CRM in Manufacturing

Is a CRM worth the price in Manufacturing?

When people think of a CRM, they first think towards sales. Keeping track of customer information for sales is very important, but so are the pieces of equipment and parts that they’ve ordered. To create a more seamless re-order experience, having a CRM can smooth out the path for repeat business. Keeping track of orders as they move through the company can save a lot of money in mistakes or miscommunication.

We’ve worked with companies that had all of the information of past orders located on pieces of paper in a filing cabinet. Once they start hitting library size physical organization, they turn to us to start bringing everything into the digital age. Manufacturers can take this even further with custom fulfillment systems, using the same CRM, for job tracking and job notes. At the end of the job, everything is organized neatly and gets stored in the customer account for the future.

This especially comes in handy with highly custom jobs, like vehicle restoration. You need to know the exact parts that went into a custom build for the billing department. Anyone at the company, regardless of location, would be able to access information about a custom project in real time.

Upgrade this system even further with automation! When an order moves from one department to another, have triggers that automatically fill out fields. We like the one that “signs” a page from the user that is moving it. That way, we can know exactly who approved the order to move from one stage to the next. Accountability at it’s finest.

Include managers with a manager overview and ease of communication about an order. Trying to keep your managers in the loop on every single project can be a hard task to accomplish, but with manager dashboards, this becomes much easier. Salesforce CRM also has the ability to chat directly on an order, making it easier to recall exactly what was approved or not approved because that information is located on the order itself.

CRMs can be very useful in sales, but also in order manufacturing, so let us know if you need help jump starting or switching over to a more useful CRM.