Client Overview
Our client, a manufacturer of heavy machinery and equipment for construction and mining sectors, was finding it difficult to manage long sales cycles, multi-year service contracts, and complex distributor relationships.
The manufacturer needed a unified platform to forecast demand accurately and connect sales agreements to actual production runs.
The Challenge
Their sales reps would track opportunities in spreadsheets while the ERP held order data and a separate distributor portal logged channel sales. With no single source of truth, demand forecasts were regularly off by 20 to 30%.
Account managers had no visibility into actual versus committed volumes on sales agreements. They could not identify underperforming distributors before quarter-end. The finance team faced the same gap, with no reliable way to reconcile sales agreements against ERP delivery data.
The Solution
We implemented Manufacturing Cloud as the agreement and account-based forecasting layer, with Sales Cloud handling opportunity management for direct sales. Sales agreements were configured to track committed volumes, pricing tiers, and actual order performance in one place.
We used MuleSoft to integrate Salesforce with the SAP ERP system, syncing delivery data, invoicing, and inventory in near real time. Account managers can now compare committed versus actual volumes directly inside Manufacturing Cloud without switching systems.
Custom Lightning components were built for distributor scorecards and quarterly business reviews. Flow-based automation routes contract renewals and price escalations to the right account team 90 days before expiry, removing the risk of missed renewal windows.
The Impact
- Forecast accuracy: Improved demand forecast accuracy by 35%, narrowing variance to within 8%.
- Pipeline visibility: Gave account managers real-time view across 1,200 active sales agreements.
- Renewals: Increased contract renewal rate by 18% through proactive lifecycle automation.
