 1% of its profits to philanthropic causes and the employees also volunteer for a number of causes. Plus the company is heavily reducing its carbon footprint. And now Salesforce is helping other organizations become more sustainable by developing a product for tracking environmental initiatives.
Patrick Flynn, the Vice President of Sustainability at Salesforce, told TechCrunch that the company sees sustainability as a key issue and requires action now.
“We’ve been thinking about how can Salesforce really take action in the face of climate change. Climate change is the biggest, most important and most complex challenge humans have ever faced, and we know right now, every individual, every company needs to step forward and do everything it can,” Flynn explained to TechCrunch.
As a result, Salesforce is building the Salesforce Sustainability Cloud, which would help companies track their sustainability goals. The tool would track carbon emissions, renewable energy usage, and overall progress. The tool would be able to tap into internal data and third-party data.
To test out the product, Salesforce has been using it internally for measuring their own sustainability efforts.
The Sustainability Cloud product is in beta now and should be available next year.
