How Does CRM Drive Manufacturing Success?

If you are primarily a manufacturing business, you may think that you don’t need CRM. Many businesses don’t see the point of adding sales software on top of their ERP or other back-office systems. After all, CRM is for sales and front-facing teams, and your focus needs to be on the quality of your product, right?

However, there is a major flaw with this thinking. You could be an ERP superstar, using your solution to develop high-quality products while cutting back on shop floor waste. But what good does that do if you have no way to market products to potential buyers or even keep track of current customers? Customer satisfaction should be one of the main priorities of your business model—and CRM can help you improve this, as well as your manufacturing processes, tenfold. Are you still on the fence about the utility of CRM for manufacturing? Here are three of the top reasons why a CRM system could be vital to your manufacturing success.

Link Production with Customers

Properly integrated CRM will empower your sales team to provide clients with comprehensive and detailed insights. That means your skilled employees can paint a full picture of everything that goes into the product or service they are trying to sell. Your team can trace the origin and life cycle of all the products being made on your shop floor and then utilize the CRM to communicate this information to your clients. For the modern, origin-conscious customer, this kind of connectivity is crucial when it comes to satisfaction and loyalty rates.

When you integrate your ERP with CRM for manufacturing, the true power of both pieces of software fully emerges. Customers can track when their products pass through certain stages of the manufacturing or shipping process, so they know the exact status of their orders at all times. Using order trackers and back-end data, sales people can communicate proposed production and shipment dates more accurately than ever.

Find out more advantages of ERP and CRM integrations by watching our video demos. 

Create a Demand-Driven Supply Chain

By storing and organizing all your sales data in a single system, you can wield your CRM to become a lean enterprise. That means eliminating waste in all aspects of your business, including production, storage and shipment. For example, the data can help your team structure a pull-scheduling system that allows you to build your production and inventory in time with demand. You’ll be pulling resources through the production process as they are needed rather than stockpiling them for rough predictions of demand. The result: A huge reduction in inventory waste. 

A sophisticated and well-implemented CRM system can compile reports on historical orders and demand data for specific customers or the entire company, so that you can assign production lines and work hours for the times you need it the most. This prevents an overstock in your inventory when demand is lowered. Because CRM as a software is inherently focused on sales, demand and customer relationships, you can refocus your shop floor operations with this crucial data in mind. This is when using CRM for manufacturing reveals its true value—providing a complete picture of your operations to potential and current clients and getting an overview of their activities in return.

Become an Interconnected Enterprise

The strengthening of each link in your supply chain makes your business more powerful. Once you have organized and streamlined your processes to focus on the client, customers will naturally be more satisfied with your services and return for more. Your CRM allows you to store key contact information, sales data and purchase history, so that you can run your manufacturing processes with precise knowledge of demand and scheduling. Additionally, customer service portals allow your clients to interact directly with your shop floor team, and sales reps can bring together production and customer-facing interactions.  

By implementing CRM and then integrating it with your enterprise management system, you can truly take hold of your business and leverage your software for manufacturing greatness. The future of the manufacturer is that of the interconnected enterprise, and a manufacturing business that doesn’t connect CRM and ERP risks falling behind.

Wrap Up

Although CRM software might get its reputation as a tool primarily for sales teams or commercial companies, manufacturers can also take advantage of the system’s connective functionality and ability for stellar customer service to grow their business to new heights. Many manufacturers approach customer service as a simple afterthought, sometimes at great detriment to their business. Your customer is your lifeblood after all, and your market strategy needs to reflect this. To do this, you must leverage CRM to truly take control of every aspect of your company, from the shop floor to the top floor.

Installing and integrating CRM will give both business managers and stakeholders a 360-degree view into your customers, the products they want and how they are buying them. But to get the right systems in place to power manufacturing growth, you need to talk to the experts. Datix is the full package. We are an Epicor Gold Partner and a certified partner of Microsoft Dynamics 365 CRM and Salesforce. That makes us leaders in ERP and CRM consulting. With Unity, our premier integration platform, our consultants can connect ERP with an array of systems to help you form an interconnected enterprise.

Find out which enterprise software solutions are best for your shop floor. Talk to Datix today! 

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