Advanced Salesforce Forecasting for Manufacturers | Manufacturing On-Demand

[Music] welcome everybody to another episode of the demand chain manufacturing on demand I am Andy moldenhauer and with me as always is my friend John graph and Jamesville Wisconsin how you doing John hello hello how is everybody we are all doing good so um checking in with you John our last episode we had our trebuchet and you have some agreements with your neighbor The Bakers is everything going okay there oh oh yeah we came over made a whole big ordeal out of it we uh we shot some fruit back and forth between the two Lawns and uh and it was a blast of a summer because of it so uh good relations amongst uh neighboring states I'll say very good so uh if this is your first video that you're watching go back and watch our our last episode on sales agreements you'll learn all about manufacturing Cloud sales agreements and uh have a little fun with John's homemade trebuchet uh which is which is pretty neat so uh in this episode John asked me to cover forecasting and uh since up here in Minnesota we have all four seasons I have all of that uh covered and ready to go so I thought I would build out a forecasting mechanism for John and I'm going to re reveal it to you right now here is is John's forecasting Stone and uh uh this is uh this is gosh prehistoric AI I think stone is wet we know it's raining out if it's dry it's not raining if it's white we know it's snowing if it is moving uh we know it's windy and I think the best one here if the stone is gone uh there's been a tornado so John I'm gonna ship this down to you and uh consider my uh part of the of the episode covered of bringing prehistoric AI for the weather Community to handle forecasting and I'm I'm pretty sure that's that's what you wanted me to do today for this absolutely I mean that must come from the top meteorologists in in in the US one of the best forecasting uh details that we have out there uh but honestly we we do have uh some really great forecasting tools now available to a lot of manufacturers I know for quite a long time it's very difficult to get all the information right together in one place so let me let me show you guys what I have prepared this uh this time around it's a lot of fun uh so this week we're going to be account managers account manager specifically for crocodile shops one of the the best automotive uh Appliance gear type of uh shops that are out there within the US right uh we can look at our account and see some basic details of course we can look at our related lists and see oh these are the opportunities that they've had throughout the year here's a sales agreement that shows what our expected sales are here's the orders that are coming through this is a lot of disperate information and right now we're only seeing the very very top of it we want to be able to see everything all at once right um well you can go a little bit deeper you can have an analytics page in here and show some of the basic detail but in reality you're going to want your sales folks to take a look at all of the information in one place and be able to even make their subjective interpretation of the data to say hey I know that maybe in the sales agreement they're going to be ordering 300 work boots in the month of September but I talked to them recently and I know that number is going to be higher and or lower right so it get you a chance to actually provide that input all of this is just the standard regular CRM outof thee boox stuff that you're going to get with Salesforce generally but how do you put everything together to make one large forecast right um again you can look at the sales agreement and this is what we talked about last time Andy we were on we talked about being able to look at all right well we've got the activated carbon we're going to get 500 in August in September a October and then the actual quantities will upload based off of the orders or maybe an upload through API from your Erp system that's a lot of letters back to get back to back isn't it um but really the the key to this Advanced account forecast involves a it's called the advanced account forecast set use that's a mouthful isn't it uh I refer to it as the set use uh but this record right here is going to give me the forecast context for crocodile shops now through configuration we defined what our Dimensions were we want to break down what the product category is and what the product is and maybe even the ship from location because they're all over they're all over they're going to be ordering from different locations that's going to help our uh Inventory management be able to say we should be expecting to have X number of these shipping out of East Wick Maine um in the month of October or November Etc uh now we add in all of the different products that are relative to the team to uh to uh crocodile shops and we also add all the ship to locations more importantly this is this is what's great your metrics are unique we've learned that throughout the years Andy you and I working with manufacturing companies everybody's tracking roughly the same thing but there's always a little bit of a variance on what you want to be able to identify what's your definition of actual gross margin I know if you go to an economist they'll give you one definition but if you go to a regional sales manager they're going to give give you three other definitions as well so you're going to get to be able to come in and say I need to set my actual gross margin and this summarizes all of that information that you saw back there on that account so it's summarizing the opportunities that are in the pipeline if you want to look back historically you can summarize the uh here me change from the current period to a set of periods we're going to look all the way back to February of 24 uh April May July we're looking at all these periods here so we can go back historically and see each one I picked each period we could set a range we can walk through and scroll through the whole thing uh we can add more of these measures that are out there now so yeah John let me ask you a question so this the way you have it set up here is is pretty good but um you know can I customize what I'm seeing in those measures for my business absolutely something from Salesforce that's that's coded you know that's that's kind of uh the big selling point Salesforce has had forever is that you can customize nearly anything that you got in here right so I Define what these measures are I Define what the dimensions are uh these measures can be rolled up or summarized from your opportunities they can be summarized from your sales agreement or your orders if you have a custom object that's out there if you want to say hey what's currently in stock at Eastwick main right now for this particular product we could summarize that if that information exists within Salesforce not only that you can grab it with CSV or an API integration and grab that information from an external system and roll that in as well the tool we're using for this is called the data processing engine DPE is what I refer to it as huge amazing tool that allows you to summarize tons of information without necessarily hitting any of your flow processing limits it's it's fantastic absolutely I see that up on the top right you can import CSV file um so in Salesforce you had your opportunities which we all know that's your pipeline reps enter this looks a little bit more official a little bit more intense uh how do I how do I keep this up to dat how do I how do I um you know edit these things and and change the data as I learn more as a rep well I mentioned before you're that's a great question I mentioned before how your rep looks at it and he knows that in October Eastwick Maine is is not going to order 53 activated carbon filters right they are going to go way above and beyond he knows because he talked to the people he's got the inter inside uh knowledge of the account that's what your account manager should be doing right he can come in here and make an individual edit right there opportunity wise it's going to be 250 sales agreement wise it might be50 uh and again I just put in these measures randomly you can set whichever ones you want them to be able to manually update them yourself and we can hit save now that information is reflected uh you can also I love this a little bit of accountability you can see that I'm logged in is you by the way Andy uh I made that change to 150 to on today at 936 so all every change it's made in there that's the individual change you can do a mass update check this out I'm going to OPP update the opportunity quantity Where would set a list that's associated to maybe the the ship to location and the product in question and we want to increase by 15% and then bang it'll go through and update all of those records by 15% based off of that one quick click uh really cool feature absolutely love it time saer for the Reps right if they're really managing this stuff hey yeah you know they have very minimal time to make a lot of clicks here so we're trying to reduce those clicks down to as much as possible right yeah that's perfect now I know you mentioned it at the beginning and you showed some things embedded but is all this data in a structure that we can report on uh what is what is Salesforce giving us to make it get all the insights out yeah ABS absolutely now you're getting into the technical development level stuff that uh that I absolutely love in relish and have bored my wife and daughters for months on um but there is an object within Salesforce that holds all of this so I told you about that DPE it takes all the information summarizes it crunches it shuffles it back together filters it out and it and it drops that back into an object called the advanced account forecast fact or fact for short so using that fact alone using that fact alone you can pull that into basic reports and dashboards but more importantly bring that into your crma your analytics tools and and uh you can just go crazy with it from there that point on that's honestly where you get a lot of the information that comes into some of these dashboards like this um or I know that Salesforce provides with manufacturing Cloud license uh depending on which level you go with they give you a lot of these pre-built um analytics ready to go that is tied to that object so that you can hit the ground running and not have to start from scratch which is uh which is very powerful right and you know we talking about making these manual updates those numbers now can reflect back to reports so not only do you see what Salesforce says you're going to be selling but you also can set it side by side with what uh Bert your inside sales guy says you're going to sell and you can compare numbers you can really see all of the information in one place one of the biggest wins I I love about the manufacturing cloud of recent releases absolutely very good very good thanks John absolutely glad to glad to show off I tell you what that was a fantastic uh overview John and uh I hope our viewers get a a good feeling about what the manufacturing cloud is H set up to do we're going to take some more time in upcoming uh episodes to cover some of the other features but again if you combine that sales agreement stuff we did last time show how this pulls it together and lets you visualize and and edit and impact the forecast over time you can sort of see how that this this manufacturing Cloud license is is coalescing around your reps activities to give you a really really good view that you'd probably have to Cobble together uh from lots of other sources so um absolutely I think we have mission accomplish today John thank you again so much for putting this together uh I will make sure that your uh forecasting Stone gets sent down to you and uh we will uh we'll see you all in our uh our next manufacturing on demand and uh podcast thank you thanks