Author: John Carroll

We discussed the advantage of moving some parts of your assembly back to North America in our previous blog, Thinking of Moving Production Onshores? Adding Salesforce’s Manufacturing Cloud to your Sales and Operations Planning (S&OP) gives your company a central location for all your shared data with partners, customers, vendors and more having full access.

This blog will focus on the importance of vendor and performance management and how vendor management is critical for any companies profitability, deliverability, and overall quality of your parts or tools.

Vendor Qualification and Management

Manufacturing companies go through a whole vetting process to validate their primary and secondary vendors. Some companies could have multiple vendors delivering the same parts, where some vendors might only have one unique part with only one vendor. The process of qualifying vendors becomes critical for manufacturers so that they know their first versus secondary vendor to have a consistent supply chain process. Once you start moving your schedule around, you may be in a situation where maybe a vendor can’t react as quickly as another. You need to be able to quickly look in your system and go, “Maybe vendor B can accommodate more than vendor A.”

On the other side, it’s critical to keep your vendor accountable. The vendor’s responsibility should include deliveries, part quality, and inspection.

Manufacturers shouldn’t be waiting for a truck to pull up, only to realize there’s a quality problem while unloading. Quality checks and inspections should always be done at the vendor’s location. It’s important to take into account some critical questions about your vendor like:

• • Are their quality checks good?
  • Have they implemented correct action for defective protects?
  • What is their on-time delivery?
  • What is their competitive pricing?

Manufacturing Cloud and Vendor Management

Having a system like Salesforce that supports vendor management and performance is critical.

Manufacturing Cloud gives you the ability to have a centralized location that allows you to collect and see all your data at a 360-degree view. Everyone in your company and partner ecosystem can all be on the same page regarding sales agreements, vendor management, analytical data, tracking, and more.

Manufacturing Cloud allows you to understand the quality of all your crucial metrics regarding vendor management and performance. With real-time reports, you’ll be able to have the data proving which vendor is standing out among the others.

Tracking in Salesforce helps manufacturers stay up to date in real-time. For example, if a defect occurs on the floor or in the field, you can instantly track the return material. When tracking is managed via Salesforce, the trickle-down effect gives you the ability to make sure your vendors communicate and react with your changes.

ERP’s aren’t designed to do this, but you have the flexibility inside Salesforce to keep everyone on the same page in real-time.

Corrao Group’s Manufacturing and Salesforce experience

Since 2008, Corrao Group has helped manufacturers utilize Salesforce to create an automated closed-loop system for channel-centric manufacturing. We’ve worked with nearly 1,000 customers, implementing, customizing, and optimizing over 2,100 Salesforce projects. Implementing Salesforce without a detailed and customized plan can lead to wasted time and money spent on small fixes along its lifecycle. With a trusted Salesforce partner like us, we can help you maximize your investment. For more information, please visit our website.

Our Salesforce Manufacturing Cloud Blogs:

• • Manufacturing Cloud: Struggling with Dated Collections?
  • Frustrated With Your Manufacturing Sampling Program?
  • Manufacturing Cloud: No Timely Visibility Solved
  • Manufacturing Cloud: No Longer Negotiating Blind
  • Our Favorite Manufacturing Cloud Features
  • The Importance of Manufacturing Cloud

Sources 

Salesforce

Since 2006, we have been working with the Emilio Nares Foundation (ENF) to help support their flagship foundation, Ride with Emilio. Ride with Emilio provides free transportation for low-income children with cancer to make sure they attend their life-saving treatment appointments, on time, every time. Ride with Emilio has traveled over 1 million miles and safely transported over 4,000 children in Southern California.

At Corrao Group, we are excited to announce that we have passed over 5,000 CANCER RIDES DONATED! We are beyond proud to help ENF and will continue every day to help impact their organization and their kids in any way we can. We are incredibly privileged to work with founders Richard and Diane Nares and the entire ENF staff. From everyone at Corrao Group, thank you for all your hard work, dedication, and love. Thank you to our customers, as we would not be able to continue to donate to ENF without your partnership.

In light of the ongoing pandemic, the Emilio Nares Foundation had to cancel their annual physical event, Harvest for Hope. HOWEVER, the children still need all of us more than ever. Together we can offer them a chance to continue to get their treatment throughout 2020 and 2021. We ask that you register for their virtual auction, Harvest for Hope on Oct. 2nd-10th 2020, by clicking here: HarvestforHope2020.org. You can also text H4H2020 to 76278 and register on your phone!

Going through every note of the Salesforce Summer ’20 Release Notes can be tedious. We’ve highlighted the most popular features circulating around the Salesforce community with a description of each new release. It’s important to note that most of these newly released features are only available in Salesforce Lightning and not Classic.

Sales Cloud

• • Kanban View Enhancements:
    • Enable sales reps to update key opportunity fields from the kanban view quickly. Add a little fun to your sales journey by celebrating closed-won deals with new celebration moments in the kanban. Click the link below to watch to see the Kanban View enhancements in action!
• • High-Velocity Sales: Einstein Call Coaching
    • Sales teams can now optimize interactions with customers with conversational intelligence. Post-call insights give managers intelligent trend analysis ensuring teams can build and refine sales strategies based on conversation trends.
• • High-Velocity Sales: My Feed Alerts
    • Sales reps can respond to their prospects’ engagement in real-time to maximize outreach while the lead is hot. For example, sales reps can tailor email arrival times to increase the likelihood that recipients read them. If a sales rep knows that their contact always reads their email when they come back from lunch, you can schedule the email to arrive at 1:00 pm. The new Scheduled Emails component lets reps update the content of a scheduled email and change its scheduled date and time.

Service Cloud

• • Service Cloud Voice
    • “Natively integrate the telephony channel within Service Cloud. Voice calls can now be part of the dynamic workspace, alongside digital channels. Agents use an omnichannel module to accept an interaction. With real-time call transcripts, connect workflows and next best actions to voice conversations. Deeper integration drives agent efficiency, customer satisfaction, and supervisor insights” (Salesforce).
• • Einstein Reply Recommendations
    • Give your agents the power of AI that automatically suggests recommendations to customer requests. Einstein is continually learning about your customers, giving you suggested replies based on a list of approved responses.
• • Field Service Lightning: Deep Link Actions
    • Mobile workers can now use the Field Service Mobile app through deep linking. “With deep linking, you can specify URL schemes for other apps and send users to external content inside the Mobile Publisher app” (Trailblazer Community). Deliver better experiences for your mobile team by adding deep links to specific actions and flows to reduce the number of taps it takes to trigger an action or flow.

Marketing

• • Content Builder – Interactive Email
    • Marketers can now evolve the inbox experience for customers with Email Form Block. Using five different templates, marketers can now create in-mail forms to have subscribers complete forms without leaving their inbox.
• • Datorama: Data Lake
    • “Data Lake is a new, comprehensive solution for processing granular, raw, and non-aggregated marketing data for use within Datorama” (Salesforce). Marketers can extract and store raw data at scale, and load it easily into Datorama for analysis, visualization, insights, reporting, and activations.
• • Einstein Copy Insights
    • In an intuitive dashboard, marketers can gather language-related feedback regarding subject lines to find out what drives engagement and enhances campaign performance.
• • Einstein Messaging Insights
    • Einstein Messaging Insights quickly and efficiently analyzes your email and customer journey activity providing automatic key insights into what factors impact your email sends.
• • Pardot: Einstein Attribution
    • Einstein Attribution is a new AI-powered multi-touch allocation model that tracks all of your campaigns’ conversion trends and highlights which channels and campaigns are most successful.
• • Pardot: B2B Marketing Analytics Plus
    • Discover a connected, smart, and enterprise-ready experience that links data across all of your marketing applications and business units with further enhanced predictive insights and intelligence. Comprehend what happened with your campaign, why it happened, and what could happen in the future.

Manufacturing Cloud

• • Account Manager Targets
    • You can now create, assign, or edit targets for your organization to achieve performance goals based on product volume, revenue, or custom metrics.
• • Key Account and Product Management
    • Manage large data sets, boost efficiency, and improve forecast accuracy by defining key accounts and product parameters representing tiering structures within your organization.
• • Account-Based Forecasting Enhancements
    • New and enhanced Account-Based Forecast reporting gives you more versatility in assessing business results. Create comprehensive comparative reports that allow you to analyze account-based forecasts by product and time period more efficiently.
• • Sales Agreement Enhancements
    • New and enhanced sales agreement reporting allows you more flexibility in assessing business results. Develop comprehensive composite reports that show products and product schedules for sales agreements.
• • Einstein Analytics for Manufacturing Enhancements
    • Track and analyze changes in forecasts at the account and product level. With the new multi-currency support, users can use pre-built templates to analyze data in any of the supported currencies within their organization.

Work.com

• • Workplace Command Center
    • Access return-to-work readiness from a single hub to safely reopen workplaces. Manage and monitor your staff’s health, completion of training, shift scheduling, and the preparedness of your facilities.
• • Shift Management
    • Streamline employee and workplace readiness by allowing employees to specify their availability, manage shifts, and comply with the social distancing rules upon their arrival window.
• • Emergency Program Management
    • Help organizations support residents, neighborhoods, and agencies in crisis times by providing access to emergency information and replacing manual processes with streamlined application processes.

The Salesforce Summer ’20 Release Notes does bring exciting new features for Salesforce employees and customers. However, customers still using classic will not be able to use these features. If you would like to learn more about migrating to lightning from classic or have any questions about the summer release notes, please visit our website.

Sources

https://www.salesforce.com/releases/summer-20/overview/

https://trailhead.salesforce.com/en/content/learn/modules/summer-20-release-highlights

https://releasenotes.docs.salesforce.com/en-us/summer20/release-notes/salesforce_release_notes.htm?d=cta-body-promo-86

Salesforce.com

Salesforce Photos

Manufacturers face a combination of robust decision making components that are factors for any business globally. With the ongoing unknown of 2020, and incoming massive new tariffs (trade deal phase 1), moving some parts of your production back to North America could become the new norm as early as 2021. The component price will always be lower overseas, but what if you could control your entire manufacturing process? Gaining flexibility is now available with the use of Salesforce’s Manufacturing Cloud. Before discussing the motives of moving production back onshores, it’s important to understand how manufacturing evolved.

Early Manufacturing

In the early 1970-1980s, manufacturing within the United States was booming. Local manufacturing jobs were thriving, and all production was done here on shores through quick runs. The era of quick runs soon became an era of the past. Having to go back and forth on prototypes became expensive, and with rising new technology came a vision of manufacturing processes (Structural Design) done quicker and cheaper. China began creating large factories with low-cost labor and tolling resulting in a more affordable and faster way of manufacturing. With labor costs so cheap, China would go on to become the world leader in manufacturing.

Starting to Move Production Back

As 2020 moves forward and companies start to prepare for 2021, moving some operations to North America is becoming the priority with most manufacturers. When you factor in the new tariffs from the trade deal and managing the supply chain from afar, it becomes a lot to maintain. Final assembly, software packaging, trail producing, and testing are aspects of production that can be moved back to the United States or Mexico. Moving production back onshore is an opportunity to take some of the raw components and assemble them in the US. For example, final assembly in Mexico could become extremely cost-effective with easy access of driving materials across the border. Having one-week shipments being readily available vs. six-week shipments allows you to be less dependent on your supply chain. Integrating your Sales and Operations Planning (S&OP) with Manufacturing Cloud will give you control over your entire business processes.

Salesforce Manufacturing Cloud

The advantage of adding Manufacturing Cloud to your S&OP is that it can drive demand, and tell your factory what to build in real-time based upon your specific schedule. Adding modules in your system through real-time reporting in manufacturing will provide you visibility into what your factories are currently building, what product is coming in, and more. With a central location of all your data and correct scheduling, your sales team will be updated and on the same page. Data spread out across multiple spreadsheets or silos will cause various problems for your company in tracking, updating, and sharing deals. Overall, integrating your manufacturing processes into manufacturing cloud gives you the flexibility of not being so dependent on products coming from offshore.

Our Manufacturing Experience

Corrao Group’s experience and discipline with manufacturing pain points date back to 1982 with our Managing Partner. Jack Corrao has developed numerous operational infrastructures to support hardware and software companies to deliver the best in breed solutions. Since 2008, Corrao Group has been helping manufacturers utilize Salesforce to create an automated closed-loop system for channel-centric manufacturing. We’ve worked with nearly 1,000 customers, implementing, customizing, and optimizing Salesforce and have been everyday power users ourselves since 2008. Corrao Group can help you maximize your investments in Salesforce and Manufacturing Cloud. For more information, please visit our Salesforce page. To learn more information about us, please visit our website.

Salesforce solved a significant pain point for the manufacturing industry as manufacturers no longer have to negotiate blind. Salesforce figured out another challenge for the manufacturing industry: No Timely Visibility into Sales Agreements. Sales Agreements in spreadsheets can become very confusing and frustrating to track. Manufacturers must veer away from spreadsheets to a single source of truth.

Losing Track of Sales Agreements

Manufacturers are often so busy that losing track of sales agreements becomes a regular occurrence because most agreements are managed or hosted outside of the ERP. Manufacturers can’t make the necessary changes to help their company if a sales agreement is lost and underperforming. Data spread out across multiple spreadsheets or silos will cause multiple problems for your company in terms of tracking, updating, and sharing deals. Without full visibility into every deal, you’ll lose an opportunity or two without making any adjustments to the agreements or releases.

Salesforce’s Solution

Manufacturing Cloud gives you a flexible central location to house all your customer data, sales agreements, and forecasts. Sales agreements give your sales users the ability to put actual orders beside planned and forecast amounts in real-time. Additionally, manufacturers can receive automated platform alerts on missed targets to make quick adjustments to underperforming agreements. Real-time visibility allows manufacturers a way to manage complex deals and release schedules.

Salesforce Power Users

Salesforce solving the pain point of no timely visibility into sales agreements is another victory for the manufacturing industry. Manufacturing Cloud becomes your single source of truth that trickles data to your vendors, partners, and the factory. Everyone in your company has real-time visibility into all the important metrics with Manufacturing Cloud to work more efficiently and productively.

As everyday Salesforce power users, Corrao Group understands how flexible the Salesforce platform is to support every department of your business. Salesforce “off the shelf” is rarely tailored to your unique requirements. We work with you to remedy that. We’ve worked with nearly 1,000 customers; implementing, customizing, and optimizing Salesforce. Since 2002, Corrao Group has been helping B2B organizations of all sizes successfully optimize their business processes with Salesforce and our full-scale digital marketing agency. Please contact us if you would like to learn more about how Corrao Group can help you.

Our 2020 challenge to every company is simple: Adopt a nonprofit organization NOW. Words like care, commitment, love, and generosity come to mind when we think of the word adoption. When you adopt an animal, child, or nonprofit, it’s forever. Adoption doesn’t just mean you get together a couple times a year to feel good. Adoption means you are giving a commitment level that happens 365 days a year.

Give Beyond The Holidays 

For many companies, it’s the same story every year. The holidays arrive, and companies conduct one or two fundraising events for charitable nonprofit organizations. How is your company contributing to solving social problems the other 11 months of the year? The need to give back to your community hasn’t stopped because the holidays are over.

It’s time for the executive leadership of companies to adopt a nonprofit organization to help make a difference year-round.

The Importance of Adoption 

Adopting a nonprofit involves ingraining the organization into your company, culture, and business plans. Adoption is a deep and passionate commitment to helping a nonprofit every day of the year. It’s about making sure your company accepts, assists, and engages with both the events and mission of their adopted nonprofit.

You should take the KPIs (Key Performance Indicators) for adoption as seriously as any other company KPI’s. Our managing partner, Jack Corrao states, “When I look at our revenue and profitability goal, I think our nonprofit (Emilio Nares Foundation) goal the most important. The Emilio Nares Foundation’s (ENF) flagship program is to provide transportation for children with cancer to and from their hospital appointments. Funding rides for kids means we’ve hit our revenue numbers, we have happy customers coming back to us, and we have a healthy business culture. For me, it is the ultimate metric for Corrao Group.”

Nonprofit organizations need help. Many people working for nonprofit organizations don’t have a business or financial background. In today’s world, employees want to put in a fair amount of work, make a livable wage, and want to be associated with a company that makes a difference in their community. CEOs who adopt this model are more likely to attract people who are passionate about both their work and making a difference.

Our Beginnings – Saint Augustine High School

Our adoption started with Saint Augustine, a private intercity Catholic High School in San Diego. Saint Augustine reached out to our Managing Partner and their own Alumni, Jack Corrao, about his interest in being a part of the technology committee in 2001.

Because Saint Augustine shaped Jack Corrao’s core values, he wanted to do more.

Jack joined the Saint Augustine High School board of directors to provide consultative guidance for their future mission. Their first initiative – the rebuild of Saint Augustine High School into a new state of the art facility. New facilities included high-tech classrooms, a library, and a Gymnasium.

Health issues caused Jack to leave the board of directors in 2012. However, Saint Augustine remains a part of Corrao Group’s culture. The Corrao Group’s internship program provides high school seniors with early mentorship and guidance on the basics of business operations. Early professional guidance for students provides them with purpose and direction to help start their business careers. After students complete their internships, Corrao Group stays connected to them via advanced summer internships, LinkedIn, and summer visits. Many former interns become full-time Corrao Group employees after graduating from college.

The Emilio Nares Foundation

We decided to adopt and become a part of the ENF family in 2006. ENF helps families navigate through their child’s journey with cancer. Their flagship program, Ride with Emilio, provides free transportation for underprivileged children and their parents to and from the hospital for cancer-related appointments. Ride with Emilio currently serves children in San Diego, Orange County, and Los Angeles. Their goal is to bring Ride with Emilio nationwide.

Here’s how we helped grow and expand ENF since adopting their organization in 2006:

• • Corrao Group gladly welcomed ENF into our office when they needed additional workspace.
  • We implemented their Salesforce Org to help manage their donations and events.
  • A Corrao Group staff member has been on ENF’s board of directors to make sure we are physically a part of their organizational goals.

The most important part of our commitment and KPIs for ENF is Ride with Emilio. For every hour we bill our customers, we provide $5 to ENF which has resulted in over 3,396 rides for children to and from cancer treatment. It is a donation we happily send once a month to help them grow and expand as an organization.

“Using the Salesforce CRM tool has allowed us to increase our outreach and improve our donor relations. We are able to better manage our campaigns. Our Salesforce team, Corrao Group, has given us outstanding service, and they have become an integral part of our organization. Because of their excellent service, we have been able to grow and serve additional families whose children are battling cancer treatment.” – Richard Nares, Founder of ENF

Corporate Examples

Marc Benioff

Marc Benioff, Founder and CEO of Salesforce, recently set forth a challenge for every CEO: Adopt a public school. Benioff writes about a random visit to Presidio Middle School in his new book, Trailblazer. He didn’t have an appointment, but he walked into the principal’s office and asked to help out. Since his visit to Presidio Middle School, Salesforce has adopted 107 public schools. Additionally, Salesforce has given out $70 million dollars to local San Francisco and Oakland public schools. Salesforce also provides volunteerism, mentoring, and technology to the schools. Benioff recently explained the power every CEO has to make a difference in schools, “You’d be surprised at the power your company can have to improve your local public schools. And do you want to know who are in the schools? It’s the children of your employees.”

Domino’s

Domino’s selected St. Jude as its’ national philanthropic partner in 2004. Domino’s has raised more than $57 million for St. Jude through its participation in the St. Jude Thanks and Giving campaign since 2004. “St. Jude is leading the way the world understands, treats, and defeats childhood cancer and other life-threatening diseases. Treatments invented at St. Jude has helped push the overall childhood cancer survival rate from 20 percent to more than 80 percent since it opened more than 50 years ago, and they won’t stop until no child dies from cancer” (St. Jude Mission Statement).

Richard Branson

Richard Branson, the founder of Virgin Group, has been a big proponent of giving back instead of using the money for his personal use. Branson found Virgin Unite to “Unite people and entrepreneurial ideas to create opportunities for a better world. Since then, together with some great partners, we have inspired and incubated a number of wonderful collaborations – like The Elders, Ocean Unite, Carbon War Room, The B Team, and The Branson Centre for Entrepreneurship – which have spurred much needed change in the world.”

Adopt a Nonprofit

Our 2020 challenge to companies is to find a local nonprofit to adopt. Committing to a nonprofit is not just about writing a check for them every month. It’s about making sure your company embraces, participates, and supports all their events. You will have a successful adoption if you find a nonprofit that you are passionate about, and an organization that aligns with your company’s culture.

Where will your company priorities be in 2020? You are disconnected from our world if money is your only priority. We are in a new decade. It’s time to wake up and make a difference for people who need our help… TODAY!

What will you choose?

References

• https://finance.yahoo.com/news/marc-benioff-challenge-to-ceos-adopt-a-public-school-130056612.html
• https://enfhope.org/our-programs/#ride
• https://enfhope.org/
• https://www.qsrmagazine.com/news/dominos-raising-money-st-jude-childrens-research-hospital
• https://www.stjude.org/about-st-jude.html?sc_icid=us-mm-missionstatement#mission
• https://www.cnn.com/2018/08/04/us/lebron-james-opens-school-trnd/index.html
• https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1WteiD8HOlY&feature=emb_logo
• https://enfhope.org
• https://www.virgin.com/unite/