As part of its ongoing efforts to take on SAP and Oracle, Salesforce has launched clouds for manufacturing and consumer product goods (CPG) companies.
The SaaS giant has been working to tailor its CRM system for more industries and it recently launched a version of its cloud and data platforms aimed at financial service firms as well as healthcare companies.
Salesforce has customers in most industries who use its CRM and customer service applications. When the company acquired Mulesoft last year, it gave it even more connections with data sources. Now Salesforce is trying to tackle specific pain points for a number of industries starting with manufacturing and consumer product goods.
Salesforce's Manufacturing Cloud is designed to give organizations a unified view of market and customer demand to help them better forecast business. The company wants to put customer service in the foreground with ERP data, spreadsheets and data silos in the background.
- Salesforce adds customer data platform to CRM
- Salesforce snaps up Tableau in biggest acquisition yet
- Salesforce launches blockchain channel
The Manufacturing Cloud is made up of a series of modules including Sales Agreements, Account-Based Forecasting and Einstein Analytics. Salesforce believes that front-facing manufacturing sales and service teams as well as partners can serve as an early warning system for a volatile industry.
Consumer Goods Cloud
Salesforce's Consumer Goods Cloud will take a similar approach to its Manufacturing Cloud by using sales data and technology for field reps to help optimize product sales at brick and mortar stores. The company is trying to close the disconnect between the back end operations of inventory, manufacturing and logistics and the teams that deal with stores.
Through its Consumer Goods Cloud, sales and service people will be able to relay intelligence faster to their organizations and CPG firms will be able to move the right good to the right stores at the right time.
Consumer Goods Cloud will provide field reps with lists of prioritized and assigned store visits with apps and maps to manage routes, access to templates based on store and segment types, Einstein AI tools for image recognition and object detection and tools to order and capture data. By automating tasks and delivering data more efficiently, Salesforce can give reps more time to spend with customers.
Salesforce Manufacturing Cloud and Consumer Goods Cloud will be available in mid October with Einstein availability coming to the Consumer Goods Cloud in February 2020.
- Also check out the best cloud hosting services of 2019
Via ZDNet