Salesforce, the worldwide leader in CRM software as a service, introduced a new “cloud” a couple weeks ago. This one is somewhat of a departure from their previous business-oriented offerings. Sustainability Cloud is designed to track a company’s carbon usage and their progress toward reducing their carbon footprint.

Salesforce, after a record 2nd quarter of $4.0 Billion (up 22% from last year), announced a series of new vertical templates. In this blog, we are going to take a very high-level look into the new Manufacturing Cloud.

The idea behind Manufacturing Cloud is to more closely align Sales and Operations, so that sales forecasts and the manufacturing demand planners are in synch.

Salesforce seems to be on a cadence of making a big (and I mean BIG) acquisition each year.

Last year it was MuleSoft, an integration platform for $6.5 billion. I wrote a blog about this at the time questioning the impact for the average customer. I’ll follow that pattern with this more recent acquisition.

I was recently asked if it is possible to see all scheduled tasks for all users in Microsoft Dynamics 365 (D365) CRM. Well, of course, there is! By using a standard list view of activities, you can see all the captured details. You can even pop open a chart that shows counts of activities by user or by type (or various combinations) with stacked bars showing users and numbers of activities of each type.

I get asked a lot about how easy it is to set-up CRM. At the hands (or fingers) of a skilled consultant, it is remarkably easy. There is a theory that to really be accomplished at something it takes 10,000 hours. I am constantly in awe of professional golfers piping that 300-yard drive, but I can’t, because I didn’t put in the time to learn how.