MuleSoft Accelerator for Manufacturing: Sales rebate management

Seema Gokhale (00:08):
Hi, I'm Seema Gokhale, the Product Manager for the MuleSoft Accelerator for Manufacturing. Today, I'll be sharing the Accelerator for Manufacturing's sales rebate management solution, which streamlines the sales rebate payout process.

(00:25):
Here's our agenda for the presentation. I'll start with an overview of why we built the solution, show a demo of core functionality, and close with the value proposition for the accelerator and a call to action. So let's dig in.

(00:41):
Meet Cindy, an accountant at Mythical. Part of Cindy's job is to manually enter rebate payouts from Manufacturing Cloud directly into SAP. One time she was rushing between meetings and accidentally input. Two extra zeros into SAP. The distributor got paid a $100,000 instead of $10,000. There were many downstream impacts and Cindy was really in the hot seat. Her management team was very upset, and systems had to be corrected because of our error. Cindy even had to formally apologize to the customer, but should an entire business process be based solely upon manual entry? After all, people are only human and everyone makes mistakes, don't they?

(01:30):
This isn't an isolated problem. Rebates are commonly used as an incentive to build loyalty and improve sales and market share. In fact, an Aberdeen report found approximately 50% of manufacturers use rebate programs. Since 65% of a firm's business comes from existing customers, offering them discounts gives them a reason to come back. Repeat customers represent just 8% of visitors but a full 40% of revenue. Because the rebate management module can be incorporated into many different Salesforce clouds, the solution we built has broad applications to clouds other than Manufacturing Cloud, where rebates are used such as Government Cloud, Utilities Cloud, and even industries outside of Manufacturing and Automotive, such as RCG and CMT.

(02:27):
You're probably wondering about some of the details. With our solution, Cindy's awkward situation could have been avoided entirely. Here's an API-led view of the solution broken down into system process and experience layers with this release rebate payout calculations in rebate management are synced to SAPs S/4HANA as new credit memos. In the real-time use case implementation a draft credit memo will only be created for an approved payout. Because customers have varying implementation types, they also have the ability to create credit memos in bulk in HANA, regardless of the payout status. And when payments are approved in HANA, the paid status is reflected back to Manufacturing Cloud, and a helpful email notification is sent to the customer, informing them that a rebate has been paid in the amount they qualified for based upon the incentive program. Additionally, this release also enabled bidirectional sync of customers between SAP S/4HANA and Manufacturing Cloud.

(03:39):
Let me show you exactly how here we create a new account in Manufacturing cloud — a person account. Click on next and enter in some of the key details, like the name, the phone number, and the address, and then save the person. A new customer has been created in Manufacturing Cloud. And if we refresh the screen, we can see that the customer was actually created in SAP S/4HANA because there's an ID associated with it. And the customer graph also shows an ID for Manufacturing Cloud, as well as a global ID.

(04:39):
Now looking at the HANA ID, let's copy it and add it in here as a business partner. Here is Mr. Krishna, the customer that was created, and we confirm that he indeed has been created in SAP. So scrolling down, let's edit some of the key details. The street name we can change to Behind Sterling, the telephone number will now end in a 9. And the email address will have a 99 in it. Let's save these changes. Go back to Manufacturing cloud. These are the old details, refresh the screen, and voila. The sync has updated back to Manufacturing Cloud. It's behind Sterling, 99 in the email, and the 9 at the end of the phone number. So that's the bidirectional sync of customers between SAP S/4HANA and Manufacturing Cloud.

(05:59):
Now let's move on to the rebate payout portion of the demo. Here's a rebate payout within Manufacturing Cloud, and here are some of the pertinent details, including the amount for $900 and the status you can see has been generated. Now, when we change the status to approved, it will sync to SAP and create a new credit memo. So let's go to the previous screen and change the status from calculated to approved. So we go to the edit button, change the status to approved, save, and we can see that the status is now an approved status. Now we should see this as a new credit memo in SAP.

(06:59):
Let's go to the integration logs and we pick up the credit memo ID, copy it, and paste it in SAP. Voila! A new credit memo was created in SAP. We go into the credit memo and we choose a customer for the payment. It'll be Mr. Krishna again. Then go to the search button, enter in the credit memo ID, and there's our sales rebate payout for $900 here in this list. Go ahead and clear it. And note that the balance up here at the top right, goes to negative $900 USD. However, the payment has not yet been sent to the customer. In order to do that, we have to update the general ledger account as well as the amount. So let's do that. We choose a general ledger account. We will enter in an amount of $900 and then post. Now the customer has officially been paid.

(08:34):
Now let's go see the paid status updated back in Manufacturing Cloud through our bulk load. Let's go to schedules and run the payment scheduler to update payments back to Manufacturing Cloud. If we go back, the payment was in generated status, refresh, and the payment is now in paid status. The payment status getting updated in Salesforce will also trigger an email notification to the customer that contains both the document payout ID and the amount. Here it is.

(09:27):
To summarize the accelerator for manufacturing launched its second use case called sales rebate management, that solves problems manufacturers face with handling rebates. Our solution can be easily customized or reused in multiple implementations. If you're watching this and are interested in learning more about whether Salesforce rebate management is a good fit for your business, please call the toll-free number listed. If you're already a rebate management customer, please check out our solution.