Value is Shifting From Creating Factories to Creating Brands

Over the past 15 years, outsourcing and contract manufacturing have commoditized production for many manufacturing companies. To compete in this new landscape, manufacturers must quickly meet customer demand while maintaining a price premium. The responsibility for driving differentiation and a superior customer experience is in the hands of the sales and marketing team.

In response to this shift from factories to brands, manufacturers have increased sales and marketing staff to create a superior customer experience. Right90 research shows that the ratio of Marketing and Sales headcount since 2000 has increased 20% compared to Manufacturing and Operations headcount. However, technology spending for front office applications to support Marketing and Sales has decreased by 20%.

So, what does the disproportionate investment of technology compared to headcount indicate? That the most important part of a manufacturer's business is under served by systems that help it maximize performance. Manufacturing companies are running the revenue side of their business on email, spreadsheets and paper forms to accomplish important functions such as producing proposals, price quotes and sales forecasting. When companies run the revenue side of their business on spreadsheets, opportunities can be missed and revenue evaporates

Enter the New Front Office. The New Front Office is a SaaS solution that brings best-of-breed market leading applications and technologies together into a seamless, end-to-end sales and marketing solution. Data is entered once and seamlessly shared between CRM systems, such as Salesforce CRM and Oracle On Demand, Marketing Automation, ERP and New Front Office quoting, product configuration and sales forecasting applications. With a unified awareness-to-order business process, decision makers gain the visibility needed to manage and react to business issues as they arise to positively impact the bottom line. For example, changes to the sales forecast resulting from higher than expected response from a product promotion enables management to fine tune production and delivery.

Founders of the New Front Office include best-in-class SaaS leaders Astadia (systems integrator), BigMachines (quoting and proposal software), Cast Iron Systems (integration technology) and Right90 (sales forecasting software).

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