Manufacturing Cloud and Rebates Management

Manufacturing Cloud Manufacturing Cloud for Service – This was announced in Winter 22, but it was really launched as part of Spring 22. Salesforce did a launch release for this right before Spring 22 went live (which we were a part of!) that actually covers what’s included in more detail than the release notes do. With this, the biggest new capability is the ability to track the revenue coming from the service side of the manufacturing house. Not all manufacturers have this – like you don’t typically provide service for ball bearings for example – but a lot of manufacturers drive a significant portion of their revenue from the service side. This could be service contracts, ad hoc repair work, or even servicing parts. All of these revenue streams can now be reported on within Manufacturing Cloud. With this, manufacturers can now see a complete picture of their revenue streams and track expected revenue vs. actuals. For the Sales side of Manufacturing Cloud, one of the key features is the ability view run rate business over time and be able to immediately take action if you see a customer slowing or even increasing their order volume. The service side of the business isn’t immune to these same issues – and in a lot of cases you might be even more blind to what happens there. Just because you have a customer that orders what you manufacture, it doesn’t mean they are buying the repair parts or the service contracts from you. They might be going to a 3rd party who is cheaper. Typically this is a high-margin business you want to protect so with Manufacturing Cloud, you can now see if customers that were purchasing your parts or using you for maintenance repairs suddenly start dropping off. Mostly like this isn’t because they don’t need the parts – it’s probably because they just found an alternative. This will let your service sales team jump onto these and try to save them before it’s been too long. Love that service is finally included here and looking forward to seeing this expand over the next releases. Measure Groups – I like this new feature a lot. If you’re really starting to use Manufacturing Cloud, you’ve probably started to build out a bunch of different measurements to track and your forecast grids are getting a little unwieldy. Measure Groups solves this problem by giving you a way to create your own groups to bucket your measurements in. Within your grid you now have a Measure Group filter that you can use to select a measurement group and only those metrics within that group will be visible. It looks like a measurement can be in multiple groups which really lets you break these up as you’d like. Great way to simplify your view – and this coupled with the next one makes the forecast grids even more powerful…