Our client, Penn Color, is a global manufacturer of color concentrates and pigment dispersions. They provide state-of-the-art color & additive products across industries like building & construction, cosmetics, and food & beverage packaging. During their course of active business, the company faced many challenges – including problematic lead and opportunity tracking, minimum account management transparency, and sales forecasting. Penn Color partnered with ForeFront to address these business challenges with a swift and innovative Salesforce Sales Cloud and Salesforce Tableau CRM (also known as Einstein) solution.
The Challenge
Penn Color produces and sells unique products to their customers. Each product is custom formulated to their customer’s specification and goes through rigorous lab testing to ensure it meets their needs. As the Penn Color Sales team qualifies new customers or products, they submit requests to the lab for new color formulas. This process is completely manual. The Sales team has no status knowledge of the lab requests and the lab has no good way to prioritize new work.
In addition, once the deal is won, the Sales team has no efficient way to track their customer’s purchases. Because each product is purchased at any frequency or volume, Penn Color has difficulty verifying each client’s actual purchase level against original order commitments.
Lastly, sales management consists entirely of manual processes with multiple excel spreadsheets – a serious impetus in remaining competitive with today’s market demands.
The Solution
ForeFront leveraged Salesforce Sales Cloud, Salesforce Tableau CRM, and Integration know-how to Oracle EBS (Penn Color’s ERP system) to streamline pre-sales, account management, and forecasting processes.
The Sales team now has one place to manage customer interactions, can maintain their pipeline, and monitor their book of business. As new orders are placed, all information is automatically updated and tracked. ForeFront configured the Salesforce Mobile App as well, to enable Penn Color’s Sales team to maintain their accounts, log meetings, and manage their sales activities right from their phones.
Furthermore, data is collected for purchase pattern trending and order prediction analytics. Salesforce Tableau CRM enabled Penn Color to monitor forecast changes over time, highlight abnormal buying patterns, and most importantly, help the Sales team prioritize and focus on the client accounts that matter the most.
The Results
Penn Color benefited in a variety of ways with the help of ForeFront. First, our client was able to manage their monthly, quarterly, and yearly sale forecasts completely in the Salesforce Sales Cloud system. This significantly reduced time spent on manual sales admin tasks through processes analysis, optimization, and automation as enabled and configured by ForeFront.
Second, Penn Color gained valuable business insights by focusing on purchasing analytics. ForeFront’s expertise with Salesforce Tableau CRM combined with Oracle EBS information integration, helped our client benefit from up-to-date order management, improved demand resource planning, and seamless business processes. Predictive product re-order demands were now available before a given customer’s inventory was low or depleted.
Our client’s migration to Sales Cloud Einstein was swift and successful across units – from lab work efficiencies, better manufacturing projections, and insightful decision-making, to sales outcomes. Integration between Penn Color’s Oracle EBS legacy assets and the features of Salesforce was critical in ForeFront providing an end-to-end customized Manufacturing Cloud solution.
In general, our Manufacturing clients start with one Cloud implementation as part of their Digital Business Transformation. Upon solution outcomes and their needs, other Clouds are added such as B2B, CPQ, and FSL to complement what would become their Manufacturing Cloud journey. ForeFront is uniquely positioned to help all of our clients realize their vision – with flying colors!
To learn more about how ForeFront is continuously innovating & transforming businesses in Manufacturing, Life Sciences and more, please contact us.
