Salesforce Promises To Link ERP And Sales Data In Manufacturing Cloud

In the latest of a series of moves and countermoves by SAP and Salesforce, two of the world’s largest and most influential software companies, Salesforce has promised to link Enterprise resource planning (ERP) and Sales data in its brand-new Manufacturing Cloud.

In recent times, SAP is making every possible attempt to parlay its traditional strength into cloud leadership. Conversely, Salesforce is looking at a bright future by expanding beyond its huge but limited customer relationship management (CRM) category. The world’s number 1 CRM Company, Salesforce is now planning to leverage its position as the top enterprise-Software as a service (SaaS) company as a force-multiplier to delight big manufacturers around the world.

Eighteen months back, SAP CEO Bill McDermott had a meeting with financial analysts and announce his intentions to revolutionize the CRM market. The strategy was to infuse the powerful ERP insights and data of SAP into a revamped CRM suite called C/4HANA. Under President Alex Atzberger, it has been growing in triple digits as SAP is able to provide businesses more-complete and more-valuable perspectives on what their customers are doing, have done, and are likely to do in the future.

On the other hand, Salesforce co-CEO Marc Benioff during the quarterly earnings call of his company hammered home the new focus of the company on its “Customer 360” platform. Benioff emphatically stated that we have pivoted our entire organization into something we call Customer 360. 

Benioff remarked near the beginning of his opening remarks on the earnings call that Salesforce has a powerful vision for the future with our intelligent Customer 360 that gives its B2B and B2C customers unified 360-degree views of their customers across every touchpoint: from sales to service to marketing to commerce to community and more.

Benioff added Customer 360 will continue to be a major growth engine for Salesforce going forward. The CEO of Salesforce went on to add that every business, irrespective of its size or line of operations, must make the customer experience a top priority. Benioff remarked every success-driven organization must anticipate customer needs, predict customer behavior, build modern mobile apps quickly, and deliver the right services at the right time and place on any device.

In a press release, Salesforce said its new Manufacturing Cloud offers a unified view of rapidly changing customer demand across the entire value chain. It was also added that the new features such as account-based forecasting and sales agreements allow manufacturers to strategically plan to meet customer commitments and better react to market changes.