Salesforce Revenue Cloud Integration Is Critical for Digital Transformation in Manufacturing

enosix is the key piece for unifying Salesforce Revenue Cloud with SAP ERP data and processes to empower recurring revenue models and deliver great customer experiences for manufacturers

For manufacturers, the front and back ends of their sales and billing/accounting/inventory processes are often siloed. But in today’s economic environment, you must add or increase recurring revenue to keep your business stable as it grows. Any gap between your CRM and ERP can lead to misunderstandings, lost sales, and an inability to capitalize on recurring revenue opportunities. That’s where a CPQ integration solution like enosix is needed to remove the roadblocks to digital transformation.

Manufacturer sales teams typically use Salesforce Revenue Cloud to build orders, but the back end typically uses SAP to manage contract arrangements, financials, and the supply chain. This means the inventory and pricing rules are kept in SAP, even though the orders are being generated in Salesforce Revenue Cloud. Transact aligns these systems, allowing the sales team to configure, price, and quote orders from inside Salesforce Revenue Cloud that will account for and abide by the pricing rules and inventory realities held in SAP.

It’s time for your manufacturing company to move forward with its digital transformation and connect SAP ERP to Salesforce Revenue Cloud with a CPQ integration solution that streamlines processes and enables transparency while allowing instant cost, price, and quote alignment between front- and back-end systems.

Controlled, thoughtful growth takes complete digital alignment

A layer of complexity is added as recurring revenue grows. The only way to maintain the profitability of recurring revenue is to transform the business process.

Existing tools that require manual intervention to align the CRM and SAP ERP simply slow things down. These swivel-chair integrations can’t support increased activity volume, which affects the entire customer experience by hobbling service and delivery. This model is economically inefficient, decreasing revenue and thereby profits.

In the past, a company could go on for years before reaching this flashpoint when an integrated solution was necessary. This year, changes brought by the global pandemic and explosion of digital, work-from-home ordering have forced manufacturers to fast-track complete alignment of front- and back-end processes.

Digital transformation is not just about sales

You can’t just invest in your sales infrastructure and think that will remedy the problem. The entire business process must be entirely transformed for any manufacturing company to achieve digital transformation.

This means configuring a new model for recurring revenues that allows for transference between Salesforce Revenue Cloud, accounts receivable, and ERP systems. Recurring revenue makes billing more complex, so the CPQ integration system must have ways to handle upgrades, changes in contracts, swaps, and add-ons. This type of operation isn’t possible when systems are siloed.

Sales and billing processes must be designed not only to work together but to facilitate the customer experience and minimize friction.

The benefits of integrating Revenue Cloud and SAP

Research shows that sales reps spend only 34% of their time selling and a lot more of their time generating quotes and proposals and getting customer sign-off. Users who deployed and properly used CPQ (which is now part of Revenue Cloud) reported the following benefits:

• Quotes are generated 10 times faster
• Approval time is reduced by 95%
• The quote-to-cash time was reduced by half
• New reps ramp up 30% faster

In addition, by integrating CRM and ERP while implementing an end-to-end, lead-to-sale-to-billing process, your manufacturers can realize additional benefits:

• Improved sales effectiveness: Sales reps can sell more when the process is streamlined. They can sell through more channels, order errors are eliminated, and proposals are generated instantly. Customers are provided with pricing specific to them and their channels.

• Enhanced efficiency in operations: Manufacturers can implement an integrated selling process that creates faster quotes, streamlines approvals, reduces sales cycles, and liberates staff, who can then focus on what they do best — sales.

• Improved business insights: Protect margins while maximizing sales leads, increasing cross-selling and up-selling, and optimizing pricing.

• Leverage existing ERP data to streamline quotes: New quotes are often 95% copied from old quotes, but that copying process steals salesperson time and kills energy. Keep selling energy high by automating as much of the quote process as possible through your CRM.

In short, enosix Transact unifies your CRM and ERP system around quote customization and transparency. Manufacturers report that cross-sell and upsell increased 55% with a complete CPQ system in place.

Make the transformation

There are considerable data transformation and mapping requirements before ERP data is useable by a CPQ tool. Typical integration solutions try to export the data from SAP and copy it through complex conversion algorithms. Even when these translations work, performance is poor.

An alternate method is to recreate the data and rules in the modeling environment, but this boosts the chance of errors and creates a stressful scenario of repeated testing and optimization. Even more work is created because the implantation process must be repeated with every change.

But it doesn’t have to be that way.

Enosix Transact allows Salesforce Revenue Cloud users to create quotes in real-time from SAP without moving, replicating, or exporting the SAP data and logic. Your complex SAP pricing rules and product configurations — including variant configurations — stay in SAP.

This lets your sales team and even external partner channels create accurate quotes based on the data in SAP. This pre-built integration reduces implementation time by 70-90% and delivers must-have functionality that’s just not possible with other approaches.

enosix takes the complexity out of SAP integration. Schedule a demo today or reach out with questions. We’ll get you the information you need – fast.