5-minute video
In the past, manufacturers have relied on systems of record to keep track of the many transactions occurring across their companies.
But in the new world of Industry 4.0, manufacturing firms must move beyond a transactional mindset. Your suppliers, employees, contractors, channel partners, distributors, and customers are all key stakeholders in the success of your business.
To thrive in this new, hyper-engaged world, your company needs to think collaboratively. And that means moving from systems of record to systems of engagement.
In this short video, we discuss the benefits of an end-to-end manufacturing cloud platform. These comprehensive systems unify your ERP, CRM, marketing, distribution, and customer service systems — giving you unprecedented insight into your shop floor, your back office operations, and your customers’ journey. And with collaborative tools like communities and self-service portals, communication among suppliers, distributors, team members and even customers becomes not only more efficient, but more meaningful.
This episode continues our series of discussions around the 10 Best Practices for Digital Transformation.
Have a question you’d like answered?
Let us know in the comments below, and we’ll talk through it on a future episode!
What's the ROI? Just six months after implementing their digital transformation efforts, luxury textile manufacturer Matouk saw a 233% return on their investments.
Transcript: In Manufacturing, Think ‘Systems of Engagement,’ not ‘Systems of Record’
Jessica: Hi, and thanks for joining us for our ongoing conversations around best practices in digital transformation for manufacturers. My name is Jessica Vodden, and I'm a team member here at Mountain Point, and I'm joined by Andrew Rieser, our President and Co-Founder. Hey Andrew.
Andrew: Hey Jess, how are you?
Jessica: I'm doing great, I'm doing great. So, this is a conversation we've been having for several weeks now where we've been breaking down, piece by piece, our 10 best practices for managing digital transformation projects. And, we kinda hit on this in the last discussion whenever we were talking about the big data piece and having a 360 degree view of both your operations and your customer. And today we're gonna talk about best practice number seven which is to move from more of a system of record to a system of engagement with dynamic data sources that keep track of your organization in real time and give you the ability to interact with all of your stakeholders, so your supply chain suppliers, your logistics companies, your customer, all across the board. So Andrew, tell us a little bit about what that looks like and why that's so important these days.
Andrew: Yeah, absolutely, so in describing this I like to kinda first define what I think about when thinking about system of record and system of engagement. And so, with system of record, it's typically your traditional back office systems, so things that are doing the transactional pieces of the business. Systems of engagement, we're in this fourth industrial revolution that we were talking about, and in an era of cloud computing and software as a service, and to summarize that it's the "age of the customer", right, so it's all about how do we make doing business easy and how do we have these systems and tools kind of work in our favor. So, when I think about the systems of engagement I think that that's anything customer-facing, things that are providing a better customer experience. Things that are mobile first and digital first, and so with software as a service and this age of the customer, the expectations are higher and more and more manufacturers are trying to implement these solutions so that they can provide best of experience solutions and engagement around the customer.
Jessica: Great, and so whenever we get started with this concept, so what kind of software, what kind of tools do you need to be able to make this happen? How do you begin kind of tackling this shift to be able to have this full view of your operations and your customer as well?
Andrew: Most of the time we see this start on the customer relationship management side, so your CRM and then there's natural evolutions into marketing and service, so any of those touchpoints and that can be something as simple as exposing information on your website all the way to exposing data to your internal customer service team so that when that initial call comes in that you can be the first line of defense and provide an answer or next step to the customer that's calling in.
Jessica: But, it can really originate with any sort of department or function within your organization, right?
Andrew: Exactly, so I think as you look across the organization and think about digital transformation wholistically, it's really identifying any processes that impact the customer, and identifying how that can be either digitized or make the experience better.
Jessica: So, I know we've been trying to keep these short and sweet, but before we sign off, did you have anything else you wanted to add or talk about?
Andrew: I think I do have one last thing and that is just around these tools provide an Agile framework so that you aren't spending months and years to try to implement a new process or a new experience and so with these clicks and mock code applications really deploying new processes and iterating through that and constantly evolving is much faster. So a lot of these solutions that we're talking about can be accomplished in weeks and that also makes for a better experience because you can continue to evolve and iterate just as the customer's journey and expectations will continue to evolve and iterate across multiple channels.
Jessica: All right, well Andrew thank you so much. We'll go ahead and sign off for today. For those of you listening, if you have an issue or a question you'd like for us to address in a future episode, please let us know. And we'll continue talking about best practices in digital transformation over the coming weeks, thanks again.
Andrew: Thanks for having me today.
What's the ROI? Just six months after implementing their digital transformation efforts, luxury textile manufacturer Matouk saw a 233% return on their investments.